Starship Krupa

I ordered a Gigabyte UD (ultra durable) motherboard on eBay. After I did, I tried this one again and it’s still hosed. (Based on my empirical observation that sometimes the act of buying a replacement will bring the dead one back to life)

Questions about what will suffice are hard to answer without knowing more about what you want to do with Cakewalk. Strictly audio? If what you do is record audio and then mix down using a sparse number of the FX that come with Cakewalk, that task is not beyond a Core 2 Quad system with 8G of RAM and a 500G 7200RPM spinner. If you’re doing professional scoring with multiple soft synths, sampled orchestral libraries, fancy sound design FX, maybe a gen 7 i7 with 32G RAM and a couple of SSD’s will just get you in the door. A savvy user can stretch requirements by freezing instrument tracks and FX-heavy audio tracks. That turns them into audio tracks, which Cakewalk can read with little overhead. It really comes down to how much processing you need to do at the same time. Cakewalk can record and play back a LOT of audio tracks at one time on a low end system. On that same low end system, a handful of fancy FX or synths might bring it to its knees. You can also take care to work with plug-ins that are easier on the system. IZotope’s tend to be resource hogs, Meldaproduction’s tend to be more efficient. The Sonitus fx and ProChannel modules that come with Cakewalk are very efficient.

I abused substances enough to have to stop 32 years ago, but stop I did!

Yeah, that's what I fear. Some surface mount component or other probably cracked its solder joint. My guess would be something that causes the power supply to fail to get a "power okay" signal back from the board. I guess it's a writeoff. I can get a nice used board on eBay for a little over a hundy, so it's all good anyway. Yesterday's technology today! I'll see if I have an old PSU around I can sacrifice to an experiment: pull the CPU and trick the PSU into coming on anyway and see if I can let out some smoke. ? BTW, for the "latest and greatest" crew, Intel have announced that Gen. 14 is due before the end of the year. Make room in your dustbins.

I think you meant this in a humorous way, but there is much truth in it. Pressures of fame, pressures of having to keep delivering the goods, access to plenty of cash and willing hangers-on are all more likely to send someone to drugsville. And if you're famous, you'll have the gigs and naturally end up traveling a lot, and the more miles traveled, by whatever means (we've lost a lot of musicians to motor vehicle accidents, too), the greater the chance of catastrophic failure. Add to that the fact that big timers don't usually fly commercial, relying on pilots and equipment that may be less squared away, and you get the recipe for the plane crash deaths (I forgot to mention Jim Croce and Aliyah). Sakamoto is the only one on my list who bought it on a commercial flight (along with 519 other people, the deadliest plane crash in history).

I have a vintage JL Cooper MIDI merger/patchbay that I am looking to sell. PM if interested.

The singer has some real talent and star power. The rhythm section are solid as a rock, despite not having the in-ear click track so many drummers use these days. Despite the multiple clams he dropped, I really liked the guitarist due to his stage presence and fashion sense. D'you think he's ever watched any Joy Division and New Order videos? He was stoic, never winced at any of his f-ups. Needs to un-deck that whammy bar. Wonder where they all are now....still playing, I hope.

It was a feature request, not a request for a workaround. Posted in the forum area where we make feature requests. Nobody said that they were going to forego using samplers until BandLab hands us one. We're going to continue to use the same 3rd-party solutions (Sitala, TX16W) that we've been using. I'd use a sampler more often if there were a native one, but when I want to use a sampler, I use a sampler. Whoa. This is an idea that hadn't occurred to me. An excellent idea, an essential feature, and one that I doubt that the other DAW's have. At least not all of them. I think that the BandLab collection of samples and loops is a feature that's neglected by most Cakewalk users.

While that statement is true, it is also true that this has probably been the most requested feature for a long time (as murat's long list of previous threads suggests). "Use a (3rd-party) VST" is a workaround, not a solution. There are multiple advantages to having an integrated sampler. Mixcraft got two of them (one a pad type and the other a mapped keyboard type) many years ago and at first I thought "meh." Then I put together an '80's Ministry/Lard type piece with newscast samples, and WHOA, the usefulness of this thing became very apparent. Things like being able to right click on a clip and "Send to Sampler," they don't seem that big a deal until you get comfy with them. There's also the important matter of the DAW keeping track of the audio files. Also a sampler that everyone has, so we have the benefit of mutual help on the forums, YouTube and wherever else Cakewalk users trade tips.

