bitflipper

You've just revived some painful memories of moving my piano into my current home. Did I hire actual piano movers? No, I saved money by hiring a couple guys with a truck. Now my once-beautiful piano has an ugly gash along one side. I rearranged the entire living room so the blemish would face a wall.

Yeh, that's the ticket. I'm always delighted when a simple tweak makes a radical difference. The guitar tones are richer, lyrics more intelligible, drums punchier. Great job.

What makes it confusing for newbies is that DAWs are made to look like their hardware precedents. Animated pixels that look like faders and buttons, but don't actually do anything themselves. They're just a place to aim at with your mouse. While that does help make controls' functions more obvious, at least if you've used hardware in the past, no piece of software will ever actually do everything a hardware console does. One of those things is inserting a trim pot at the front end, ahead of all active electronics, that can reduce the signal that the mixer sees. There simply is no such thing in your computer, despite what the pictures show. Cakewalk actually gets the signal way down the line and must work with what it's given. It has no direct connection to the outside world. Bottom line is that you have to set input levels outside the computer, in the real world.

In the 80's I had a gig in a fancy athletic club, the kind of place where people wear their sweaters on their backs with the arms tied in front around their necks. To look athletic, I guess. Mostly it was a place where movers and shakers cut deals while dining on their company's credit card. My job was to noodle quietly in the background while people ate. Hey, it paid really well and how many gigs go from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM? It might have been a dream gig, except that the piano sounded absolutely dreadful. Trying to play it quietly just made plinky dead-sounding notes. One night, I opened the lid and to my shock the entire piano had been stuffed with cardboard. Not in any manner remotely respectful of the instrument's tone, not using some kind of "acoustical cardboard" - just flattened boxes laid atop the strings.

This article describes methods for measuring touchweight. They suggest using stacks of nickels taped together, as nickels are 5 grams and unlike other coins that weight hasn't changed over the years. That piece says most pianos are around 50 grams, which is surprising, even counter-intuitive. It means the average acoustic piano takes far less effort than the average electronic piano. Steinways vary from 47 at the top of the keyboard to 50 grams at the bottom. Acoustic pianos vary a LOT. I remember the first time I played a Steinway and was blown away by how lightly I could hit the keys and still make a sound. It was a solo gig at a fancy-schmantsy wedding. I was there just for ambiance, and I'd never before been able to play so quietly with such ease. Only then did I understand why Steinways fetch the prices they do. There is nothing else like them.

Keep looking. You'll find it eventually.

https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/keyboard-action-and-key-weight-experiment/?utm_content=article1-button&utm_source=insync&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20200822-t1 This was a test of how "heavy" or "light" the action is on different digital pianos and synths. I've always liked the feel of Yamaha keybeds and was surprised at how much pressure it takes to play them. I would have assumed that I'd prefer a lighter touch. The heaviest of all was the Hammond SK-1, not a piano but nice to have as a reference, and not an instrument I associate with requiring a lot of muscle to play. My own primary keyboard (Korg Kronos) was in the middle of the pack, interesting because I've always considered it a pretty stiff action. However, that particular instrument skews the results because it's a progressively-weighted keybed, meaning it takes more force to hit the low notes than the high notes (like an acoustic piano),. Now I know why I don't solo in the bottom octave.

The effects of a bad economy are not applied evenly. Premium ice cream, for example, always does well during recessions. I might not be able to afford new tires for my car, but dammit I can still enjoy some ice cream and I'm gonna splurge on the good stuff. Music software similarly falls under the category of inexpensive luxuries. I can't afford a new synthesizer, but a sample library remains in reach. It just won't be the full VSL suite. Sure, we could conceivably get to a point where collecting Kontakt libraries is no longer feasible due to NI's greed and/or mismanagement. But if that happens, another platform will appear to fill the void. Remember, Kontakt wasn't the first sampler, just the most popular. It could fade away. Remember when WordStar, Lotus 123, DBase and CP/M ruled their respective markets?

It's a child window of the main page, so its URL is not the one in the title bar, and is unavailable from a context menu.

Click on the "share" icon at the bottom, in the player window.

Just testing...had to re-figure out how to post a link to a Soundclick-hosted song, too. https://soundclick.com/r/s8e73k This WiP began as a demo for tritik's new IRID regenerative reverb plugin, which I'll be reviewing in next month's SoundBytes. I used it on the piano intro (that's not a pad you hear, it's reverb on the piano!) and on the violin (the amazing solo violin from AudioModeling that I reviewed in May).

Thanks! I knew there had to be a way. This is why musicians should not design software. Or skyscrapers, for that matter.

Love the tune, Keith. But yeh, gotta agree it's too loud. My ears are surely not golden these days, having been tarnished by too many decades on the stage, but even I can hear the distortion. Tom, I understand; you're a guitarist and tube devotee, so distortion is your native ecosphere. Tom does understand the math, though, and he's right about limiting for MP3 encoding. Mathematically speaking, you can only guarantee no overs in an MP3 by setting the hard limit to -3 dB. That's a little extreme, though, and -1 dB should soften the blow a lot.

