Starship Krupa

Good to see you around, Larry! Sheesh, yeah, he had nothing better to do than attack the credibility of someone who was trying to help people with RA-100's, and that's sad. He could have chosen to examine the schematic and figure out whether it was possible for the protection circuitry to affect the audio; after all, it only "requires a basic understanding of discrete transistor circuits." That would have contributed to the topic. But it's not about contributing anything useful, it's just trying to take someone else down a peg. You notice that he bragged about how his output protection circuit worked for decades? Well, duh, I mean, that circuit is only in there to protect your power output stage in case of abuse, like shorting the speaker wires and turning it up. The best protection is not abusing your amp in the first place. Turn the power off before you repatch. If you repatch and no sound comes out, don't turn up the volume in the hope that sound will come out if you just dime it. ? I suspected that I would attract a pedantic hater or two, due to the fact that it was my first ever post in the forum, and that's a flag for certain types to go on the attack. Since I hadn't previously "proven" myself, I'd naturally get a "who the hell are you?" So I was ready for him. The best torture you can deliver upon someone who's trying to pick a fight is to not take their bait. I appreciate that you found it "relentless." ? "Oh good sir, I bow before your greater knowledge and will keep you talking until you yourself reveal that you're full of crap." It was Socrates' favorite ploy, and it pissed off the powers that be so much that they had him put to death. His final jab was to say "a life unexamined is not worth living" and slam the cup of hemlock. It's not about "belief," either, at least on my part. I'm very skeptical about things like this, and I would love to believe that all solid state power amps are created equal. To learn otherwise complicates things that I would rather not have complicated. I'd rather handwave any possible differences between hardware as inaudible, but my ears betray me, even at age 61. Who wants to be concerned that their audio gear isn't giving them the best performance that they are capable of hearing? I just want it all to work. As for measurable results, at least in this case, I could probably find them if I knew what to look for. There's this school of thought in audio circles, it's the other side of audiophile lunacy coin. It says, like this guy did, that if you can't measure it, you can't hear it. Which assumes that when measuring something, you know what to look for, that your measuring equipment isn't pulling a Heisenberg on the unit under test, etc. There are all sorts of things that can happen in an amp that can't be measured by putting a sine wave or square wave into it and examining the difference between what's going in and what's coming out. It also tends to assume that any amp that was designed by someone who worked at a company and was mass-produced is somehow automatically properly-designed, and designed to be neutral. Having worked in the electronics industry, I have no idea where this trust comes from, but whatever, it's a trust that I definitely do not have. Here are the published specs for the RA-100: THD: 0.05% THD @ 1kHz (8 ohms), 0.19% THD @ 1kHz (4 ohms) Frequency Response: ±1dB 20Hz - 20kHz Noise: 100dB below full output Damping Factor: 200 @ 8 ohms You can get that by, as I said, running a sine through it and comparing the results. It says nothing about intermodulation distortion, group delay, phase distortion, slew rate, transient response, crosstalk, any number of factors that have been scientifically proven to be audible. We test amplifiers with simple sine waves and square waves, but we listen to them with incredibly complex material with a wide dynamic range. A sine wave tells you nothing about how well the amp will respond to something like a cymbal crash, except that it will be able to deliver the highest audible frequencies. That information could be smeared like crazy if the amp has phasing or intermodulation distortion issues. If it has group delay issues, the different frequencies could arrive at slightly different times, all in various states of in or out of phase. 