That's a nice-sounding demo. I will put Asymmetric on my want list. One thing I like about it is that it doesn't include the usual dozen or more drum kit sounds that I'll never use. Which brings me to: why doesn't A|A|S, with their amazing acoustic modeling engine, have a drum machine? I would TOTALLY use their drum kit sounds in that context. When they come in the soundpacks, it seems too computationally expensive to stick an instance of Player on its own track just to get a snare sound. I suppose I could sample them and build a kit that way, but that seems like a lot of trouble to go to. A velocity sensitive drum machine built around the A|A|S modeling engine, that is something that would definitely interest me. Still haven't found my perfect virtual drum machine.

As always, I would like to mention that Swatches/Player has also been updated with sounds from Asymmetric. And I believe that for the first time, A|A|S' installer is allowing the choice of exactly which formats to install, good news for those of us who are weary of purging our systems of AAX.

You would not. I'm a frugal dude, I like to tinker, I like to get extended use out of hardware that other people might consider outdated, and I only care about generations of processors insofar as the next one I get should be a performance upgrade over the one it's replacing (I usually like to at least skip a generation when upgrading). Part of the fun of the hobby: how much can I do with how little? I don't have a day job, my spare time is plentiful. I let other people spend the big money; 5 years later I'll spend a couple hundy for what they spent a thousand to buy. If I even need to, often enough folks are kind enough to give their old hardware to a good home. My sweet spot seems to be about 6 years from the processor's introduction date, but until the middle of last year, I was happily using a 3rd generation Ivy Bridge processor for DAW, NLE, and indie gaming (with the help of a $15 CL'd GTX550Ti). One of the Cakewalk devs (a true Scotsman) uses an i7-3770 system as his main studio computer. I recently put together a Core 2 Quad system with 8G of RAM for a friend to use for web browsing and video watching. I installed Cakewalk and it runs just fine. He records a couple of tracks of audio and maybe one or two soft synths per project, so he'll never hit the wall. If he wants to get more sophisticated, he can have my old i7-3770 system. With the i7-6700, programs start faster. I added a GT 1030 and I can even run any game I want (Obduction, Quern, Pneuma, Firewatch, Lightmatter, Manifold Garden, Turing Test) at ultra settings. It was well worth the outlay of about $200 (for motherboard/CPU/RAM/SSD, PSU and graphics card; I already had a donor case and all the peripherals). Is there anything other than the latest FPS games I can't run on my i7-6700 system with 32G of RAM? I don't think $200 was a poor investment for a computer that does everything I want it to (and even more). I guess it was tl/dr, but I said in my first post I reseated the CPU. While it was out, I checked for bent pins and found none. I also reseated all power connections, multiple times. Including fans. I'm probably looking at a used LGA 2011-v3 motherboard from CL or eBay. No pressing need, I can wait until they come down in price a bit more (maybe Intel will be up to Gen14 by that time ?). When the ASRock motherboard inevitably mysteriously begins working perfectly the minute I get its replacement home, I also have an i7-6800K that will fit nicely.

I'm not worried about starting it up with the mobo horizontal and the cooler loosened a notch, as a troubleshooting step. If it suddenly comes to life as a result of that test, it would suggest that there might be an issue with the cooler. Could've gotten damaged in shipping, might not have been installed correctly in the first place. I'm at the straw-clutching phase anyway. Anything other than the same spin up/spin down would be welcome.

The king has spoken! Well, let's see. The power supply is a 6 month old EVGA 500W that was powering my current daily driver until I found a Corsair RM650X on CL for $50. I've tried two video cards, both of which have functioned well in other systems: a GTX550Ti and a GT 720 (in case it was a matter of too much power draw). I have pulled the battery, used the reset BIOS jumper, pressed the reset BIOS button on the mobo, and even flipped the switch to invoke the backup BIOS. Same behavior. The only things I have yet to try are swapping out the PSU (the only other one I have available is in my daily driver, so pain) backing off on the Noctua's clamp screws and swapping the CPU out for the 6800X. Sure would like to know what the previous owner did to get past this issue when he had it. I'm pricing LGA 2011-V3 motherboards on eBay. ? Kinda pricey for my budget, but Microsoft has helped out by ensuring that Windows 11 won't install.

