Starship Krupa

Selecting none is a handy thing to be able to do quickly in Cakewalk. Performing certain operations with too many things selected can easily produce unwanted results. Mapping the tilde/invert quote key to Edit/Select None is the choice for many. No modifier needed.

Yeah, the documentation and actual behavior of wheel zooming don't always line up. I've brought it up in the past. I was going to mention the Zoom Factor settings, as at one point I got into the same pickle you did. Glad you found them. Also, in teh PRV don't expect everything mousewheel zoom to work as described. It doesn't. It's not that far off, but some things, like vertical zoom, just don't work as described in the documentation.

Yes, I know. AFAIK, though, the plug-ins that are branded as such at PA are developed by the brainworx team. Do I have that wrong?

UfA is kind of the odd brand out in the PA universe. They really don't deserve to be included in PA's lowball sales, despite the fact that I've benefited hugely from them. They should be getting more revenue for those amazing FX. And I think for the purposes of this discussion, people are referring to the brands that are developed by brainworx, like elysia, SPL and so on. Unfiltered Audio is a separate company based in Santa Barbara, CA that just happens to be distributed by PA. I'm a fan of Glitchmachines and Freakshow Industries as well. They can really add some crazy ear candy to a track. Not useful for anything but electronica at this point, but if some big time pop producer dropped some Glitchmachines into a hit track, it might become part of the vocabulary, like the autotune glitch thing. Not that I would necessarily welcome such a thing.

Ugh, yeah, I don't care for that sort of thing, like the differences between Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor and the Class A version, or bx_masterdesk and the "classic" version. Or BYOME and TRIAD. New features are great. But make them available via a switch and call it 2.0 rather than keeping the old version around as a separate product. Exponential Audio was guilty of this with Phoenix/Nimbus/Stratus, which were all the same basic engine with bells and whistles added. Also R2/R4/Symphony. In all of those cases, I might even see keeping the old version around as a freebie (which they have done in the case of masterdesk and at times SHMC) or cheapo, with an upgrade path, but that ain't how they roll. Whatever, between MEGA sales and vouchers, I have everything I want from them for peanuts.

Depending on what you consider "groundbreaking" and "a while," Unfiltered Audio have released SILO, LO-Fi-AF, Tails and Needlepoint all in the last year. Maybe these are not the first granular, lo-fi, ducking reverb and vinylizing FX on the market, but they are unusual enough in their categories to warrant getting them even if one already has FX in that class. For the most part, when I think of Plugin Alliance, "groundbreaking" is not the first thing that comes to mind except for Unfiltered Audio. brainworx, elysia, SPL, Lindell, Shadow Hills and their other brands seem more aimed at "faithful software recreations of sought after hardware" than they are breaking ground. Not exclusively, but that just seems to be more their thing.

Must it be either/or? How about striking a well-considered balance?

He sold to Soundwide, not BandLab.

Yeah, it's just this side of too small on my 1920x1080 monitors. Like much of the PA line, kinda overdue for some UI scaling. I just snagged the SPL Vitalizer and it's on the other side of too small. Tiny tiny.

You certainly have plenty of excellent ones to choose from. When it comes to PA's stuff, elysia mpressor is a very nice track compressor. I tend to ignore the more advanced features like the attenuation limit and built-in EQ and just set it up using the ratio, attack, release, and makeup gain controls. Whatever its detector is doing, snare tracks seem to like it better than anything else.

Sure, a lot of developers do. Once you mentioned it, I started to think about it, Waves, iZotope, Kilohearts, IK Multimedia, Eventide, Softube, brainworx, UAD, Soundtoys, Airwindows, HorNET, Analog Obsession, FabFilter.... They all seem to aspire to be one stop shops, with multiple FX in each category. I'm curious about what companies you think take a different approach. Wavesfactory, maybe? I tend to take it on a plug-in-by-plug-in basis. I tend to go by my own attraction to the sound, reputation from others, ease of use and easy to stare at UI. Also I like tightly-coded stuff that pays attention to resource conservation (despite having iZotope's MPS ?). Every manufacturer seems capable of clunkers, failed experiments and resource hogs. As I said earlier, the more they step into the "analyze the material and apply magic processing" zone, the more wary I get, from a manufacturer of any size. I think MAutoAlign and MAutoStereoFix are in that category, but MTurboReverb, MTurboDelay, MEQualizer, MFreeformEQ are not. I was skeptical of MDrumleveler, but it turns out I get good results from it.

Nice, nice. Lots of products that I own but haven't delved deeply into.

Oops. For some reason I thought you were referring to Track View.

That would make you wary of a lot of developers. Who are the ones who specialize in a few FX rather than a full line?

I hope you're not still using SONAR. It's slower thank Cakewalk by BandLab, has more bugs and fewer features and hasn't been supported for over 5 years. Is Rhythmizer by Futurephonic the plug-in you're having trouble with? It looks like it takes input from the user and manipulates it and then sends it along to a soft synth. Getting things like that to work depends on a few things, like whether it's a MIDI effect or a virtual instrument. It's likely a virtual instrument because MIDI FX are rare. If it's a virtual instrument, you'll probably want to set it up in its own instrument track and enable MIDI Out in the VST3 menu of the plug-in UI window: Then on the instrument track(s) you want it to send notes to, set their input(s) to Rhythmizer.

