bitflipper

Note that the article was written in 2018. Since then they've added a VST version and the ability to load up two plugins for analysis without needing 2 instances of Plugin Dr. Last Black Friday they were selling it for $38.

I would recommend installing TTS-1. It's not a great synth, but it's 16x multi-timbral and comes in handy for scratch tracks and click tracks. I use it often, despite having an extensive toolbox of fancier synths and samplers. btw, I, too started with Cakewalk a long time ago, c. 1986. Left around '93 (to devote all my energy to being a type A cubicle dweller) and came back 10 years later (after a decade of 80+ hour work weeks led to a heart attack). You have chosen well for your friend, Doug.

If you mean the literal definition of "periodically", meaning at consistent intervals, then no. If you're asking if anyone's ever seen an access violation, then yes, it's unfortunately not uncommon. Especially in early builds, which is why you're far less likely to see them at version 1.1 than 1.0. I understand that you're hoping to find some other plugins that frequently raise access violations and use them for testing, but unfortunately that's going to be an exercise in futility. It's always a bug in the software, in this case the specific DLL identified in the dialog, and it's something that only the plugin developer can fix. Your only option is to stop using it until the dev releases a new version.

There was an interview with Steven Spielberg and John Williams where they talked about their long collaboration, friendship and mutual regard for one another. At one point they talked about Spielberg's reaction to Williams playing the Jaws theme for him for the first time. Basically, Steven said "you're kidding, right?". Two notes? Two notes that became a musical meme embedded in our collective consciousness and will forever be associated with tension and primordial fear. But I don't feel that way about the same interval in Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit. The bold opening to Beethoven's grandiose 5th Symphony is the same interval that opens the theme from Sesame Street. Then again, I still remember the impact of hearing Solveig's Song and Aase's Death from the Peer Gynt Suite as a child. Both filled me with sadness, even though at age 6 I had no prior associations, had never seen a movie. That and the 1812 Overture were my faves, and I recall that the latter used to make me march around the room with patriotic pride for Mother Russia, a country I wouldn't even have been able to find on a map. So there's some evidence that emotional content is at least somewhat universal.

Agreed. But let's not dismiss SuperFreq's point, which is that you can appreciate production techniques in any genre, even those you might not personally care for. From a technical curiosity standpoint, it's beneficial to listen to stuff that you maybe wouldn't want to fall asleep to. If somebody wanted to pay me to mix a rap album, I guarantee you I'd spend a week intently listening to rap. The money would have to be pretty good, though.

I still remember the first time that somebody I knew died. We were 16. He fell while doing a dare-ya stunt at a construction site. That's when I disabused myself of the teenage delusion of immortality.

I actually enjoyed that a little. But it's way too inventive to call itself "metal". Plus they have a keyboard player, and everybody knows real metal bands don't do keys. I will, however, give them credit for defying tradition by not having a singer.

I took that test, and while doing so considered whether to post it here. By the end I'd decided it wasn't quite good enough to advertise on this forum. No offence to Old Joad! To be fair, I only copped a negative view of it about 2/3 of the way through. 13 of the 15 tests are legitimate, even if most were ridiculously easy - assuming you're not genuinely tone deaf, which would be approximately 0% of readers of this forum. However, there were two tests that I took issue with because both asked for a subjective opinion, namely whether something sounded "sad" or "happy". Now, if you're a Blues fan, do you find the blues scale "sad"? The correct answer, according to the video, is "yes". Sorry, but the blues makes me happy. Minor 9th chords make me happy. I'm sure that for some, the B Major scale is demonic and should have no place in civilized art. Subjective. What he meant to ask is whether the listener can distinguish between major and minor scales, but he was trying to avoid musical terminology in order to make it more accessible to non-musicians. Do I need to admit that my score was 14 out of 15? It would have been 13 out of 15, but after getting burned by the first sad/happy test I assumed he was trying to trick me.

