bitflipper

I use iZotope's Insight, but that's overkill and $$. The Youlean loudness meter is probably your best choice, primarily because it's free. For $39 you can get the "Pro" version, which adds a few nifty features, but the free version is all you really need. Another freebie that everyone should have is Voxengo SPAN. Although a spectrum analyzer, it does have decent metering and can be set for K-system metering. The K-system was a precursor to LUFS, and I used it for many years until EBU R-128 came along. The K-14 standard is nearly equivalent to the LUFS-14 standard.

Back then, software did exist for transferring files over parallel ports via FTP. I remember using it, but that's all. Given that you can still find Pong and Pac Man online, there's a chance some antique software enthusiasts have preserved it. Of course, that assumes you have a computer with a parallel port on it. Cool that you still have your old modules. I have none of mine. Fortunately I used descriptive track names, else I'd have had a hard time of it.

Good news! Jon Lord didn't use a Leslie. Life just got simpler!

Oops, sorry. He's still got the Reset button, though, which might fix the problem.

Open Preferences and go to File -> VST Settings. 1. Under the Scan Options section, click Reset 2. Check the Generate Scan Log option 3. Re-scan If the instruments still aren't there, open the scan log with Notepad and search on their file names (e.g. keyscape.dll) and see if they are even mentioned. If not, then the appropriate folders are not included in your scan path. If they are mentioned, see if their initializations failed or succeeded.

I refuse to resort to medication...oh, you mean the diskette drive. Yeh, I had to dig through some boxes to find one.

OK, here we go again...

I'm not sure what this is. It's weird, funny and cheesy. Frank would have loved it.

I found a floppy from around 1988 that contained projects from Cakewalk 1.0. Loaded right up into the current version of Sonar.

Yes. For awhile I was using an inexpensive Axiom 49 controller for just this purpose. It has 9 assignable sliders, but as you say it never had the tactile feel of Hammond drawbars. Today I have a Nord Stage 3, not the piano version but the one with synth-style keys, very Hammond-ish in feel. And not the one with the digital drawbars - my particular model has real indented drawbars that I use to control my Korg Kronos (which has a superior Leslie emulation over the NS3). So in the band I often play organ parts on the Nord but produce the actual sounds in the Korg. Making that NS3 the most expensive MIDI controller in the world, I think. btw, when I record Hammond parts they're all played on the NS3, but only its MIDI output is recorded. Afterward, I insert B3-X into the project and route that MIDI track to it. That way, I never have to worry about latency while recording, never have to adjust audio buffers, and get that "real" feel during the performance. But then subsequently enjoy all the benefits of a virtual instrument.

It may not be related to Cakewalk at all. If you google the entire error message, you get lots of results that all pertain to MS Office (Excel, Word, Access, etc.) Office does have some background processes that run periodically (and aren't needed) and one of them could be raising the error at unexpected moments, resulting in confusion as to which application is causing it.

Unfortunately, the B3-X's Leslie is integrated into the instrument and not available as a separate plugin. However, it's the same Leslie that comes with Amplitube, so if you have that product it's do-able. There is a distortion effect included in the B3-X, but it's a Tube Screamer and a bit over the top. Also, you can't route it in series with the Leslie, only in parallel. My favorite Leslie for dirt is Meldaproductions' VintageRotary. I wouldn't consider it an all-around Leslie sim, but it's pretty good for gritty tones. GG-Audio sells their Leslie emu, called Spin, separately for fifty bucks. It's pretty OK but also doesn't quite nail the overdrive effect. I've had good results placing FabFilter Saturn in front of it. For pretty tones, I like to stick Valhalla Ubermod in line with a Leslie. Also, I've never been a big fan of the Hammond spring reverb, so prefer to run the Leslie into Valhalla Plate (or vice versa - reverb in front of the rotor is a quite different effect). So much fun to be had with an instrument invented in the 1930's by a clock maker looking for a cheap alternative to pipe organs for churches. And who hated the Leslie speaker and forbade Hammond dealers from carrying it. For hardcore Hammond enthusiasts I recommend a book titled The Hammond Organ, Beauty in the B by Mark Vail, published by Keyboard Magazine.

You don't even need to own a Suzuki Hammond. There are numerous dedicated drawbar controllers (and foot pedals, too). This one's $200, from Crumar, the people who make my hardware faux Hammond (Crumar Mojo). And yes, you can also control your Hammond/Roland/Crumar/Nord registrations from the same MIDI track that drives your IKM B3-X. I like this one. It's got all the controls. They actually sell a model called "FC-3 VST Organ Controller, B3-X Edition". It's double the price of the one shown above, though.