Looks like most of them are in the RFK category.

Maybe it's just Canadian drummers? Well, okay, I guess Keith Moon and John Bonham.... However, Jimi H., Janis J., Jim M., Amy W., Minnie R., Bon S., John L., Kurt C., Hank W., Buddy H., Richie V., Big B., Tupac S., Biggie S., Nick D., Freddie M., Ronnie V., Cassie G. Sam C., Jim R., Kyu S. and Judy G. made the case that singers can check out pretty early. Neil and Robbie beat Judy Garland by 20 years. She's the geezer in the bunch at age 47. Of the rest of them, Minnie Riperton, Sam Cooke, John Lennon, Jim Reeves and Kyu Sakamoto were the only ones who even made it out of their 20's. 21 singers, and none of them made it to 50! Only two of them (Minnie and Freddie) died of natural causes. Of the rest, 7 of them died in plane crashes on the way to gigs, and with the rest, it was drugs and/or violence. Yeah, I know, I'm about to turn 62, and I kinda hope that I've got more than 5 years left in this theme park we call "life," but all of those I listed crammed a LOT of living into their time. Well, except maybe Nick Drake ?, but if you're trying for a lasting legacy, Nicky baby knocked that one out of the park.

Wasn't the first manual that came out the product of one (or more) users? I remember going over the thing desperately searching for what I needed to do to start it recording audio. IIRC, you have to create a clip before you start recording, which is so unlike any other DAW I've used it never occurred to me. Every other one creates clips after you've recorded the audio. My usability benchmark when I was DAW shopping back in 2014 was to see how long it took to record some audio, then delete a section of it. Seems pretty straightforward, but IIRC, it took me at least 45 minutes to accomplish that small task in REAPER. Might have been even longer. By the time I finally figured it out, I wasn't too keen on trying to go further with it. Mixcraft, on the other hand, took about a minute or two. Given its bargain price, it was clearly the way to go, so I went with a copy of Mixcraft Home Studio and upgraded it. That copy of Mixcraft Home Studio was the last piece of boxed software I ever bought.

The first time I tried to boot it, I hadn't pulled the CPU, but the guy did of course need to remove that honkin' Noctua tower cooler in order to ship it. So I just re-pasted it and installed the cooler per the Noctua instructions, which call for some serious tightening. When I later removed the cooler and CPU to look for bent pins, the paste looked fine, no indication that there had been too much pressure. There was no stray goop lurking around either. I guess he and I know our oats about heatsink paste. The CPU is not the first one that he had in there, at some point he upgraded from a 6800X, which he also sent along. Haven't tried swapping that in yet, but I will before I buy a replacement motherboard.

Googling "ASRock Fatal1ty power cycling" results in a distressing number of hits. I read that in one case, the person loosened the clamp on their cooler and it went away. Now that you bring it up, I installed the Noctua per the factory instructions, but I haven't tried backing off a little on its clamp screws to see what happens. It could be that it's flexing the board enough that pins aren't making contact. A thing I need to remember about CPU cooling is that while CPU's these days are tough to "burn up," insufficient cooling will result in them slowing themselves down or going into error states. I remember when that wasn't true, when people were frying their CPU's with overclocking.

Good idea. Did it. Forgot to mention.

I removed it and it measured about 2.9V, which I figured was still in the range of "good." Also, since the original post, I made a "beep speaker." Got no beeps.

It happens whether I power it on with the motherboard's own power button or the one on the case. The duty cycle on the spin up/spin down is very regular. It goes up for about 15 seconds, then down for about 2 seconds, repeat.