"I intend to live forever, or die trying" - Groucho Marx

Back in the 70's we bought our band clothes at a store mostly frequented by pimps and ***** wannabes. Well, it's not like you can find shimmery satin shirts at Nordstrom.

Not all projects will benefit from load balancing, and I can imagine scenarios where it might actually reduce performance. Watch the CPU meters during playback. If one core appears to be doing all the work, then that project may be a candidate for load balancing. But if all cores are already dancing around comparable values, then PGL probably won't make a noticeable difference. If all cores are working hard, PGL can't avoid the need for increasing buffer sizes for a CPU-intensive project. This is most likely what you'll have to do. Should also note that not all plugins are compatible with load balancing, and dropouts (crackles) can be a symptom of using PGL with plugins that are incompatible.

Metal music stopped being interesting to me a long time ago. Because everything is so derivative of everything that came before, there can be only so much creativity and innovation and still be accepted by fans as legit. I also reject the phony personas and posturing. If you're gonna play a character on stage, as least make it original, don't look like an extra from a 60's biker movie. But it appears that all these years I've been missing the point.

I've met many people before who have a parrot. But no one with FOUR of them. Sheesh. Do they all talk at once?

I've been thinking about how to dispose of my musical stuff when I die. It would be quite the treasure trove to the right person, but my family wouldn't know what was valuable and what wasn't, or in some cases even what to call it in a Craigslist ad. The last time I gifted a family member some gear, it went straight to the pawn shop.

I've just returned from what will undoubtedly by my last visit with a longtime friend, business partner and musical collaborator. He's in hospice and seriously sedated, so there was no conversation, just an eye blink to let me know he recognized me. I've known this guy since 1975, when he was my booking agent. In 1993 we started a software company that's still going, even if my heart's not really in it anymore. That enterprise bought my house, so I'll always be grateful that he came up with the initial idea. I've spent the last three nights sitting around the dining table with his wife and daughter, telling stories. The dude was a player back in the day, but I was careful to include only tales suitable for a mixed audience. I was delighted that all of my stories were new to them. We did have some adventures. Then his wife led me to the garage and begged me to identify all the stuff he had in there. A lifetime of never throwing anything away has resulted an incredible collection of musical instruments and electronics, some valuable, some not. Thousands of dollars' worth of lighting and video editing gear. I suggested Craigslist, since they live in a small town out on the coast and it's unlikely she'd find a buyer there who could appreciate such treasure. But I did bring home five microphones with me, four of which are Beyerdynamic ribbons, two of them a rare matched pair. The fifth one I've yet to identify. It looks like an SM-58 but doesn't say that, just that it's "dual impedance" - but I don't know what that means. I'll try to post a photo in case somebody here can identify it. Plus I snagged a box full of XLR cables, which I always need more of thanks to my mic-cable-eating pup. I think she'd hoped I'd load the whole mess into my van, but I'd only be transferring all that stuff from his garage to mine. Just goes to show that you can spend a lifetime accumulating cool stuff but in the end it's just stuff.

I'm inclined to trust Fleer's endorsement for this one.

Yury, please come back and update us once you've solved this mystery.

Try this as an experiment: create a new, empty MIDI track, open the PRV and hand-plant some notes. Route that to your kit and see if the problem is still present. If it isn't, then something in the recorded MIDI track is setting a filter or volume in the instrument. If the problem is still there, then there's something weird going on in the drum brain itself, e.g. a bad connection between it and the sensors. If it's something in the MIDI data, open it in the Event View. This will show you what's in there, including things like CC events that can change volume or tone in the instrument. My money's on something weird going on with the drums themselves. The drummer in my band plays an electronic kit, and when he first got it there were a lot of problems with intermittent hits. If the sensor isn't properly telling the brain what the velocity is, or if the MIDI data stream is getting interrupted (e.g. a wonky cable or a too-long USB cable) you can get all kinds of weirdness.

