Starship Krupa

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.

Hit Alt+9 to open the Synth Rack View. You should see the rack with all of the synths in your project. Then double click on the icon of whichever synth you want to open.

Inevitable with mergers, innit? Many functions are duplicated across the companies. Unfortunately, in my experience, it's the ones who do the actual work who tend to get cut rather than the (now redundant) middle and lower managers.

Look for the AC Dark Aqua theme, should be a ou-le of pages down in this sub forum. It uses a glow effect, as I understand glow effects. ‘I would say that a glow effect is a gradient from a dark color to a lighter one.

I think that may be one of the canonical locations, but I don't see it often either. The usual one, which the PA stuff uses, is Documents\VST3 Presets\<Company Name>\<Product Name> In that location on my system there are 6 manufacturers who have created folders, but not all of them have used them for presets. They probably created the folders to store user presets. One of the things I dislike about the forcing-on-everyone of VST3 is that it seemed to coincide with developers dropping support for the query-the-plug-in method I described earlier. The ones that bothered to started making their own preset managers, some of which are crap. Things like presets work better for me when I know where to find them. It took embarrassingly long for me to figure out that Plugin Alliance products actually do come with presets. I thought for years that I was on my own, which naturally didn't endear their products to me. I mean, I like their stuff okay, I just thought "no presets, ever" was something I just had to live with, kind of like "no mix control, ever" is a thing with Freakshow Industries.

What is missing is scanning the folders where the .vstpresets reside and using them to populate the native Cakewalk preset list. When VST3 presets are present, they are present in locations specified in Steinberg's VST3 spec. Cakewalk should be able to check those locations and populate the menu if possible (which is surely what Reaper, Studio One, et al are doing). If Cakewalk is able to display a list of valid presets in the VST3 menu, it should be able to populate the other menu with them. As it stands, I believe there is a way for hosts to query a plug-in itself to get a list of factory presets and that is what Cakewalk does. Unfortunately, that mechanism seems to have fallen out of use by plug-in developers. When it's present, it works in both the VST2 and VST3 versions. It works in the Lindell T-100, for instance, and I think maybe the Millenium NSEQ.

I find it very handy in Cakewalk to map my tilde (~) key to Edit/Select None. When I need to deselect things, it's much easier than doing it with the mouse.

Bitflipper is right about using a limiter. The free Kilohearts Essentials collection includes a very easy to use limiter. Also, any compressor that allows for setting a hard knee and infinite ratio basically acts as a limiter. This includes the Sonitus compressor that comes with Cakewalk, and especially the PC76 ProChannel module.

Buy it for the stand, shockmount, pop filter, give the mic to a friend who's into mic modding. Looks like a nice enough shell.

So if you bounce the track, you get 2 octaves, then apply the effect again....

https://www.meldaproduction.com/MTurboReverbLE Wait for one of Meldaproduction's 50% off everything sales, then buy the MEssentialFX bundle using the newsletter signup credit and my 20% off referral code (MELDA1923165). That will get you a nice pile of FX, including MTurboReverbLE and MTurboDelay, for about the standard price of MTurboReverbLE.

The free Kilohearts Essentials collection includes a very good pitch shifter. I'm not sure about the range, but hey, it's free.

Check out Valhalla Supermassive. It's free.

This. After using and making custom themes for so long, I feel uncomfortable with Mercury and Tungsten. Since I overhauled the Tools module in my new themes to take up as much real estate as possible and represent the tool cursors you actually get when you invoke them, the stock Tools buttons look spindly and odd. Like, what's up with the wrench? And no more 3-D tape recorder buttons on the Transport, I've gone to the flat Studio One/Ableton style. I like this theme; the flat Transport and the Gain and Pan knobs especially. It's all business. And....MModernCompressor and VC-670 4 lyfe!

@Light Grenade has 6 tutorials and likely more on the way.

Not in my experience, and I've moved many machine-registered iLok licenses around. And since a big part of PACE/iLok's whole schtick is how it helps handle the issue of using one license on multiple systems, I'd be very surprised if they ever put a limit on numbers of activations/installations. As I understand it, back when iLok was physical-only, a selling point was that you could travel to different studios with your iLok and be able to access your favorite plug-ins. And a selling point for developers was that there was no longer a need for them to maintain a licensing server, the mechanics of end-user licensing was all handled by PACE. Sell the user an iLok license then you're out of the support loop. They have tried to make it easier on the user with the Cloud approach, but not enough developers have bought into that.

Hmm, that sound like an illness to me. "The girl with Sonitus goes by." ? I pronounce the name as SAW-nih-tus. Sorta Latin. I guess it could also be SO-nih-tus. Or SON-it-us, as in "we have met the enemy, and son, it us." Mutual, John. Means a lot. Your hiatus was a blip. I noticed that you'd been quiet, but figured that you'd be back. My hope is that even with the ebb of participation in online forums, the information that we provide will be of use to people doing Google searches. I know that the old, archived forum is still helpful to me at times in this way.

Working like that on 2 systems here. Open PRV, try turning Show Velocity and Show Notes on and off. It will appear below the View menu and above the piano keyboard. To the left of the ruler. I found the element in the weirdest place: Loop Construction view/Resolution Menu.

