Starship Krupa

The only 3rd party plug-ins that I consider absolutely indispensable, which is to say that I wouldn't want to release a track without being able to use them, are my reverbs. My ears seem to be very sensitive to reverb. When I'm listening especially critically, like testing equipment or CODEC's, it's the transients and reverb tails that reveal the differences. Exponential Nimbus or Meldaproduction MTurboReverb. Flip a coin. Probably go with MTurboReverb because of the licensing and continued support by the developer, although I have few worries that the Exponential 'verbs are going to break any time soon. Could do it without 'em, I suppose, but I'd be gritting my teeth.

"So what" indeed. There is a practical, easy explanation, though. SONAR was the product of a whole division of Gibson, Cakewalk, Inc. Cakewalk is the product of a handful of developers who work for BandLab. Cakewalk, Inc. had multiple marketing employees whose job description included maintaining friendly relationships with the marketing people at other software (and hardware) companies. Part of their job would have been to keep an eye on iZotope and others to make sure those companies had everything they needed to make sure that SONAR stayed on their compatibility list. This could include things like free NFR copies of SONAR for testing, cross promotions, bundling, etc. There's nobody to do that now. It's entirely up to the marketing (and engineering) people at those companies to decide which DAW's to list as explicitly compatible. As mentioned elsewhere, there are only so many hosts that it's economically feasible for them to be able to test thoroughly enough to put on their compatibility list. Not to worry; in the past 5 years of BandLab's ownership, getting on compatibility lists is actually on the way up. BandLab make it easy to test with Cakewalk; it's free. Also, the Cakewalk developers have a healthy interest in working with plug-in manufacturers to ensure compatibility.

If you're a first-time Melda customer, sign up for their newsletter to get a flat €10 credit. Also, be sure to use a referral code (mine is MELDA1923165, but anyone's will do) to get 20% off your first order. By stacking all the discounts, a first-time buyer can upgrade their FreeFX bundle to "pro" for about €10. For veterans, check your My Account page to see what kind of prices you'll get on upgrades. Bundle prices will be reduced even further to take into account plug-ins you already own that are in the bundles. If you're wondering which bundle(s) give you the most bang for the buck, MEssentialFX is a smokin' deal. You get Mturboreverble (the only reverb I've heard that can touch the Exponential ones), MTurboDelay ( @abacab described it as a "Swiss Army knife," but to me that doesn't say it all, it's more like one of those plus a Leatherman Tool), MAutoAlign (essential if you're stereo mic'ing anything), MAutoDynamicEQ and a bunch of other heavy hitters.

I have a similar product, the Presonus Studio 2|4 and neither it nor any other USB-powered interface I've used has shown any difficulty with either gain or headroom on the inputs, as long as one has them properly switched, that is Mic vs. Instrument level and phantom power for the condenser mics. They have gain adjustment knobs on the front that you turn down if you get clipping, and there's plenty of range. Most if not all of the interfaces in the $150 and under price range will be powered by the USB bus. That goes for Focusrite, Tascam, Presonus, Behringer, just about anybody's, They use dc-dc converters to bump the voltage up from the 5V supplied by the bus. You just can't run them for very long on a phone or tablet that isn't also hooked up to a charger (I use an iPhone "camera adapter" to accomplish this).

The Presonus AudioBox USB 96 is a steal at $79 before the 10% discount. If you need 5-pin DIN MIDI, it's the way to go. I have the similar Studio 2|4 and hooking it up to my system made me remove my Firepods and go in search of a better 8-input interface.

Nebula is one of those plug-ins that seems like it would be more useful than it actually is. All that flexibility in modulation, I thought it would end up being my go-to flanger, chorus, trem, etc. Very attractive UI, too. But somehow it just never clicked with me. Maybe it's that "something" that is missing.

I tried it and didn't think it had much to offer, especially considering that it chews up system resources as much as or more so than Chromophone 2.