Ugh, this has long been a gripe of mine. Fortunately, in recent years, there's been some relief. I'm a stalwart nVidia user from way back, and they now even have special "creators" drivers that are supposedly optimized for NLE/DAW/raster graphic editing. There's still no benchmark program that I know of for 2D performance, but the thing is, 4G of DDR5 and you're good to go. You will find an enormous performance boost compared to your GT 710 no matter what you get. In order to find recommendations, Google "best video cards for video editing." https://justcreative.com/best-graphics-cards-for-video-editing/ They seem to think that the RX550 is a good budget choice, you can pick up an RX-580 for $121: https://www.amazon.com/51RISC-RX-580-8GB-DisplayPort/dp/B0BNBN8HQF My daily driver is a passively cooled GT 1030 DDR5 (that last is important, nVidia also has one with GDDR4 that should be avoided) and I can even run all of my indie games on it at ultra settings. Only has two outputs, though. As I only have two monitors, this is fine with me. I like a quiet PC, and it's the most powerful passively-cooled one out there.

Well, not a completely new build, but new to me. Thanks to a kind donation of various components from a fellow forumite, I have the opportunity to level up once again. My current system is an i7-6700 with 32G of DDR3 (weird, because 6770's can take DDR4, but this was a bargain on CL for a hundy). What he sent me was an ASRock Fatal1ty motherboard with an i7-6950X. Not a big level up in speed, but cores for days, which IME, DAW's and NLE's really love. Mobo also accepts DDR4. Along with this was a sweet Noctua tower cooler. Couple of 8G RAM sticks and NVme drive from Amazon and we're ready to go. Or should be. While waiting to pick up the case, I decided to set it up in "breadboard" configuration, where you rest the motherboard on its box, hook everything up and give it a test run. The 6950X, being built for RAW overclockable speed, has no onboard video, so I put my old GTX550Ti in. Hit the power button on the board, and the fans (including the power supply fan) spin up and....spin back down again, then spin back up, then back down, ad infinitum. Never gets to POST, nothing on the monitor. The power supply is a nearly new Evga 500W that was recently powering my daily driver, plenty of juice for this scenario. I have tried: A different video card, a GT 720 that is very light on wattage requirements. Checking multiple times that all power connectors are correctly connected Reseating the RAM. Reseating the CPU. Booting without the SSD installed. Booting with a single RAM stick, in various slots. Booting with no RAM. Booting with no mouse or keyboard. Booting with a Windows installer thumb drive. Disconnecting the power supply from the board and reconnecting it. Clearing the CMOS, both with the jumper and the CMOS-clearing button Flipping the switch to boot from the backup BIOS. Connecting extra fans to see if it didn't like booting without "case" fans. Letting it cycle for an hour to see if it just needed to properly enumerate everything. Popping the CMOS battery. Unplugging the power supply and letting everything sit overnight. Installing it in the case once it arrived. Same behavior in all scenarios. There's a 2-digit "Dr. Debug" display on the board, but it never gets as far as lighting up. I PM'd the guy who sent it to me and he said that at one point he had the same issue but doesn't remember how he got past it. Deep Googling reveals that while many have had the issue, they "solved" it by getting an RMA from ASRock. My inclination was to write the board off as damaged in shipping somehow (although it was packed pretty securely), but since the donor says that he had the same issue and managed to get past it, I figure it's worth trying to bang my head against it for a while, or at least until I can locate a replacement board to go with the CPU. The things I haven't tried are making a beep speaker to hook up and swapping in the extra i7-6800K he sent along. This is because in situations like this, it's very seldom the processor. I will try both before giving up, though. Thinking about it, since even the PSU's fan is spinning up and back down, it looks like it's throwing juice at the board, then either not getting a "power okay" signal or getting a "dirty power" signal back from the board. I don't know how to check for this. I can operate a DMM and oscilloscope and have both. Suggestions, condolences welcome....

That BeQuiet case looks pretty spiffy. The old curmudgeon in my eschews that level of LED bling for a studio PC, but I have to admit that when I watch Mike Creative Sauce's videos, his system looks pretty sharp with the lighted fans. In my recent experiences of building up a couple of PC's from spares and donated parts (one of which was a very nice Noctua tower cooler, similar to the BeQuiet), I found out that the typical classic mini tower form factor isn't wide enough for a tower cooler like that. I had to go with a mid tower. These days, I know that there are mini-height cases that are wide enough to accommodate them, but I need a case with an externally-accessible optical drive bay, and I couldn't find one of these wider mini-towers that had an optical drive bay. The case needs to be at least 8" wide, while the standard mini-tower is 7" wide. In my mini-tower case, I went with a Zalman flat cooler.