That smells of convolution.

You make a good point that Melda also publish a free convo loader (which includes a cabinet impulse), but MTurboAmp's marketing seems to emphasize the need to pair it with MCabinet.

Back when I offered to do a remix of one of your songs, I knew that one of the things I'd be using was Trackspacer. I don't remember if I mentioned it in the topic in the Songs forum, but I thought the mix' primary issue was frequency buildups and collisions. You now have the best tool for taming that stuff. Due to the informative display, setting it up and watching it do its thing has actually increased my understanding of how sidechaining and collision-elimination work.

I think Vojtech is blowing it big time by not naming it "MGuitarchitect."

Also, when you need to briefly switch tools, you can press the F5-10 key for whichever tool you want to use, but don't release it until you're done using it and it will pop back to the Smart Tool (or whatever tool you were using before you depressed it). Drawing automation already ignores snap settings. Try it. While the Aim Assist line will snap to the nearest snap point, you can place a node wherever you have the cursor. It's easier to see when you have snap set to a higher value, like a whole note. To me, this is a bug, but it seems like for you, maybe a blessing.

The devs have stated that they are trying to migrate as many functions of the Plug-In Manager to the Browser, especially the organization functions. Unfortunately it must be deep in the to-do list, because there's been no work on the Browser in at least the past 5 years, probably longer. I would like as much flexibility as possible with plug-in layouts (especially drag and drop moving/copying from one category to another, renaming categories, and Exclude), but any improvements would happen in the Browser.

Could you share how you're getting Cakewalk to do it? AFAIK, it requires the first instrument to support MIDI out, which not all soft synths do.

? How have I not noticed that in 5 years of MIDI editing in Cakewalk?? I think that maybe since the Smart Tool goes through so many cursor changes in so many different contexts, my mind filtered them out after a while. Like "oh, the cursor just flipped again, I wonder what that's about, let's get back to the editing." That is a cognitive rut I must get out of.

That's good to know. One of my issues with convolution reverbs has always been my perception of an unfavorable cost:benefit ratio in regard to resource use vs. sonic results. I have Exponential Nimbus and MTurboReverble, which take care of my reverb needs very well. I'll do some comparing. Algo vs. convo. I loaded up a clean electric guitar sound using Strum Session going into MTurboAmp>MConvolutionMB and got some rockin' sounds. MTurboAmp really needs to be paired with a good cab sim. Not including one, and therefore requiring something like MCabinet or MConvolutionMB to complete the sound is a ***** move. Every other amp sim I've seen includes a collection of cab sims and usually some kind of spring reverb emulation.

As Brian said, getting in touch with Meldaproduction seems to be in order. If they sold you products that aren't working, why not give them a chance to make good on the deal? If you have MAutoAlign and MAutoStereoFix, that suggests that you have a bundle or two. Swearing off the entire line, which includes many more straightforward plug-ins that don't include the same analysis and processing because you got poor results from those two of them seems like throwing a lot of babies out with the bathwater. You're not getting acceptable results from their phase alignment tools. What does that have to do with the same company's compressors, EQ's, reverbs, delays and filters? Due to bundle purchases, I have 90 or so of their FX, but I only use a fraction of them because either I've found no use for what the other ones do or have similar FX from other manufacturers that I prefer. Both of those FX do advanced, unusual analysis and processing independent of user control. Meldaproduction's Achilles' heel is sparse documentation, specifically in the area of suggesting appropriate source material and applications. They rely too much on trial and error on the part of the user. I've said it before, even directly in forum conversations with the owner, Meldaproduction's plug-ins have always felt to me like I found an alien artifact with 1000 buttons and knobs, and I've figured out that about 5 of them can do really useful things. The rest of them can probably do other maybe even more amazing things, but I don't have a clue what those might be. There's a lot of confusion around just what kind of source material MAutoAlign is supposed to be used on. It does really well with single instruments that are multiple mic'd, and material that's been mic'd with stereo pairs. For instance, when I mic an acoustic guitar with 2 mics, one pointed near the bridge and the other further up, MAutoAlign works great. I get a huge sound. When I apply it to my drum overheads, which are set up asymmetrically in a modified Recorderman/Glyn Johns configuration, I have to be more careful where I take the analysis from. I tried adding the kick drum and snare mics to the group and things got a lot less usable. I only got MAutoStereoFix a few days ago, but it looks like it uses similar algorithms for analyzing phase. I'll keep an ear open for the kind of artifacts you mention, but if I don't like the results I get with it, I'm not going to bench my remaining 89 Meldaproduction FX. I'm suspicious of FX that run on any kind of autopilot, like iZotope's "assistants." It always feels like I've turned part of the mix over to someone else and therefore have to listen closely to the results to make sure they didn't screw something up. So I use MAutoAlign sparingly.