Starship Krupa

I can do that in Cakewalk, but my secondary DAW is Mixcraft, and their plug-in management is less flexible. It's just a way to minimize distraction. I already have a category called "A-List," which is handy because it shows up at the top of the category sort. It's where I put my quick go-to's.

Meldaproduction for ya. Every plug-in comes with their famous "tyranny of too much choice." ?

Indeed you do. It's not for "adding a little slapback," it's a full-on sound design powerhouse, like an Unfiltered Audio delay. This is a great deal on one of my favorite sound design tools.

I agree. I mean, there are several projects that I have that use only the default Nimbus preset, it's just that good. Set it up as a send and I'm off to the races. Having said that, I poked around in MTurboReverble and found a few that can be just as "go-to." The "Brichamber" is one of them. I guess it's their attempt at emulating the legendary Bricasti. So even if my beloved EA reverbs stop working at some point (I'm not too worried, they have been among the most trouble-free FX I've used), I'd be fine with MTurboReverble. Also given that at that future point, MTurboReverb will likely be even more useful than it is now. I mentioned it because it's the only other reverb I've tried that can touch the excellence of the EA ones. Apparently my ears are sensitive to reverb tails, so I react negatively to any graininess or other artifacts.

I presume you have MSoundFactory Player and Monastery Grand. I'd have to say that it's my favorite free piano. I too have tried many free pianos. Not my favorite piano period, that honor must go to the Meldway Grand that comes with MSoundFactory(LE). Soundpaint comes with a cool sampled Steinway. Check it out if you haven't already.

And if you remember my post about what I learned from doing a complete new system build, IMO, best practice is that once I find the ones I want to settle on, go through and cull the ones I now know I'll not be using. Hundreds of plug-ins bit the dust when I did the new build. A less-cluttered plug-in browser is like a less-cluttered inbox: it means less distraction. It also means that I won't use some minor league plug-in in a project that I'll call up after I've culled it and get the missing plug-ins message. This applies more to mixing plug-ins, the eternal question being "how many compressors/EQ's/channel strips/reverbs do I need?" But it also applies to the oddball glitch-y sound design-y ones. If I browse through my plug-ins and can't remember from reading the name what it does, I call it up and make sure that I actually want to keep it. If I'm telling myself that one day I might use it as a source of inspiration....well, if it hasn't inspired me yet, it can wait in my downloads folder instead of my VST directory. I make exceptions for a handful of manufacturers that I especially like. Meldaproduction of course; their unified UI makes for quick work now that I know my way around it. IK Multimedia, their level of excellence is so high. Unfiltered Audio, Glitchmachines, Freakshow Industries, all so good at what they do, so much fun to play with.

Yes. I figured out what the missing step (or at least "a" missing step) was: I thought that when I pulled up the ACT and all of the cells were already populated, with, for instance, S1 mapped to Dry/Wet, that those were default assignments and they would work without further ado. R1-R8 being the 8 rotary pots and S1-8 being the 8 sliders. And then there were the two "B" rows, which I thought were for the buttons. As It turns out, the parameters seem to be assigned to the cells in whatever order the plug-in reports them. And apparently I need to give each one the ol' MIDI learnaroonie. Then it works (yay!). I don't know why they all look mapped like that and then I still have to do the learny-dance, but it's okay, I really just want it to work. Anyhoo, one hurdle leads to the next, eh? So my next question is about the "banks." So as far as I can make out so far, what I must do for each plug-in I want to set up is: Open its UI Click on the Properties button in the lower left corner of the ACT Module. Check "enable" in the lower left corner of the resulting dialog, which will populate the cells with the names of various parameters that can be assigned. Hunt down each parameter I want to control, then click on its cell and twiddle the knob or press the button I want to use to control it. There doesn't seem to be a way to tell Cakewalk "okay, that's it, we're done learning for that function" which makes me kind of nervous, because how does it know that I'm ready to move on to the next? It's okay, I accept that it somehow knows. I just want it to work. What I'm still hung up on, though is the banks. What if the function I want to map is in the same row as another I want to map, but in a different bank? For instance, with MEQualizer, I want to map the first 4 knobs across the top of the compressor (Dry/Wet, Shift, Output, and Saturation) to the first 4 knobs in the R1-8 row. That works out fine for Dry/Wet and Saturation because they're in the R1-8 row in bank 1. Not so great for Shift and Output ("Gain") because they're both in the S1-8 row, but in different banks. Apparently only parameters from one bank at a time can be active, and you choose which bank in the dialog? Since the whole thing with the parameters showing up in various cells looks arbitrary, it seems kind of sad if there's no workaround, like I just lose the parameter lottery if the ones I want share a row but not a bank? I'm sure I have a lot of this wrong, but I feel like I'm closer to getting it to work than I've ever been before. I mean, heck, I can set three knobs on my controller to control three parameters on a plug-in, and it's recallable. I've never gotten this far before.