55 years ago, people still believed that it was impossible to hear the difference between tube amplifiers and solid state amplifiers, that if anything, solid state amplifiers should sound "better" because they had greater frequency response and less measurable distortion. People who claimed otherwise were accused of magical thinking. And as we know, "magic" is sometimes "science" that hasn't been explained yet. Now we know why tube amplifiers, for instruments as well as hi-fi, can sound objectively better depending on the application. Part of why we know this is that so many people preferred the sound of tube amps that we got busy and figured out why that is. I've previously experienced this with computer audio interfaces. I happily used a pair of Presonus Firepods for about 8 years until one fateful day I found a Presonus Studio 2|4 on Craig's List for $30. The idea for getting such a small interface was to have something to use with my portable devices. I hooked it up to my main DAW system to test it and....OMG. The stereo image sounded like it extended about 2' past the outer edges of my monitors, sounds in the middle had better Y-axis image, I could hear all these little sonic details in the background.... So I went online and did a deep dive into how this could be possible. It was just playback, which should have sounded identical; the big difference in audio interfaces is the input preamp circuitry....right? Because everyone "knows" that all that DAC's do is convert those ones and zeroes into audio, and since the THD is negligible and the frequency response extends beyond what dogs can hear, any differences are due to placebo effect from my having a shiny new toy. Well, a Gearspace thread from around 2010 from a Presonus representative mentioned that the Firestudio, which had just come out and was the successor to the Firepod, would sound way better mostly due to the introduction of "JetPLL" to the clocking system. Which led to my discovery of this paper from the inventor of JetPLL, which has been standard in prosumer interfaces since it was introduced around 2010. Turns out that people can hear differences in jitter, it's measurable and audible. Here's Presonus' ad copy regarding the Firestudio's introduction of JetPLL: "JetPLL™ ensures the highest converter performance possible, resulting in better stereo separation and clearer more transparent audio." Which is exactly what I was hearing, before I saw their ad copy. I even found an old page on Presonus' site offering factory trade-in credit on Firestudios for owners of Firepods. I guess they didn't want them out there. Anyway, it was so audible to me that I unplugged the Firepods and went in search of an 8-input Firewire interface from the JetPLL era. Found a new-in-box Sapphire Pro 40, and sure enough, its playback sounds great. Now I'm sure that prior to 2010, all manufacturers claimed that their interfaces played back audio perfectly, and had the test results to show it. So if that were the case, why does every mass-produced interface made since then include a JetPLL chip? It's not as if manufacturers go in search of licensed technology to add manufacturing cost to their products. Turns out that a stable clock is critical to a DAC's audio performance and that clock stability took a huge leap in the late 00's. I don't like to play this card online for various reasons, but I've been a professional instrument amp repair guy for 15 years. Had to retire from it due to health reasons. I've designed and built guitar amps, both for my own use and on contract for other companies. One of my products was very favorably reviewed in Guitar Player magazine. Before I had my own company, I worked in the engineering departments at a variety of audio companies, including Orban Associates and Nady Systems. In my early Silicon Valley days, I laid out integrated circuits using the old amberlith-and-xacto-knife method. I am not a newbie hobbyist at electronics. One of the reasons it's not good to play that card with someone like that poor fellow is that they'd only come back at you with "well if you have all that experience then you must know...." It would just be playing their one-upmanship game. I don't need to flash my cred. If you were in my area, I could hook up both my modded and unmodded RA-100's and you would find the difference stunning. You'd have no trouble with a blind A-B test.

