Starship Krupa

It's possible that what they mean by that is if you turn down the Output knob and crank the Input knob, you'll get more coloration. This is a job for Plugin Doctor!

Bleah, that was a typo. My GT 1030 also has only 2 DisplayPort connectors. I'm not sure whether the chip itself is limited to only 2 monitors. Anyway, if you wanted to run a third monitor, does your CPU have a built-in Intel GPU you could use to drive it? Mine doesn't, which feels a little weird. It's the first PC I've owned in 15-20 years that doesn't have built-in video. The CPU is an "enthusiast" model, where Intel, knew that everyone who bought one would be running it with an equally overpriced/swoopy video card. I read what this chip used to go for when it was new....?.

I have a passively-cooled nVidia GT 1030 GDDR5 that I got for $80 on Mercari. It's (obviously) quiet and handles DAW and video NLE tasks with aplomb. With a passively-cooled GPU, you do have to pay attention to case airflow. My system has a good, quiet case fan (bought a 3-pack of them on Amazon). It's very sippy with power requirements, so you don't need to run an extra power cable to it. I can even game the snot out of my indie games in full resolution. I find that with DAW work, the UI will draw more quickly and scroll more smoothly with a better GPU. The minimum chip I would go with at this point is the GT 1030. The 700 series will work, but I don't know that you'd see much better performance than with the onboard Intel graphics. A caveat: to my understanding, the GT 1030 can only drive 2 monitors by itself. But you can use it for the more graphics-intensive tasks and drive the 3rd monitor with the on-board Intel video. Whatever you get, make sure that it has at least GDDR5. Memory speed is important for the kind of 2-D drawing we see in DAW's. nVidia released a version of the GT 1030 that, criminally, had GDDR4. Make sure you don't get one of those. The RTX 3050 is surely more than enough GPU to do DAW stuff, and it has a fan, and my guess is that its fan will run so slowly as to be completely silent.

So it turns out that installing the actual plug-in to a plug-in folder (or "paste") that Cakewalk scans for plug-ins resolves the issue? It's a miracle!

Yeah, but in 2000, problems with Windows were much more common!

So you're saying that you drag the slider all the way to "Extreme" and it stays there until you click "Apply," then it jumps back to 2 ticks down from "Extreme?" That is a strange one. I've not heard of any setting that prevents you from changing this setting. Curious: what happens if you try to select one of the levels more toward "Light" and click "Apply?" Does it jump up to the 2 ticks from the top setting?

As you might imagine, this is like waving a red flag at me. ? I'll point out that every one of Cakewalk's stock plug-ins, including the ProChannel modules, is a "FREE PLUG-IN." Statistically, most of us try more freeware plug-ins than payware ones, so we're more likely to find issues with freeware ones. Wider is a favorite of many Cakezoids. I like it for extreme widening effects, but usually prefer JST/Boz Sidewidener (once magware, now freeware) or Ozsoft Xpander for more subtle effects. Anything you find in the "Favorite Freeware" threads is vetted to some degree by Cakewalk users. Cakewalk itself is a testament to the quality level of today's freeware. It's become more stable, faster, and compatible under the freeware license than it was when it was payware. Things have changed in the past 10 years: so many larger companies have begun issuing freeware as a loss-leader promotion. MeldaProduction was one of the innovators, with their highly-regarded MFreeFX bundle. With the old picture of freeware being the product of solo hobbyists working in their spare time is no longer accurate. Wider is a loss-leader product of Polyverse, who have a line of decidedly non-free plug-ins. As a loss-leader, presumably intended to pique interest in the company's for-pay efforts, one would hope they have incentive to make sure the thing worked. Anyway, I prefer to say that it's a conflict with a plug-in. This avoids the dreaded finger-pointing/perception of defensiveness. And, bottom line, if there is a problem with a plug-in (especially with one as popular as Wider, @John Vere ?), the Cakewalk developers should be informed that there is an issue. Same with the plug-in developers. Let 'em know? If a plug-in doesn't play nice with Cakewalk, neither Cakewalk nor the plug-in is "at fault," even though thousands of other plug-ins work just fine with Cakewalk and the plug-in in questions works just fine in other hosts (usually REAPER ?). Compatibility is a 2-way street, and the fact is, both the host and the plug-in can be 100% compliant with the VST3 spec and still not play nice with each other. Fortunately, it's easy for developers to test with Cakewalk: all you need is a Windows system and an internet connection to get it. Why should Wider work for so many others, but not John? I have no idea. I've seen a tiny number of plug-in conflicts not with the host, but with another plug-in. Sometimes they don't like being in the same rack or even project with each other. I see that situation as being hopeless, because how do you get 3 different developers to sort out something like that? BTW, regarding payware vs. freeware, has anyone mentioned the possibility that there's an unregistered plug-in in this project? That's a common feature of plug-in demos: before the product is registered, it will issue silence or hiss at various intervals. The gap or noise usually lasts for at least a second, not as brief as 88mS, though.