You might have a plugin running in demo mode. Since the 88ms dropout affects the entire mix, start with the plugins on your master bus. Even if a plugin is bypassed it remains in the circuit and still has an effect on the signal passing through it.

First thing I'd do is delete (not bypass) every plugin and run multiple test exports to see if the problem persists. If it does, then you'll know it's something in your system causing the problem. If it doesn't, then you'll know to look for something specific to the project.

I am dismayed by how loud live music has become over the last 20 years or so. It diminishes the experience, imo. Sure, the audience will recover their hearing after an hour or so, but the degradation of the musicians' most precious asset will be cumulative and lifelong. Gotta be even worse for the FoH guys.

I've always wondered if "age-related" hearing loss isn't just nature's defense against our noisy world. We now know that it isn't really age-related at all, e.g. the hearing acuity of an 80-year-old from a remote tribe in the Amazon is as sensitive as that of a young child in urban America. In a 2008 talk by a hearing specialist at NAMM, they said that current teens have the hearing sensitivity of a 50-year-old fifty years ago. They chalked it up to in-ears at high volume for long hours. And predicted that by the time today's teenagers are in their 50's, hearing impairment will have become epidemic and a major health crisis. They also noted that one of the worst occupations for hearing loss, those who lose their hearing faster than average, was mix engineers. That hit hard for the audience, who were mostly mix and mastering engineers. They didn't have to include performing musicians. We already know we're screwed.

Funny how things with "Simple" in the name can actually be complicated, e.g. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Simple Instrument Tracks. Some history for the Class of 2023: SONAR originally did not have instrument tracks. Just MIDI tracks and audio tracks. They made perfect sense, especially if you came from hardware synths and sequencers. But as usual, there were complainers who whined that other DAWs didn't make you think about MIDI and audio, just instruments, and why can't we have that? So instrument tracks were added (SONAR 8, iirc). That was soon followed by a flood of how-to questions on the forum, such as "how do I handle multi-timbral instruments?" and "how do I stack synths?". All of us old-timers gave the same advice: don't use Simple Instrument Tracks, go back to separate MIDI and audio tracks. "But that's not simple!" some complained. Well, yeh, it is necessarily more complicated when you have to think about what's going on under the hood. Synths are separate from the MIDI data that tells them what to do. MIDI can come from multiple sources. One MIDI track can drive multiple synths. Synths can have more than one audio output. Some synths can even output MIDI. Complexity is a necessary prerequisite to versatility. Simplification requires hiding features and limiting versatility. And so it is that year after year new users are forced to learn the same lesson: don't use Simple Instrument Tracks. Years from now, Jaxeed will be here relating his experience to the next batch of initiates. P.S. I do not hate instrument tracks. They can make for a tidier Track View. They can ease the transition from some other DAWs. They do the job just fine for single-voice instruments in mostly-audio projects. But I think if you took a poll you'd find that almost none of the more-experienced users here use them. OK, I've finished my second cup of coffee so time to move on to more serious stuff, e.g. pictures of cats playing guitar down in the Coffee House.

Just thinking out loud...I'm wondering if there might be a bunch of garbage MIDI events at the front of the imported file, such that Cakewalk doesn't have time to process them all or is otherwise unable to handle them, e.g. a SysEx request. Events that aren't copied when you copy the track. If you look into the MIDI data with the Event List view, is there extra stuff at the top of the imported file that isn't in the copied track?

This is why so many heavy Kontakt users set aside a terabyte or more disk storage dedicated to just that VI. Just don't delete past versions and don't move the sample libraries around and you'll probably never have an issue. Another good practice is to save your own presets with names like "Song_Name_Strings.nki". This will come in handy when you want to re-use a custom/tweaked Kontakt instrument from a previous project. It will also save you if you run out of disk space and have to move your libraries to a new drive. It could have even potentially saved the OP, as long as the libraries were not from the factory content. But even taking those measures is no absolute guarantee you won't have issues in the future. That's why it's a good idea to freeze your Kontakt instruments as a worst-case precaution.