I have all five of these instruments. The Hammond is the only one I'd pay $69 for. And it comes with a Marshall emu so you can bring out your latent Jon Lord. btw, I've made no secret of my dislike for IKM the company. But you have to give credit when they do something this good.

Totally worth 9 bucks. Sure, there's likely to be a lot of overlap with similar libraries you already have, and it's not as broad nor as deep as many other percussion libraries. But it's 9 bucks.

It's the best Hammond/Leslie emulation available, imo. I wrote a review of it a couple years ago. Scroll down for a little demo I made using it.

If only! I saw this joke taped to a cubicle in a Microsoft office: Q: How many MS engineers does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. They just change the standard to "dark". To be fair, Windows isn't too bad when it comes to consistency within the registry - if you ignore legacy keys that can't be moved for backward compatibility. But they don't enforce standardization on third parties, who can throw stuff all over the place if they want.

Thanks for the memory jog. Now you've got me reminiscing about all the neat synths René brought to the table: Pentagon, Triangle, Square and the Soundfont player. Pentagon and Triangle were great for beginners trying to wrap their heads around subtractive synth programming, because they had all the essential features while still keeping it simple. I just had a look at my plugin inventory, and to my surprise, I still have some of those installed! Check it out...all those knobs! And text I'd need a magnifier to read...

I have no inside information to offer, but my educated guess is that there is a good chance Z3ta+ might make a comeback. As you know, much of the bundled content included with classic Sonar was licensed from third parties (e.g. TruePianos). Most of those are gone for good. In some cases, the companies behind them don't even exist anymore (e.g. Kjaerhus). However, some third-party products were purchased outright by Cakewalk (e.g. Sonitus Suite) and would therefore have been part of the intellectual property that BandLab purchased. Those plugins stand the best chance of revival. Z3ta+ falls into that category. Z3ta+ was developed by one René G. Ceballos under the name RGC:Audio. René also created the immensely popular Dimension Pro and Rapture. About the time Dim Pro appeared in Sonar, Cakewalk bought RGC:Audio and hired René. A couple years later, Rapture and then Z3ta+ came along. Now, this is all from memory so I could be fuzzy on the sequence of events, but it would appear that Z3ta+ is owned by BandLab now, hence my optimisim.

I didn't link that one because I did embarrassingly poorly on it.

If volume is the only automation on the track, you can temporarily disable it by clicking the "R" button (Read Enable) in the track header..