It's unfortunate, but understandable. In the past year, there have been other companies that have retired large swaths of their product line, some of them releasing them as unsupported freeware. I suspect that these culls have to do with Apple Silicon. They can keep these products around in the catalog and have them either trickling out every so often or going out in bulk during deeply discounted sales, not costing the company anything at all, only as long as they don't have to spend money on updating the code. The M1 switch forced companies to make decisions about what products were worth porting to Apple Silicon. iZotope had already effectively lowered the price on all of these products to $10. $10 plug-ins, no matter how great and useful they are to me, aren't worth the cost to port them to Apple Silicon. The only way these could have survived would have been to add desirable features and call them Break Tweaker 2, Iris 3, and Trash 3. All of these products are, IMO, already overloaded with features. As faithful users, "all we want is a resizable GUI," but is having that as the only new feature going to pry $75 out of our wallets? Probably not me. The Apple way of stomping on backward compatibility is annoying enough when confined to Apple products, but it also has effects on other parts of the market. ?

Not sure which pricepoint you mean. Do you mean the single-seaters for $10? I have 2 $10 licenses apiece for Phoenix, Nimbus, R1, R2, and Excalibur. That's a hundy (well-spent, I must say). The Exponential reverbs sounded so much better than anything else, in a class by themselves, at least to my ears. Then I bought a bundle from Meldaproduction that included MTurboReverbLE (pronounced "Mturboreverble") and it changed my mind about them being unequaled. I believe you have MTurboReverbLE, how do you think it stacks up next to the Exponentials? If someone waits for it to roll around during an Eternal Madness sale, or a 50% off everything sale (which should be coming up this holiday season), they can snag it for $75 and install it on as many computers as they own. If first-time Melda buyers rules apply (with referral code and newsletter credit), then it comes down to under $50. Or get the MEssentialsFX bundle for $125 during a 50% off sale. If a first time buyer, well under $100. With the Exponential ones no longer a buying option, I believe that MTurboReverbLE/MEssentialsFX is the best deal on the market. Guaranteed (ha, right) updates forever (or at least as long as the one person the whole show relies on keeps at it and doesn't become incapacitated or retires) I love Break Tweaker, I just use it as a drum machine. When I first got it I was really stoked and tried the deep dive into microedits and other programming and whatnot, but it didn't stick. To me they're just sound effects and drum sounds and I'm okay with using ones that someone else has come up with. The content that comes with Break Tweaker Expanded is....extensive. I'm wondering how long before Stutter Edit 2 goes on the chopping block. If Break Tweaker got the boot, maybe they decided that glitch sounds are "out."

Steve Cook maintains a utility that does just that. @mettelus, It's been a couple of major revisions since Meldaproduction forced installation of formats you don't want. They don't even make 32-bit versions of their plug-ins anymore. Get the 16.01 installer, it has a lot of really great updates:

Not yet, but I did of course try disabling my network interface card. Going to try turning off ACPI and see if that helps. Also hybrid sleep. I already have a Texas Instruments chip Firewire card, so we can rule that out. Buffers are set to 384. I'll try swapping in a different Firewire cable and check again to make sure the on-board sound chip is disabled.

Yes I must have my system configured in such a way that allows Mixcraft to handle it correctly but blocks poor sensitive Cakewalk. Where do you think I should start looking? Audio interface driver? Motherboard BIOS update? Chipset drivers? Video driver? Disable C-states? Turbo mode? ?

It's the FX routing that's the issue, yes. The OP mentioned it. There is no problem with the preset being recalled, it does come back to the right preset, it just doesn't remember the FX routing. Since many people (like me) prefer to turn off a synth's internal reverb and delay and use our own, this is something to be concerned about. Bottom line: it doesn't work correctly in Cakewalk (works fine in Mixcraft).