It looks like Radiator has an "output" knob, is that not a true output trim? Yeah, anything that can change the level needs some way to control the output. I use kHs Gain, which is part of Kilohearts' free Essentials bundle. If you don't already have this bundle, I highly recommend it. A collection of 31 useful mixing and creative FX. Before Kilohearts came out with kHs Gain, I used BL Gain. I also like to put an instance of kHs Limiter on synth tracks when I'm auditioning patches. Keeps loud synth sounds from slamming the meters.

Yes, output trim controls are a must for anything that can raise or lower the level. It looks like Radiator has an "output" control, is that something different?

It looks like Loop Engine may even provide a solution/workaround to Cakewalk's inability to route MIDI to multiple synths: I see that one of the reviews is from @Lemar Sain; Lemar, what about these tools?

They do this with Instachord, don't they? I bought Instachord years ago and it never clicked with me. It put me off from these MIDI compositional tools, which is probably unfair. I guess I should try demos of Chords Pro and Loop Engine. Is Chords Pro a subset of Loop Engine or do they have different purposes? (edit) Found it: https://waproduction.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/7944668407068

Phoenix, the best sounding natural algo reverb I ever heard! Nimbus, just like Phoenix but with modulation on the tails! Stratus! Same algo, now with prettier GUI! Repeat for R2, R4, and Symphony. And AFAIK, there was never an upgrade discount, at least not from iZotope. I understand that people gotta make money, but for one-seat licenses that require an iLok 2 (if you're going to dongle them), this seemed....not very nice. iZotope's recent nuking of Phoenix, Nimbus, R2 and R4 was unpopular in some quarters, but really, it was overdue housekeeping. The upside was that in the years before the nuking, you could get licenses for $10 during sales. A freaking steal for the quality of these 'verbs.

I gave this a spin. Did not care for it. It's a kind of dated hip hop-ish drum machine (hey, I like a good 808, but this ain't it). All of the kicks seem to have fake woofer fart baked in

Exponential Audio'd

So does editing the raw Cakewalk.ini file have the same effect as making entries in the "initialization file" preference pane?

As a heads-up, the dialog looks like this: I have some confusion about Cakewalk's INI files. According to the documentation, this entry would be under the WINCAKE section in the file C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\Cakewalk.ini. But the file that gets edited in Preferences is AUD.INI, isn't it?

Sure. One of my favorite uses is for reality checking plug-ins or chains of them that boost level. Everything sounds better louder, so it can be hard to tell if my processing is really doing something good or if I'm being seduced by a simple level boost. It doesn't help that so many plug-ins' presets toss a bit of boost in there.

Okay, with my new system build, I guess it's time to pull the trigger on Chromaphone at $79. I think that's an all-time low for a non-upgrade price. 2 synths for the price of one.

Is that Master bus' meter peaking around -3 to -6? There are a couple more possible choke points between that Master fader and your (presumably powered) monitors. First is Cakewalk's Hardware Outputs. That's the slide-out panel to the right of the Bus Panel in Console View. Make sure that the meter for the hardware output you're using is showing a nice, hot level. Second, there should be some kind of output level knob(s) on your interface. Is that cranked up as well? If there are output level meters on your interface, are they also showing a good strong level? I use a 20W per channel power amp (honest, 1970's-style RMS, not this "intermittent peak power" stuff we often see on power amps now) with a pair of passive Event 20/20's, and I can turn my monitoring system up to the point where it's painful and neighbors will start throwing rocks at my windows. Whatever powered monitors you have, provided that they are studio monitors from a reputable manufacturer, should be able to give you all you want and more.

Sometimes I get stuck notes with my soft synths. Not blaming Cakewalk for this, it just happens sometimes. However, when it DOES happen, I want to be able to stop them. I mean all of them, regardless of how they were initially triggered or whatever. There have been multiple times when I've hit the "Reset MIDI and Audio" button and yes, the sounds stopped, but as soon as I hit the button to restart the audio engine, the stuck notes came back on. I imagine that the existing panic button sends out All Notes Off to every synth track, but apparently not all of them respond correctly to All Notes Off. Is there some way to have a button or menu command to absolutely, for sure, definitively, terminate all playing notes, short of closing and reopening the project? And I mean, terminate. With extreme prejudice. By any means necessary. If it means sending individual "note off's" to all 127 notes on every MIDI track, so be it. I don't know, I just want all the notes to stop sounding and stay that way until I hit Play again.