Black is beautiful!

https://www.pluginboutique.com/deals/show?sale_id=11720 Yeah, yeah, we all have a pile of Soundspot plug-ins that we bought to get PB freebies and/or when we were first getting our feet wet in the sea of 3rd-party FX. IMO, some of their stuff is ho-hum, easily replaced once one dives a little deeper into quality FX, but some of their stuff is pretty good, especially considering the price. The following are some that have withstood the test of time. In order of usefulness: Voxbox: the traditional vocal double-track, it has a very handy display to help you dial in the width and amount. My go-to for this class of effect Cyclone: stereo/mid-side compressor with saturation, this one gives you the mid and side all front-facing. If you're into mid-side compression processing, this is a useful, straightforward tool with an attractive UI. Even though I have elysia alpha mastering compressor, I still sometimes use Cyclone for its more straightforward UI. The saturation doesn't sound half bad, but I usually don't push it that hard. Glitch: it's a glitch tool. It makes glitches. It's five bucks. Hiku: a bus sweetener, does compression, saturation, etc. with minimal controls. I usually don't go in for this sort of thing, preferring to set up the individual elements, but Hiku really sounds good for punching up rhythmic elements. Gets you there fast, sounds good. FAT/FAT2: FAT is their free filter, a go-to for me when I just want a dead simple high or low pass that I can easily automate. FAT2 adds things like internal modulation and multiple filter types. This is not to say that their others are useless, Ravage and Overtone are pretty good at what they do, but the above 5 are the ones I kept when I did the big purge.

Just so the people in this forum don't miss it, HUGE feature addition is "Replace FX." I'd imagine that anyone reading this is very much into auditioning different FX on a given track. This eliminates several flow-impeding clicks.

What of Bronski Beat?

Okay, you show a picture of the thread explaining exactly why I (and presumably others) marked your posts as junk: you posted them in the wrong subforum. And yet you still don't get it?

I'm writing up a simplified tutorial that may help. It explains some things and skips a bunch of things that I don't think are important to the average new user. One of my suggestions is to start small. Pick one plug-in to get working reliably, and only map the controls you really want to use. For me, that's usually only about half a dozen, if that. My controller doesn't display the parameters it's set to and I can only remember and operate so many of them. Only have 10 fingers. The two things that I keep getting hung up on are "is the plug-in actually in focus?" and "do I have the controls set to Jump or Match?" Jump or Match can mess me up because if it's Jump, at first it will look like the knob isn't doing anything. I suspect that unfortunately at this point, the code for this is in the "if ya can't fix it, it ain't broke" category until a complete overhaul is undertaken. But now that I understand the whole thing better, I can add my voice to those who are advocating for better control surface support. When I watch videos of either studios or stage performers, there is always some kind of controller in their rig, whether it's a pad controller or a knobs 'n' sliders controller. For me to consider using any DAW for live performance of electronic music, it would have to play nice with my controller. I gotta be able to work that lowpass filter cutoff!

The linked video finally made it click. I'll hazard a guess that this corner of the code base hasn't been paid a visit in a long time....

And a salesperson notices your confusion and comes over to help you choose. ? My complaint isn't that there is a choice, it's that the documentation has you make that choice before it explains what the difference is between them. Of course Cakewalk can't tell me the difference, but that's what the documentation is supposed to do. My music shop salesperson tells me the difference before I choose a guitar to buy. And now I'm facing the fact that I might have chosen the wrong plug-in for my application, wasting hours of time as a result. I finally figured that out. I thought that the "label" was the name of the parameter. I really do appreciate your effort to help me sort it all out, but to be honest, this is all too much for me to absorb, at least at this point. I want to assign a handful of knobs and sliders to certain parameters of some of my plug-ins. Right now, it looks like my biggest issue is that the parameters I want to control are assigned to different banks, and when I'm in the middle of tuning my filter cutoff and resonance, there would be the stumbling block of having to switch banks (assuming I could figure out how to do that). Is there no way to move parameters to different cells (or bank), or am I stuck with Cakewalk's assignments? I'm referring to the ACT MIDI Controller here. Can I move a parameter from Bank 2 to Bank 1? I'll spend some time with the Generic Surface and see if I can get better results.