Just visited my Soundclick page this morning to upload a new tune. I hadn't been there in ages and since my last visit they've totally redesigned the site. Now I can't figure out how to replace a file with a newer version. You can add and delete, but not replace. Kind of defeats the purpose of posting works-in-progress for your friends' comments. Anybody know how to replace an existing song with a new mix?

I just got a new headphone amplifier today, and have been surfing around looking for high-fidelity content to test it out with. I thought "hmm, I should find one of Jerry's tunes, that'd be a good test". And yay, here's a new one. Thank you, Jerry! No critique, just "thank you, Jerry". Love your stuff.

I have run into similar situations many times in the past, where Windows was insisting that a file was open even though I was sure I hadn't done it myself. On rare occasions, it was the O/S' mistake, but those always involved files on remote servers and required rebooting the server to resolve. However, the other 95% of the time it was a legit sharing violation involving some process/file association that I wasn't aware of. Every time, the tool I used to troubleshoot the issue was Process Explorer from sysinternals.com. Give it a shot.

When I started using EBU standards as my guide, the first thing I did was go through all my old mixes and see how close they'd come to meeting those targets. Surprisingly, most weren't terribly far off the mark. But I noticed that some of them were way too "quiet" when objectively measured. In particular, pure orchestrations tended to fall around -20 or even -22. "Now, that won't do!" I thought, and proceeded to pull them up to match the rest. To my dismay, those pseudo-classical pieces sounded just awful when raised up to match the pop/rock stuff. At the other end of the spectrum, some of the already too-loud mixes also suffered a little when turned down. Worst of all, when concatenated into an album, the subjective volume variation seemed to get worse, not more consistent as expected. The lesson learned: yes, it really does depend on the song: its genre, instrumentation, tonal profile and even its arrangement. Of course, loudness levels should at least respect if not conform to standards for movies, streaming, radio and television. But trusting a meter exclusively can have its own perils.

People use ASIO because it's efficient, allowing for reduced latency. However, latency is irrelevant to playback. These days, I use WASAPI for the reasons given by Noel. Some very large projects can take 10-15 minutes to load, so I often listen to music or watch Dave Gorman on YouTube while I'm waiting.

Isn't Bose a local company? I used to pass by a large building emblazoned with "Bose" across the front, back in the day when I'd spend a lot of time in Framingham and Natick. I'd always assumed it was Bose's engineering department.

Dismisses LUFS in this video. Blasphemer! Sure, the guy is best known for loud mixes (Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day) but he's also mixed Rodrigo y Gabriela, so there ya go. Any time he speaks, it's gonna be food for thought.

It might not help much, but if sympathy counts for anything know that many of us know exactly how you're feeling because we've been there ourselves. I love dogs, but I've not been able to bring myself to get any kind of pet since the last time I went through that agony 18 years ago. It was that traumatic. Maybe your next pet should be a tortoise. Granted, they're not nearly as much fun as a dog, or even a self-absorbed cat. But at least a tortoise will likely outlive you.

Does this happen as soon as you request a new instrument track from Cakewalk, as opposed to during playback? Does it happen in a brand-new project with nothing else in it? Have you successfully used this instrument in previous projects? Is there any difference between creating an instrument track versus separate MIDI and audio tracks? My first thought is something may have gone awry during the instrument's installation, perhaps resulting in some missing dependency. It might be worthwhile to re-install it. Make sure you re-run the scanner after reinstallation. I'd also suggest looking in the Windows Event Log, a long shot but there could be useful information there.

Well, after the successes of so many frivolous copyright lawsuits in recent years maybe you should get a lawyer.

One of the main differences between reverbs is whether or not they offer independent left and right signal paths. The ones that do are often referred to as "true stereo" reverbs. Many (most?) do not, instead combining left and right and then spreading the generated reflections across the panorama. Both types, however, are innately stereo effects and as such neither will allow you to completely pan hard left or right without some additional post-processing. This, of course, is meant to emulate how acoustical reverb works in the real world. A violin, for example, is a point source with a well-defined position in the panorama. Its reflections, however, scatter about the room and come at you from different angles. That's how artificial reverbs work, too. That said, I too like to emphasize reverb on the opposite side of the panorama from the instrument's pan location. It doesn't sound natural, but can help widen the mix in a pleasant way. If that's your goal, let the reverb plugin do its thing but insert a stereo panner after it, such as the Channel Tools plugin. Or my favorite, Boz Digital Labs' Pan Knob, which makes pan automation easier. OT: Given your predilection for unnatural reverb panning, let me suggest another cool trick you might like: use an autopanner after the reverb, such as the freebie from Cable Guys.

Windows version doesn't matter. Windows 95 would act the same way. What's happening is you're trying to overwrite a file that's already open for writing by another program, something Windows won't allow because doing so would compromise file system integrity. Easiest way to avoid this with cwp files by making sure that only one instance of Cakewalk is open at a time, and that Cakewalk is configured to only have one project open at a time.