A recent favorite freebie of mine is Monster Drum. It's sampled, with 20 different kits, from acoustic to electronic.

There's an extensive list of free instruments on this forum. One free virtual drum box that I like that hasn't made it to the list yet is Monster Drum. W.A. Production and the BandLab Assistant are good sources of free loops.

There's a website dedicated to documenting these: https://www.kissthisguy.com/ Legend has it that Jimi Hendrix made a joke out of it and would go over and give Noel Redding a peck on the cheek after delivering the "kiss this guy" line. As a lyricist who labors at least as much over the words as I do the music....I know intellectually that most people pay much less, and in some cases, no, attention to lyrical content, but I pretend otherwise. I guess I write lyrics for myself and for the minority of listeners who, like myself, pay a GREAT amount of attention to lyrics. The words of some of my favorite lyricists have been life-changing, life-saving (and as a depression sufferer, I will say that that is closer to literal than you might think), and have helped form my outlook on life. My childhood was during the 70's singer-songwriter boom, and the words of James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot ("If You Could Read My Mind" good lord), Carole King, and others gave me insight into adult feelings and relationships, things to watch for as I got older. It still weirds me out that people treat "Fire and Rain" as this campfire singalong thing when it's about his friend dying from a heroin overdose, the breakup of his band due to drug abuse, and his own recovery from addiction. The "Suzanne" in the song was a junkie girl who he met in rehab at the Austen Riggs psychiatric hospital. When he sings "the plans they made put an end to you," that "end" was Suzanne dying from a heroin overdose. Taylor couldn't even do the song live for years because it broke him down emotionally. Even as a pre-teen, the line "I always thought that I'd see you again" haunted me, realizing that in life, there might be people I'd lose permanently. And sure enough, unfortunately not uncommon in the music scene, it proved prophetic in adulthood. And it comforts me to know that I'm not alone in losing people I love to addiction. It helps me deal with the loss. Going through breakups? "If You Could Read My Mind," "Too Late Baby." Yikes. Cathartic. And, uh, Joni, thanks for giving me insight into the minds of commitment-phobic narcissistic women. Brilliant artist, wouldn't want to date her. ? And I encourage music fans who have a hard time making out the lyrics of their favorite songs to look them up and find out what they really say. I say this because it's been so rewarding for me. You can find out that REM's "The One I Love" isn't a love song, it's a vicious middle finger to an ex.: "another prop has occupied my time" are not words of love. People play "Every Breath You Take" at their weddings, completely oblivious to the fact that it's a threatening statement to an ex-lover informing them that he's going to stalk them. I guess brides just focus on the "I'll be watching you" line and think how sweet it is that he's pledging that he'll be watching them forever. The aforementioned Tom Petty was a brilliant lyricist, he's worth checking out in this way. Anyway, having said that, I freakin' love Mondegreens and have plenty of my own, some of which I like better than the actual lyrics. 10CC's "I'm Not In Love" (which, BTW is kind of the opposite of the REM song) in the break where the studio receptionist says "be quiet, big boys don't cry, big boys don't cry..." I was convinced that she was saying "break boys, take five." Y'know, talking to the band, telling them to take a break. ?‍♂️ Depeche Mode's "Policy of Truth," despite being a favorite song, I still hear it as "all upon a sea of truth."

That is teh secks. I love the combination of rosewood fretboard and dark stained body. I'll post some shots of my Peavey era-spanning custom frankenbass when I can find them....

I think TrueVerb was my first ever Waves Black Friday freebie, way back when.

There are other optimizations you can do at an OS level that will make things run even more smoothly. First and foremost, since you're using Kontakt and Spitfire sample libraries, go into the Windows Security settings and exclude your plug-in, Cakewalk Projects, and any folders where your samples libraries are stored from Windows Defender realtime scanning. I use Windows 10 Pro, so I have disabled realtime scanning globally, but if you want to leave realtime scanning on for the rest of your system, at least exclude whatever folders are going to get heavy reading while you're in projects. That will take a big load off your CPU, as it won't be scanning your Spitfire Orchestra samples for malware every time they're read.

Okay, I also do In The Box (aka "ITB") projects, and I'll offer this advice: Where sample rate matters is when you do your final export/render. Depending on your soft synths and FX, you may likely get better sound if you export at 88.1K or 96K and then use a converter (I use and recommend MediaHuman Audio Converter) for creating files for distribution. (And BTW, I consider it best practice to make ONE master rendered file and convert it for distribution rather than doing a FLAC export, an MP3 export, etc. The reason for this is that soft synths and FX have randomized elements that will be different every time you render.) Cakewalk has a built-in feature, plug-in upsampling. You enable this by clicking on the "2X" button in the Control Bar's Mix Module. For ITB projects, this will have the same effect as rendering at 88.1 or 96. If you enable it during mixing/composing, you'll hear any differences at that time (if you hear any differences). What it does is make your plug-ins "think" that they're running at double the sample rate. One caveat: I've gotten unexpected results from upsampling while having the 64-bit precision engine enabled. Since the word is that the 64-bit precision engine is kinda snake oil, I now leave it turned off. I hear no difference in playback or rendered audio. YMMV. If you're interested in the reason for wanting to do this, it has to do with aliasing, which I won't go into here. It's a kind of distortion that's usually considered unpleasant (unlike the GOOD kind of distortion). Either just try it and listen for a difference in quality, or study up on aliasing in soft synths and FX. It can especially have an effect on reverbs and distortion FX. HTH.

