bitflipper

I once literally chased the FedEx truck down my driveway. He had just driven up, turned around and left while I watched in disbelief from 20 feet away. Never got out of his truck, much less ring the bell or knock. I assume he was on an urgent mission, perhaps delivering transplant organs. And I'm sure he just didn't see me in his mirror as he accelerated away. On another occasion, my gate was closed so they threw a $1200 microphone over it into the bushes where it sat all day and night in the rain until we accidentally discovered it. A testament to the ruggedness of Shure products, it was not damaged. For these reasons I've made a point of being especially vigilant while awaiting deliveries. But...but...the convenience! Remember when we had to drive to a music store, make the purchase and then drive it all the way home?

Everybody knows that feeling of anticipation waiting for the UPS/FedEx/DHL/Amazon truck to come down the street, like a kid waiting for Santa to come down the chimney. FedEx seems to be enjoying it more than I am. The timeline so far... 4 June - ordered my new mixer from Sweetwater, knowing it's back-ordered. The product page says "we expect more in a few months". 28 June - get a call from my guy at Sweetwater, says a few came in unexpectedly and I was on the list to get one. Yay. 1 July - text message from FedEx saying it'll be delivered on the 2nd, signature required. Yay. 2 July - I stay home all day, in the garage with the door open so I don't miss the truck. But there is no delivery, even though the tracking status says "on truck for delivery". At 7:00 pm I check the status again, it says the package wasn't delivered because nobody was home. wtf? Liar! 3 July - tracker says it'll be delivered today. Again, I don't leave the house all day. But no delivery. At 7:00 pm I check the status again. It just says "no delivery attempt made" and the package is back at the distribution center. At this point my mixer has passed my house at least 4 times without stopping. FedEx, you're just taunting me now. 4 July - ha, ha, it's a holiday so no mixer for you. Maybe, maybe on the 5th - if you don't leave the house and camp in the driveway all day. I'm beginning to think their tracker app exists only to remind us of the power they hold, that we'll only get stuff when FedEx deems us worthy. Maybe if I left out cookies.

I'm enjoying the Purple Audio MC77 on vocals, but it's only marginally more capable than the Prochannel 1176. I've also used the Noveltech Vocal Enhancer occasionally, when I want something a bit more aggressive than Saturn. It's a dangerous effect, though. Oven mitts are recommended.

Seriously, Ed? How many vintage/classic/modern/magical EQs can one person handle before their head explodes from excessive mojo infusion?

Yeh, wi-fi can kill audio performance. Network interrupts take priority over audio interrupts, and that sneaky little bugger is constantly chatting with the world, probing for any of his networky cohorts to start a chat. Best to kill that chatty CPU thief when you have better things to do than search for printers. Every version of Windows enables services on initial installation, including some processes that you don't need when your laptop has just one purpose. When you reinstalled Windows, it likely turned on a bunch of things that are either new services or services you'd previously disabled under Win10. LatencyMon is a good start, but it'll only tell you about a specific type of problem (DPC overhead) and may not tip you off to other background processes that are hogging the CPU, memory or I/O bus. You'll still have to painstakingly run down the list of running processes, identify which ones are eating resources and figure out if they're necessary (e.g. antivirus realtime protection). Check out the link that Larioso posted above. It's specifically about using laptops on stage.

And that's not guaranteed. Not because of Win10/11, as they'll be able to read a floppy no problem. However, diskettes can become corrupted over time, and unless the original drive and the drive you're reading from were/are aligned correctly (or equally mis-aligned) the diskettes may not be readable on the new drive. Unless you have other drives available, you'll be outa luck.

First principle of software troubleshooting: figure out what changed. Assuming it's the same laptop with the same applications installed on it, can we assume that the Win11 install is the only thing that's changed? If so, then my first guess would be that the Windows update re-enabled some background processes that weren't running under Win10. For example, were you disabling Wi-Fi previously when using this laptop on stage (recommended)? Maybe Win11 turned it back on. Running LatencyMon could provide a clue.

It's been ages since I've done this, but I used to have desktop shortcuts for switching audio devices with a single click. Embarrassing admission: when I was first getting started with digital audio, c. 2004, I incorrectly believed that video games would not be able to use my outboard audio interface and that I'd need to switch back to the motherboard's integrated audio for non-musical applications (a presumption carried over from DOS days). Of course, that's not true and I've long since disabled the onboard audio. But for a few months I'd switch interfaces for different applications. That was under Windows XP, but I think this method will still work under Win10/11. Back then, I used a free tool called NirCmd. It's a command-line utility that lets you do all kinds of cool stuff, among them setting the default audio device. Put it in a batch file and create a desktop shortcut. For example, on my system this command would select my Focusrite interface as the default device: nircmd setdefaultsounddevice "Speakers (Saffire Audio)" 1 while this command sets my audio to the HDMI audio built in to my display monitor: nircmd setdefaultsounddevice "LG Ultrawide (2- NVIDIA High Definiton Audio)" 1 Note that the device name has to spelled out like that and match the Windows description. If you don't type it in exactly, it won't hurt anything but it just won't work.

Short tutorial: don't do it! Best way to humanize a MIDI performance is to actually perform it by hand. Even if you don't have keyboard skills you can still subsequently fix the timing on obvious mistakes where necessary. But avoid any tool labeled "Humanize", as it is a scam. Yes, it's true that live players' timing isn't perfect, but neither is it random.

It's free but you still have to have an iLok account and install the Pace driver. Wouldn't want an miscreants stealing it and depriving honest data aggregators of expanding their mailing lists.

This is a crucial first step when troubleshooting audio. Cakewalk does not discover drivers itself, but gets that information from Windows. If Windows can't see it, Cakewalk can't see it. This may not be relevant in your case, but Windows does have an annoying habit of switching to sources you didn't specify. Last week I plugged in a vocal effect processor that had a USB interface for installing firmware updates and editing settings via a computer-based editor. All audio was then disabled in my system when Windows decided that device was my new audio device.

Can you post the relevant sections of the scan log? The scanner does not delete registry keys outside of the HKCU\SOFTWARE\Cakewalk Music Software tree, and wouldn't affect Windows or other applications.

Bapu beat me to it. At least the inventor of ASMR was intelligible without amplification...

Yes, you initially focus on peaks for individual tracks, making sure they all have at least 6dB of headroom (preferably 12dB or more). Cakewalk will do that for you without any additional metering.

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.