Not sure what was happening in your situation, but I'm going to request that Cakewalk implement a more robust MIDI panic button. We can call it "No, Really, I Mean ALL NOTES OFF." Or "What Part Of 'ALL NOTES OFF' Don't You Understand?"

If I understand the steps, then I'm getting different results, and it's behaving as I would expect it to. Check Check Check Check Result on my system: it does. The MIDI data is going from Cakewalk to the synth (via the MIDI interface), and the audio data is coming from the synth into Cakewalk (via the audio interface). If this worked in some other way, it would not be practical to overdub vocals or any other audio source with a MIDI track playing. Cakewalk doesn't care (or even know) what device its audio is coming from, be it a hardware synth or microphone or whatever. All it knows is that one (or more) of the inputs on the interface is taking in audio. That audio could be from any sound-producing device, a microphone, a turntable, a hardware synth, or whatever, so how could the fact that it's coming out of a hardware synth that happens to be driven from a Cakewalk MIDI track make any difference? There's nothing at all special about audio coming from a hardware synth as opposed to coming from a microphone. The MIDI track and the audio track don't even know about each other. If you set this up in the same way but also set up a second audio track and plug a mic in and arm that track with the mic as input, are the input level (recording monitor) meters also dead? If so, then something is going really wrong. If they work for the mic, they should work for the synthesizer's audio outs. Are you 100% sure that you have your synthesizer's outputs plugged into the correct inputs on your interface? Are you able to hear the synth correctly on that audio track when it's playing back, and are you sure that what you're hearing is coming from the Cakewalk track rather than realtime monitoring on your interface?

Thank you. There is unfortunate confusion about the terms "USB C" and (less so) "USB 3." And then of course there's "Thunderbolt." They all relate to each other, but they also get confused for each another. I didn't pay it much notice until last December, when I bought a Dell laptop that has a Thunderbolt 3 port. At that point I started wondering what exactly I could connect to such a port. I also wondered where the docking station connector was on my new computer, turns out the answers are related. One way to remember it with USB is numbers=protocol, letters=connector. There's no such thing as a "USB 3 connector," nor is there such a thing as the "USB C protocol." A USB C port on a given bit of hardware might only be for USB 2 protocol connections. A USB 3 port may use a USB A connector. Thunderbolt is yet another protocol, and it's also a term for a certain type of port that always uses USB C connectors. A Thunderbolt 3 port is, physically, USB C. Protocol-wise, it can handle DisplayPort video, charging, and USB 2 and 3 and Thunderbolt data. The way to tell whether your system has a Thunderbolt 3 port is that it will be a USB C connector with the image of a lightning bolt (of course they would use lightning to muddy the waters even further) printed or molded next to it. So rather than using a traditional docking station, if I want to connect my laptop to an external monitor, that will be done via its Thunderbolt 3 port. My understanding is that if I had a charger with enough current capacity, I could even charge the laptop via its Thunderbolt 3 port. There's a LOT of confusion. The statement "USB 3 uses the USB C type connector" is only true some of the time. Any current USB protocol may use any type of USB connector. My Presonus Studio 2|4 uses USB 2 and has a USB C connector. So the only way you know what's provided by a USB C connector (aside from the fact that it will include some kind of USB) before plugging something into it is if you see the lightning bolt indicating it's a Thunderbolt 3 port. Going forward, it's a good idea when buying USB C-to-USB C cables to get only ones that are rated to work with Thunderbolt 3. This is because Thunderbolt 3 uses "smart" connectors that help the devices on each end know who they're talking to. My understanding of the term "jitter" relates to variances in clock frequency. I assume that jitter on the MIDI clock results in slight variations in delay? I suspect that will take a very long time. Speaking strictly for myself, I'm not dumping any of my MIDI 1 gear in favor of MIDI 2 gear. I mean, not just for the sake of being able to use the new protocol. This discussion has made me wonder what we'll see 20 years from now, once MIDI 2.0 has really taken hold, and CPU's have gotten even faster at executing instructions, With a resultant reduction in the amount of latency and timing variations. will we start to see plug-ins that imitate the current imperfections? People will claim that the variations induced by timing inaccuracies were an important part of what made late 20th and early 21st century electronic music sound like it does. "That's why sequenced music that you hear today sounds so mechanical and robotic. Back then, since the tech wasn't as advanced, there were all these little imperfections." Just like we have "analog" buttons on compressor and EQ and delay plug-ins that induce noise, roll off highs, add subtle compression, etc. we'll have "MIDI 1.0" buttons that induce latency and timing variations. And they'll do the same kind of tests that we do, put a dozen instances of the vintage-izer on a track just to see how their effect adds up and what they're really doing.... Seems funny, but we make music in a world where pretty much every producer and mix engineer has some sort of "bitcrusher" plug-in that they can use if they want to get the cool grainy sound of the earliest samplers. Not saying that we all use them, but I bet if we looked in our plug-in collections, somewhere in there, as part of a bundle or whatever, we could find a bitcrusher. That would have seemed hilarious to me 25 years ago. But bitcrushed sounds have become part of the musical language of some genres. Turns out that we like it when music bangs up against technological limitations. Take away those limitations and some of them we want back.