I use dual 23" monitors at 1920x1280. I consider that to be just at the edge of legibility with my aging eyesballs. This is not just for CbB, I use some older plug-ins that aren't scalable, and they're hard to see even at that resolution. We'd all love to see vector scaling in Cakewalk, and the devs have hinted that they'd like to do it, but it ain't there yet. There is some dusty code in Cakewalk!

The aforementioned ProChannel Quadcurve EQ that others have mentioned has spectrum analysis, but I'd prefer a free plug-in like Voxengo SPAN or Meldaproduction MAnalyzer (the latter is my favorite).

Or take a thumb drive to the nearest Internet cafe, download the installer and bring it home (don't mess with BandLab Assistant). At that point, all you'll need to connect to the Internet for is validation, which is trivial as far as data transfer.

And I'm happy to see that your state of being "done" with making Cakewalk tutorials was brief! As far as human impulses go, the one to share what we know with others just because it feels good to help people is one of my favorites. I subscribe to the notion of this being evolutionary (in whatever sense of that word): as human societies developed, the people who had useful information that could help the tribe were valued and given resources, thus ensuring their survival. Translate that to whatever spirituality one may follow. Compared to other impulses, like the one to clonk someone on the head and take their stuff, it's pretty cool. We just do it because we like the idea that it will ease others' struggling to do something we love doing ourselves. Rather than selfishly hoarding the information.

A couple of years ago I was working on an audio project and it started to exhibit this behavior. It was just the one project, and I eventually resolved it with the help of the devs, but I can't remember what I/we did to solve it. It had other issues as well, like scrolling up and down with the mousewheel had a crazy amount of delay. I sent my project file in to them and they examined it and figured out the issue and made changes to Cakewalk which solved it. This suggests that there may be multiple things that can trigger the behavior. As others have suggested, maybe try a complete fresh install of Cakewalk, try recording some simple tracks and see what happens. You've obviously been very diligent in trying to troubleshoot this. It's probably time to contact official support, who can get the attention of the devs if they themselves can't help you fix it. Believe me, the devs will want to know about this. As others have said, it's not happening for them, but it's entirely possible that it's happening for an unknown number of people who don't visit the forum and/or just switched to another DAW when they couldn't work it out. Cakewalk is under new management. The devs are much more able to address issues like this quickly than they were in the past.