My sample libraries just won't fit on a single 1-TB drive, much less on C:, so I have two 1TB drives, a conventional drive for my less-used libs and a 1TB SSD for the ones I use most. These contain not only Kontakt libraries but also Spectrasonics instruments, Superior Drummer, Cakewalk samples and anything else that's big that I don't want taking up space on my C: drive. The problem is that installers often have their own ideas as to where that stuff should go, and it's not worth the headache to argue with them because in some cases you'll have to make the same argument again with the next update. Worse, you may click through prompts without thinking and end up with duplicate installations. Fortunately, Windows offers a fairly easy solution to this problem with a feature called "symbolic links". Directories are entries in other directories, just like files are. Symbolic links let you change where a directory entry physically points to, while still maintaining the original directory entry. Because this trick works at the file system level, programs are fooled into thinking the directories and files are still at the old location and are able to find them easily. For example, my c:\program files\cakewalk folder looks like this: Volume in drive C is OS Volume Serial Number is 566F-D73B Directory of C:\Program Files\Cakewalk 06/15/2023 05:34 AM <DIR> . 06/15/2023 05:34 AM <DIR> .. 10/15/2016 03:52 PM <DIR> CA2A Leveling Amplifier 05/06/2023 11:32 AM <DIR> Cakewalk Core 06/10/2023 04:45 PM <SYMLINKD> Dimension Pro [e:\cakewalklibs\Dimension Pro] 06/09/2023 03:06 PM <DIR> Next 07/26/2017 12:17 PM <SYMLINKD> Rapture [e:\cakewalklibs\Rapture] 09/12/2016 10:36 AM <DIR> Shared DXi 05/16/2023 12:40 PM <DIR> Shared MIDI Plugins 05/06/2023 11:33 AM <DIR> Shared Plugins 06/03/2023 02:00 PM <DIR> Shared Surfaces 06/03/2023 02:00 PM <DIR> Shared Utilities 06/03/2023 02:00 PM <DIR> Sonar 10/26/2017 05:18 PM <DIR> SONAR Platinum 07/26/2017 12:18 PM <SYMLINKD> Studio Instruments [e:\cakewalklibs\Studio Instruments] 06/30/2018 05:49 PM <DIR> VST32 06/01/2023 05:21 PM <DIR> VstPlugins 09/12/2016 10:36 AM <DIR> z3ta+ 0 File(s) 0 bytes 18 Dir(s) 137,609,318,400 bytes free Note that the Dimension Pro, Rapture and Studio Instruments folders say "<SYMLINKD>" rather than "<DIR>". That's because those folders have actually been moved to the E: drive, with symbolic links left behind in the original folder that redirect to their actual location, also shown in the directory listing. CbB/Sonar is none the wiser, and opens them normally. I did not have to reinstall or reconfigure anything. This works for any files or folders, including other large data such as video games or databases. And it's easy to do. The only wrinkle is that the command to create a symbolic link, named mklink, is a DOS command, so you have to open a command prompt to use it. First, copy your folders to wherever you want them to be moved to. Then delete the original folder(s) and create a new symbolic link with the same name. In my case, I put all my Cakewalk samples on the e: drive in a top-level folder called "cakewalklibs". So to create the link for Studio Instruments, I navigated to the real Cakewalk folder and typed in the following: mklink /D "Studio Instruments" "e:\cakewalklibs\Studio Instruments" The /D option tells it I'm creating a directory (folder) rather than a file. The quotes are necessary because the folder names contain spaces. And that's it. Cakewalk now happily opens the instruments and finds their samples, thinking they are still on C:. Kontakt finds any libraries I've referenced in previous projects (even though Kontakt itself is still on C:). Even Windows' File Explorer plays along with the deception, so if I ask to see what's in c:\program files\cakewalk\studio instruments, I get a listing that shows everything's still there: C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Studio Instruments>dir Volume in drive C is OS Volume Serial Number is 566F-D73B Directory of C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Studio Instruments 07/26/2017 12:11 PM <DIR> . 07/26/2017 12:11 PM <DIR> .. 07/26/2017 12:11 PM <DIR> Documentation 07/26/2017 12:11 PM <DIR> SI-Bass Guitar 07/26/2017 12:11 PM <DIR> SI-Drum Kit 07/26/2017 12:11 PM <DIR> SI-Electric Piano 07/26/2017 12:11 PM <DIR> SI-String Section 0 File(s) 0 bytes 7 Dir(s) 259,174,551,552 bytes free The only indication that it's not a real folder is that Windows Explorer changes its icon, adding a little arrow like you'd see on a shortcut. To all the world, the Studio Instruments folder is still there, but in reality I've just freed up 1.3GB on my C: drive.

I just went through this last week. I noticed there was an update to Replika, a plugin I'd completely forgotten I even had. But when I tried to update it, it said the installation failed because the installer couldn't delete the previous version. I verified there weren't any permissions issues and ran the installer as Admin, even went so far as to delete Replika myself to save it the trouble. I went to the FAQ which explained that a registry key needed to be deleted. Welcome to 1980, NI. This reminded me of installing UNIX applications back in the day. After all that I had to try Replika to see if it was worth the effort. It wasn't. I will say this about Native Whatever They Call it Now - I do like being able to get a list of everything NI that I've got, just as a reminder of how much $$$ I've blown on stuff that never got used. It'll be worth a chuckle if it now starts reminding me to update Trash.

To quote the immortal Will Rogers, If at first you don't succeed try again. If you fail the second time, let it go. No sense bein' a damn fool about it. Words to live by.

Oh, yeh. That became a meme around here for years afterward. For historical accuracy, I maintain a file where I collect funny forum posts, and the entry I have in there reads "I find the audio engine to be 20-40% better in Nuendo". Ron Kuper then offered to test his test files, saying he'd done null tests against Cubase/Nuendo and found no differences. The poster sent him two MP3s. When others suggested that they needed to be lossless files, he came back with this retort: "i dont see the point in you coming back with a lot of useless scientific information about the difference in extraction of two wavefiles.Surely its what we hear that matters. Any wavefile will sound much the same even if played through windows media player,". IOW, a null test means nothing if *I* perceive a difference.