I'm trying to follow the documentation and immediately ran into one of my biggest stumbling blocks while reading the Reference Guide: At the start, when giving step by step instructions, it says "if you want to use Active Controller Technology, or if your controller/surface is not listed, select either the Cakewalk Generic Surface or the ACT MIDI Controller." I should flip a coin here? When I'm reading instructions and the instructions give me a choice that I am not informed about in any way, my train of learning gets derailed. Which is it? If it makes no difference, why have two options? If it DOES make a difference, tell me why before I make the decision. ?‍♂️ I started out with the ACT MIDI Controller because it comes earlier in the alphabet. This following paragraph is as useless as boobies on a boar hog: "To edit default mappings On the Options tab, in the Rotaries, Sliders, or Buttons fields, choose the Bank of parameter mappings that you want to edit, then select a new parameter for that Bank. For example, if in the Rotaries field, you select Bank 4, and the parameter field next to the Bank field now reads Send 2 Pan, you could select Send 2 Vol instead. If you then click the Controllers tab, and select Bank 4 in the Bank menu that’s in the rotaries row, the rotary knobs will now control Send 2 Volume on all the tracks currently under control. If you have at least 2 sends in each track, the Rotary fields on the Controllers tab will now display the name and current level of each Send 2 in the controlled tracks." I don't want to control "tracks," I want to turn a knob on the controller and have it change a parameter in a synth plug-in. When I click on the Options tab, those banks can't be assigned to the synth's parameters, the dialog looks like this: Notice how there's no "Pan" or "Vol?" The rest of the parameters I have to choose from are all Sends, which the synth doesn't have either. This is what the "Controllers" dialog looks like: So let's say I want to assign 4 sliders as follows: Filter ADSR and Volume ADSR. Notice that the only one of those parameters that's on this screen is Filter Attack. The rest of those show up in the first row if I select Bank 2. So far, it doesn't look like I can control Filter Attack at the same time I'm controlling Filter Decay Sustain and Release and Volume Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Release. The documentation seems to say that I can change the bank to control, say Volume, which I guess would be useful in cases where I wanted to have all 8 knobs controlling the plug-in's volume, but contrarian that I am, I don't want to do that. Ever. Fortunately, I suppose, when I try to set Bank 1 of the first row to control Vol., it doesn't take. This is a plus. The documentation has it completely wrong here: "You can edit the cell label by clicking the label and entering a new name in the Edit Label dialog box." Um, no I can't, when I click anywhere in the cell it puts the entire dialog into "MIDI Learn" where it stays until I move a knob or click back in the cell. When I switched (based on nothing other than that using the ACT MIDI Controller only gets me halfway there) to the Cakewalk Generic Surface, the things that the documentation say are supposed to happen, again, don't happen. " The garbled characters indicating what the control surface is controlling are an interesting touch. Accurate, in a certain sense. "5. Enable the ACT Learn Mode button in the Control Bar’s ACT module. 6. In the property page of the plug-in that you want to control, click the parameters that you want to control. 7. Move the sliders/knobs on your controller/surface that you want to use to control the parameters with, in the same order that you clicked the parameters (you can reverse steps 6 and 7)." Again, this does not work. When I tried it, the first slider wound up controlling every parameter. The way it's worded, it looks like it wants you to first click, click, click, click on the various knobs you wish to control, then wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle each physical knob. Is that correct? Or is it click/wiggle, click/wiggle, click/wiggle, click/wiggle? I tried both and got the same result, the first slider controlling all of them. This is an educational process. The thing I'm learning is why "improve support for control surfaces" is such a popular feature request. My nanoKONTROL2 has been essentially useless since I started using Cakewalk almost 5 years ago. I take a swing at this about once a year, that's all my patience can handle. The way I would like it to work is that there would be a dialog where you would click to add as many cells as you wish to assign. Then you would click in that cell and have a way to choose the parameter you want from a list populated with the same information that the plug-in exposes to Cakewalk's automation. Then you would choose which knob you want to control that parameter, either by using MIDI learn or by typing in the MIDI CC number. It could still have an "Options" tab, for the stuff like Banks and Shift Modifier/Shift Learn.

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."