Oy vey. I had to go through some serious hassle to even get these Dream Machines playable on my system (I documented my flailings in Meldaproduction's forum). Then once I did, I discovered that each "Dream Machine" only has 6 sample slots. They each can hold 2 samples, but only ones of similar type, like you can have 2 different hats or 2 different kicks or 2 different toms in the same slot. Then to use them, apparently you have to write automation to switch back and forth between the two samples. There's no note choking that I can see either. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but the freeware Sitala has 16 pads, each with individual outputs, and can load any sample you want. You can also do things like trim the sample, reverse it, whatever. So IMO, if you're going to sell me a single shot sampled vintage-style drum machine, it has to do at least as much as Sitala would with the appropriate samples loaded into it. Otherwise you're just trying to sell me a nice vintage sample set with a lame player. Here's a review I wrote on the Meldaproduction forum. Caveat emptor on this one (there was someone who said that with an MSoundFactory drum machine there was "no way around" having only 6 slots because MSF only has 6 outputs. Which started a mini discussion around how hard it would be to add a couple of outputs to MSoundFactory to accommodate this. Uh, suuuure, it's not possible for different notes to go to the same virtual output?) Since I wrote it it occurs to me why not just have all 12 sample slots able to be triggered by MIDI notes, that would at least put it in the ballpark of other drum machines that have 16 slots. Breaktweaker is the only one I can think of that only has 6 slots. I own Breaktweaker, I've used Breaktweaker, and Dream Machines is no Breaktweaker. .... I got a license for MSoundFactoryLE partly because of excitement around this, but add me to those disappointed to have only 6 slots in each "machine." I didn't read closely and figured that some of the "pads" would be doing double duty. As a programmer of beats, for me the minimum for usability is 8 slots, each with their own MIDI note. Preferably with choking between hi-hat slots, and individual level and pan controls for each slot. The reason for this "minimum" is that the classic drum boxes had at least this variety of sounds. If I'm trying to program something to sound like a DMX, 808, or Six Trak, it won't sound like one without at least 8 slots (some might say more). You can't program "My Adidas" or "Posse on Broadway" with 6 slots (although you might be able to do "Blue Monday"). The most basic freeware pad samplers can do this. Unlike others who have contributed to the discussion so far, I don't need 8 individual outs. I don't think there's "no way around it" at all. The number of outputs has nothing to do with the number of note slots; some MSoundFactory instruments have 88 notes and only 2 outputs. Doubling up a couple of outputs is fine, closed and open hats and hi and lo tom (or whatever) can share outputs; it's not like my beats aren't going to work if I can't separately process my closed and open hats (or toms). Automation can take care of that if it's really necessary. Lots of people use their DAWs' step sequencers to make beats, that's especially important in the absence of an internal sequencer (as with Dream Machines). It's impossible for users to program in sample changes via automation while we're using our step sequencer. I have to have access to all of the different sounds I'm going to use while I'm creating the beats. If I have to use automation to be able to use kick, snare, claps, OH, CH, and hi and lo toms, I'm just going to reach for another instrument, maybe load the samples up in Sitala or something. I'm a drummer, the head guy at Meldaproduction is a drummer. Just as I come up with beats on the fly when I'm playing my "real" kit, I often (usually) come up with them on the fly when I'm programming them. I even sometimes program them by recording "key drums" in real time with my left hand on the General MIDI drum keys. Can't do that unless my sounds are all mapped to notes, not being switched with automation. That would be like having to record myself playing the hats closed and then overdubbing myself playing them open. My request is, at the minimum, allow independent triggering of "Sample A" and "Sample B" via MIDI notes. Maybe a mode switch for "trigger Sample B via MIDI note?" That would take it over my usability threshold. More flexibility in which sounds can be mapped to which slots would be nice, as would hi hat choke. None of it seems terribly out of reach for virtual drum machines hosted by a synth engine that (I presume) can recognize, respond to, and output 127 MIDI notes. An 8 sample drum machine with 6 assignable outputs seems possible, and surely no threat to MDrummer. I don't even usually use individual outs on my drum machines, virtual or otherwise; as long as the drum machine has individual pan and level controls I'm fine.

Also the Player version, right? The way I understand it is that the full version gets you everything, the LE version gets you everything except you can't create your own instruments, and the Player gives you Monastery Grand and Super Saw. With Player, you can buy more instruments, like for instance the Dream Machines thing that just came out, and I would presume the Meldway Grand that's been Coming Soon for a while. Both of those are being given to Full and LE users at no extra cost. With the Full version and LE version, it's Melda's call which new instruments get added to those for free and which stay separate? My impression at the time was that he was trying to set up his own ecosystem like Kontakt and Sampletank, with the obvious differences. Does Sampletank have 3rd-party libraries that use the Sampletank engine like Kontakt has all those 3rd-party instruments? I haven't seen any but that doesn't mean there are any. My sample library needs are modest and completely satisfied by free ones at this point.