It appeared after I fiddled with the Show Velocity options in the Notes menu.

Thanks to TYLIP these requests are now nearly extinct, but I'm trying to figure out where to find the image used for this element (also the text color, but I have a feeling that's a lost cause): In Mercury: In Tungsten: As you can see, the button is flatter and darker in Tungsten than in Mercury, which tells me that it's themeable. Any idea? Of course, with darker themes, the black text will be a limiting factor, but the current stock buttons stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. Many extra points for knowing (or finding) where the text color comes from.

Very interesting and cool hack. Great way to get text to match the Cakewalk built-in text. Although I have had pretty good luck using Arial with anti-aliasing turned off (in Paint.NET). I must try this....

If I have to get on Faecebook to get the content, I'll pass. The only time I do anything Cakewalk-y on there is when I have a new custom theme to *****. As far as crossposting, any information I post is property of ME and I will post it anywhere I please. Approaching BandLab for any kind of promo money is a good way to be disappointed. It's just not how they roll. As far as why YouTubers not being around the forum, well, unfortunately, it's apparently not even worth it for them to announce new content here, as so few hits come from this forum (or any, for that matter). That's according to @John Vere of Cactus Studios fame, who remains a stalwart forum participant. @AdK Studios is the only YouTuber who still bothers to announce new videos in the Tutorials section. It's sad. Not even XelOhh posts announcements here any more. One reason I can think of is that we of the forum tend to be veterans who feel less in need of tutorials. Which always turns out not to be true, at least in my 5-years-of-using-Cakewalk case. My eternal inability to figure out VocalSync was solved in a Lorene "The Produce Aisle" Anderson video. She only started using the program last year, and sometimes does videos she calls "Cakestumbles" where she just flounders around discovering things. Sounds useless, maybe, but is not at all. In those videos, due to her naivete, she stumbles across features and workflows that I've missed or forgotten about. She's one creator of Cakewalk videos that I've practically begged to check the place out, if only just to lurk and glean some good tips to share with her viewers, and AFAIK, she's had none of it. Of course, being female is unfortunately sometimes a gateway for poor treatment in forums (this one not included, our sistas in the pit are invariably warmly welcomed). I guess people would rather have valuable information scroll away into oblivion and answer the same basic questions over and over again. Faecebook. Reddit, YouTube comments....bleah. Although I do sometimes drop in and help on the Cakewalk Reddit. Anyway, we've all come through with the Plugin Alliance (and other) .spp's. Just about every PA effect has been covered in the past 48 hours. All hail the helpful Cakewalk forumites!

Whoa. Nastiness indeed. Good heavens. Doesn't get much worse than that. I had no idea about this. They came with the first version of Mixcraft I got and I didn't care for them (I'm a "mix with your ears and eyes" person and their GUI's were too rudimentary). Also my foray into the use of Mixcraft coincided with a wave of excellent loss-leader and other freeware plug-ins (MEqualizer, MCompressor, MPhaser, MFlanger, MComb, and OrilRiver beat the utter kiddy-fiddling snot out of that collection), which I migrated to. What Acoustica/Mixcraft are now doing with their installer is allowing optional installation of "legacy" bundled plug-ins so that longtime users can still open old projects without getting "missing plug-in" errors. The default is to not install them. They're listed on the website as "Classic," not by the developer name. Seems like they had to compromise between completely distancing themselves and making things difficult for their user base. It's not as if the "fiddler in the clink" makes any money from it. Acoustica are unfortunately not shy about still bundling 32-bit plug-ins (despite my bug reports informing them when 64-bit versions became available ?), so they probably didn't drop them for their 32-bithood. Maybe they dropped them because they're simply not as good as later freeware products (and their current bundle, which is a nice collection by ToneBoosters). Anyway, this is the DAW Users Hall of Shame rather than the DAW Manufacturers Hall of Shame. Still, thanks for pointing me in the direction of the dirt. Icky as it is, it's good to be informed. On the topic of DAW Users Hall of Shame, I probably qualify for my follies with REAPER. I first tried it about a decade ago and have every so often since and always come to the same conclusion: too much technology standing between me and the creation of music. The first few tries, it took me the better part of 2 hours just to get a track armed for recording (compared to a minute or two with Mixcraft and Cakewalk). This was back when the manual was user-written LINUX-style, with the basics (like, uh, how to start the damn thing recording audio or MIDI) being left out. Before the REAPER brigade chimes in, yes, this has been well-remedied in the intervening years, but the menus have gotten even bigger and more daunting. REAPER is just too powerful for little ol' me, I guess. So I'm either a dunderhead for having such a hard time with it or a dunderhead for continuing to try it even after my initial unfortunate experiences (trying the same thing expecting different results, etc.). It sounds like something I'd like, endlessly customizable, light on resources, stable....but it just reminds me of trying to use GIMP after learning on Photoshop. Also, despite my hunger for a platform for live improvisation of electronic music, I repeatedly come up blank when trying to use Ableton Live. Magazine tutorials, etc. No dice. I guess I still think of songs too much in linear form. It looks like so much fun, and so many people I admire get killer results with it. Not me, at least so far. WAAAHHH, I wanna use Ableton!