I definitely understand “if it ain’t broke,” but the truth of the matter is that there is a tradeoff. The longer you wait, the more painful the transition will be, and the greater the likelihood of running into trouble, and the greater the potential of that trouble will be annoying. Windows 10 has been around long enough that it’s clear that it’s a safe upgrade from 7. And I have found that in every case, even the aforementioned Core 2 system with 4G of RAM, 10 ran better. Of course it was initially on the despised Vista, but Vista wasn’t all that different from 7 once they ironed out the issues. Cakewalk itself is no longer tested on or guaranteed to work with Windows 7. When the devs announced that years ago, that was my tipping point. There are many hidden benefits to doing a new system build. Not insignificant, you’ll weed out a TON of software you’re not using. I posted a topic in the Computer Systems sub about doing a new build and what I ran into, good and bad. One thing to be aware of is that Windows 10, when first installed, takes about 24 hours to settle down. Somehow it analyzes your system and fine tunes itself. There’s a lot of communication with Microsoft’s servers. So if you do anything heavy with it in the first day or so, it may look like performance is degraded. Yeah, machine-dependent authorizations are a pain in the cases where you must contact the manufacturer once you get past a certain number of authorizations. Plugin Alliance has a good system, all you have to do is go to their website and deauthorize your previous system. WA Production is one of the ones you must contact after you run out of authorizations.

I have no tech help to offer, I just want to give you a tip of the hat for getting it done on a wheezy old system. Some people like to brag about how new and powerful their PC's are, but I'm kind of the opposite. I think it's cool to run the wheels off, get all the use you can, people can be surprised at how much you can do with so little. If you can make cool stuff using a computer that shipped during the Bush administration, that's impressive. If you did have the latest zillion-core DDR5 rocket sled, that would be nice, but there'd be nothing remarkable about making music with it. I've been like a low rent Jim Roseberry recently. I rebuilt a couple of systems for friends to use, a couple of systems that originally shipped with Vista installed. One is a Core 2 Quad with 8G RAM that I received years ago as a hand-me-down. It was my main DAW computer for a few years and then my #2 for several more. My friend had no computer and needed one for some online exams, so now it's his. He's also a musician and Cakewalk on that computer is overkill for his stuff that usually maxes out at 3 or 4 tracks. If I were somehow forced to use only that computer on a daily basis to do my web browsing and TV watching and music creating on, I would definitely miss the newer systems that have replaced it, but I would not be dead in the water. I'd just have to be more clever with freezing synth tracks and such. It would be more work, but it would still happen. The second was an old Dell laptop that another friend of mine found at the bottom of a drawer at his house. He took it to the IT guy at his former employer and they said "toss it," so he brought it to me to see if there was a webcam I could salvage from it or something. Of course, telling me that the IT guy at work said to put it in the dumpster is a very good way to pique my curiosity. I don't remember what it had under the hood, probably a Core 2 Duo. I couldn't get past the Windows Vista password, even with my cracking tools, so I wiped it and put on Windows 10. Came right up, running on 3 Gigs of RAM(!). I dug up a 2G RAM stick and bumped it up to 4 and it runs fine as a web/YouTube/Netflix box. So of course I had to try it....and damned if Cakewalk didn't chug right along on just fine on it. Since he was expecting me to tell him that it was toast, I couldn't resist plugging a MIDI controller into it and jamming on the Cakewalk Studio Instruments for him, of course to his utter astonishment. Another guy who would do just fine recording his 1 guitar 1 voice demos on it if he bothers to try it. I found him a replacement charger on CL for $10 and now he has a portable Windows 10 system that works fine. As for the issues you're seeing, after a certain number of releases, I start to be concerned about "template rot." Cakewalk is wonderful about maintaining backward compatibility with files created in long-dead versions of the software, but how long should I challenge it by using such files as templates for new projects? ? Maybe at the 5 year point, I rebuild my template just to be sure. The 5 year point for my time with Cakewalk is coming up in April. When the time comes that you do go to get a newer computer, I think refurbished Dells are a really good value. There are many Dells from the corporate world that got early retirements and probably have a decade left of decent computing to do.