Wow. First impression is that the 8 patches from Modular City are my least favorite in all of Swatchlandia, as a group. Usually there's at least one cool and/or useful sound. I wonder what happened here. One of them sounds like the typical "default" sound on a subtractive synth emulation. Is the idea to show how pure a sine wave their algorithm can generate? "How more sine can it get? None. None more sine."

More for stage than for studio, I would think. I'd rock the snot out of a set of those at an electronic festival. (as if I'd ever get invited to play one)

A|A|S have come out with Modular City, a soundpack for their modular synth, Multiphonics CV-1. This suggests that since it will also play in the free A|A|S Player/Swatches app, Multiphonics CV-1 uses the same modeling synth engine their other instruments are built around. The promo includes the soundpack and Multiphonics CV-1 for 50% off list. Also: Swatches has been updated to 1.60 and now includes patches from Modular City and Love Lost (the latest Strum soundpack). This brings Swatches up to 628 different patches, which is astonishing. They're excellent sounds, too, the ones that A|A|S have picked to show off each soundpack.

Isn't part of the MSFLE (and Player) deal that 3rd-party instruments can be used in whatever version? That would make it up to @Chandler whether he wants to put it out for the world to share (or buy), unless of course he made it under contract to Meldaproduction. I tried an MSF instrument that someone on the Melda users' Discord made, and it sounded great, but the GUI got all messed up after a software update. That made me concerned for the future of 3rd-party MSF content. If Meldaproduction can't keep it backward compatible, that would not be a good thing. The only other 3rd party content I've seen for MSF was that thing that came with the issue of CM with the Meldaproduction feature. It was....kinda awful. Controls that operated the wrong way, a promise of more devices to come that never did. Not a great showcase for it.

Yeah, the page Brian linked to was kinda 4 different drum instruments, the Monastery Grand I already have, and then "MSoundFactory Essentials: Whatever That Is." Click on "Details" and you get this wonderfully Meldaesque non-description: "Essential data for MSoundFactory: MSoundFactory comes up with various resources, mainly samples. You can download all of them here directly and install them using Menu/Install product, or use the integrated downloader inside MSoundFactory, which can be started directly from the MSoundFactory main screen and will do all the heavy lifting for you." The description of the instruments package is....kind of like if you asked someone to describe the Amazon shipment that came this morning and they told you all about the box it came in. I know the guy has decent verbal skills, he comes across as articulate and funny on the forum and in interviews, but it's almost as if he doesn't want his products to be used to their full capacity. I trust Vojtech enough to buy the thing anyway, but I sure do thank you for that list. I assume that each of the "instruments" is truly an instrument, like a Kontakt instrument, with its own controls and set of patches? I think that some of the Super Saw patches sound great.

Therefore not a VocalSynth killer.

I'm getting interested in purchasing MSoundFactoryLE. I have enough referral credits to get it for no cash at the current price. I've also been eyeing MAutoEqualizer. My concern is that some of the MSoundFactory SuperSaw patches brought my laptop to a halt and I'm wondering how much of a hog it is in general. Meldaproduction FX are unanimously frugal with resources, but is MSoundFactory? And is there somewhere on the website that lists the instruments that come with it?

I'd be very interested to see what you come up with. Please post results on the Meldaproduction forum or here in Tutorials or Instruments and Effects. These days so many instruments come with built-in sequencers that it can be a chore to learn them all. That said, if you're emulating classic beatboxes, they really oughta have the original patterns available.

Anyone hungry for loops should check out W.A. Production's endless collection of freebies. Also, hidden in plain sight, the much-despised Bandlab Assistant is actually a great source of free loops.

Eesh, yes. However, MSoundFactory Player comes with a very comprehensive (no surprise there) arpeggiator that could probably be used for that purpose. For those who haven't stumbled across the arpeggiator, it's down at the very bottom of the toolbar (the strip on the right with all of the standard controls). In typical Melda fashion, it's extensive enough that you should be able to get a certification for figuring it out. Lord how those products could benefit from better documentation....