I tried this and you are correct, Cakewalk opens it with the parameters set to whatever the factory patch is. What does work is saving your changes in Cakewalk's native patch system. The project will still load with the parameters set to whatever the SMP factory patch settings are, but at least you can recall your own changes. This is obviously not acceptable, and seems to be a bug in Cakewalk. I tried the same thing in Mixcraft and it worked as expected, the project came up and the settings I changed in SMP pesisted. Please report your findings to the developers. They've managed to fix similar issues with other plug-ins. I guess they haven't fixed it all the way yet. As far as freebie ROMplers to replace it with, Arturia Analog Lab Lite has hundreds of sounds and may be had for free if you register at Soundbetter. https://soundbetter.com/. Analog Lab Lite is free directly from Arturia. Once you have these, you can also go to their store and find many more free sounds. I think you can still get Augmented Strings Intro for free there as well. Of course there's also Sampletank CS, which comes with a plethora of useful sounds. Kontakt Start, with all of the sounds that come with Kontakt Player, is also a great way to fill out your ROMpler collection. Also A|A|S Swatches, but it doesn't allow any parameters to be edited. But the important thing is to get Cakewalk to handle restoring Synthmaster parameters correctly.

I've been trying off and on for years to figure out how to use my Korg nanoKONTROL2 to control plug-in parameters. Of course, as is often the case with Cakewalk, there seem to be a handful of different ways to go about it. This time around I decided to try ACT, based on a YouTube video by @Simeon Amburgey where he sets his keyboard controller mod wheel to control T-Racks Leslie. It takes him seconds, and it works great, of course. Super spiffy how the ACT window gets automatically populated with the automatable parameters. However, when I try following along, I can only get as far as seeing that the fields are populated with my plug-in parameters. The issue is that my controller doesn't actually control them. I twiddle knobs and sliders to no effect. And yes, I do have the plug-in in focus. I'm sure I'm just missing a step, any idea what that step might be? Here are a couple of screenshots showing my setup. I first tried it with MChorusMB, then T-Racks 670, then did it with MEQualizer, which can be downloaded for free:

Yeah, half a dozen licenses for Berzerk over here. Want another freebie license for Metafilter....

Woo-hoo! Thanks for posting what the solution was. Good on MSI for getting a new set of drivers out there. I suspect that you'll not see this problem again (as long as you don't let Microsoft "update" your USB driver ?).

What Robert's getting at is that Cakewalk might be having trouble dealing with an effect or multiple ones. To this end, also try enabling/disabling plug-in load balancing and see what happens. But you don't mention whether the tracks are audio or VSTi's or a combination, or whether you even have any FX enabled. We need more information. What was the CPU in your last system? Since it looks like some kind of weirdness going on with the CPU and its many cores, you can also mess with the Thread Scheduling Model. Do you have Hyperthreading enabled in the system BIOS? Just some shots in the dark.

Hmm. this sounds like it might be one to report to the devs. Curious to know how it goes with the other time stretching algos.

Does Audacity allow you to specify bit depth for .MP3's and other lossy formats?

Oh, if only the Console had been scrolled down enough to see the FX bins. What Reginald said: bypass ALL the FX. If that makes the problem go away (which there's a 95% chance it will do), then turn them back on one by one until the problem happens again.

My favorite method is Alt+2

Okay, when you say "group," what do you mean by that? "Group" in Cakewalk, to my knowledge, refers to two things: grouping clips and Quick Group, which is when you select multiple tracks, then hold Ctrl while manipulating their controls.

This is a common task around my house, but with different source material. I do ambient instrumentals, and dialog samples are a staple in that genre (and fun to collect). My issue is that since I sample them on my computer, direct from Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon Prime, they come through sounding really high fidelity. Which is wonderful for actually watching shows and movies, but unfortunately sounds like crap when used in the context of ambient music "dialog samples," which typically fall just this side of "telephone" as far as tonal balance, dynamic range, and noise. There's a reason that speech is so intelligible even on a cheap telephone, and it holds true for full mixes: make it sound like a phone call and it'll cut right through. If I don't process it, it sounds about as appropriate as hard rock electric guitar with no distortion. It's not "dialogue," it's just someone talking over the music. Cymatics Origin is a popular freebie that allows you to add noise, wow, and sample rate reduction. I used it for a while, but finally ponied up for the industry standard, XLN Audio RC-20 Retro Color, and it was worth every penny. I found exactly the sound I wanted in seconds with RC-20, whereas with Origin, I could get pretty close with a certain amount of fiddling. If you have call to make things sound "dusty" on a regular basis, it's RC-20.

Well, if you are trying to go by what Jacques suggests, render with Elastique Pro.