bitflipper

First time at a HS football game since I was in high school, a long, long time ago. Surprisingly, not all that much has changed. The girls still parade in front of the boys, while the boys play it cool and pretend they don't notice them. My own perspective has changed, though. I kept thinking: those cheerleaders shouldn't be out in this cold with no pants on. But the reason I went was to see my great-granddaughter play trumpet in the marching band. She did me proud. My last hope for a musician in the family. I left after the half-time show. The score was 27-3 in favor of the home team, so I don't think I missed much.

I wouldn't waste my time chasing streaming standards. If Apple wants to turn you up by 13.8dB, then so be it. That won't make your recording sound better or worse. OTOH, if you turn it up yourself by 13.8dB, Apple will leave the volume alone but all the others will just turn you down. I realize this is contrary to much of the advice you'll read regarding streaming standards, but most of that is aimed at modern pop and rock productions that want to be as loud as possible and therefore tend to be brutally compressed to gain volume at the expense of dynamics. When those guys subsequently get turned down by streaming services, they sound very dull because they sacrificed dynamics for nothing.

Sheesh, looks like a war zone.

My experience with this tool... At first I couldn't get it to work. It told me my sample rate was unsupported. It was a 48KHz wave file. So I then uploaded an MP3 of the same project, and curiously got the same message. Then I re-read the message and saw that it actually said "Oops, your system's audio sample rate is not supported. Please set your system's audio sample rate to 44.1 or 48 kHz and refresh the page." It wasn't complaining about the file's sample rate, but my system sample rate. Somehow my system audio had been set to 96KHz/16-bit. I changed it to 48KHz/24-bit and then the analyzer was happy. First time any software has cared about my system sample rate. Indeed, it's the first time I have cared what it was. I chose a file that I'd been pretty happy with, dynamics- and volume-wise. iZotope Insight told me it was ~-16dB LUFS. Here's what Loudness Penalty Analyzer told me. The first is for the wave version, the second is for the MP3 version. Yes, MP3s can peak higher than the source file by as much as 6dB in theory and about 3dB in practice. But I have to wonder, is it saying that these streaming services treat the two formats differently, or that the tool is analyzing them differently?

Spoken like a true Floridian. You are probably aware, however, that most people around the world would not call that a "fine" day. I have only been to Florida a few times, and can't recall experiencing a single fine day there. Too damn hot and humid for this web-footed northwesterner. I only came close to a hurricane on one occasion. I was in Miami teaching a class, and when we got word of an impending hurricane everybody said "we're outa here". I suggested that it might be an interesting experience and as my flight home wasn't for a couple days, maybe I'd just weather the storm in my comfy hotel room. The locals set me straight. "You've been complaining about the heat and humidity all week", they said. "Now imagine three days of that with no A/C". I was quickly convinced. So I decided to find a flight out. I had to do it quickly, because they'd be closing the airport in a few hours. Apparently, a few other people had the same idea, because nobody was answering the phones at the airline. Now the hotel staff are bolting metal panels over the windows and I realize I'd be sitting in the dark for the duration with no cable TV, electricity or internet access. So I start speed-dialing the airline. Without success. I called my business partner back home and explained my situation. In those days he was doing most of the travel for our little company and had enough frequent-flyer miles for multiple round-the-world trips. He even had a special phone number to the airline, which he was able to get through on. Called me back, said he'd scored me a seat on a flight out that afternoon. "It's not going to Seattle, though", he said. "I don't care", I replied. And so it was that I found myself on a flight to Dallas, middle seat in the back row next to the toilets. I was never so happy to watch the ground fall away.

You waited nine months to make that joke?

The PC2A is an intrinsic effect and considered part of Sonar, which is why there is no separate (un)installer for it. Even though it's a sibling to CA2A under the hood, to my knowledge they are completely independent of one another and do not share any dependencies. It's unlikely that your problems are related to the PC2A module. More likely, it's because a project had referenced the CA2A and complained about the missing plugin. Unless you had a real crash. Talking about the kind that is accompanied by a crash dump. If a project fails to load due to a missing plugin, that's not a "crash". If I'm wrong about that assumption, we can take a look at the crash dump for clues. As for removing CA2A, my advice would be don't bother. I doubt you're so short on disk space that 3MB is going to make a difference. You can always disable it if you don't want it showing up in menus.

Depends on how the plugin was designed. 10+ years ago, it was common practice to build separate mono and stereo versions of effects. And they were necessary. Nowadays, it's become normal to design plugins that can distinguish between mono and stereo inputs and won't mess up if you, as the user, guess wrong. A recurring question that comes up on forums is "why can't I pan this track?". Or worse, "Sonar is BROKEN! Panning doesn't work!" The solutions to such issues always comes down to mixing up mono vs. stereo plugins, mismatched track interleave, or not understanding how a track can switch between mono and stereo within the same signal chain. Rule of thumb: if a developer offers mono and stereo versions of the same plugin, keep them both installed and be careful to use the appropriate one. What happens if you don't use the right one? Sometimes it'll be no big deal. But sometimes, it'll be bad. Worse, it might take you awhile to figure out why it sounds so bad. It's easy enough to test for yourself, which I'd advise you do so that when there is a problem you'll know what to look for. Symptoms are typically that a track behaves unexpectedly, such as losing stereo width or not panning the way you expect it to. Sometimes, plugins that normally widen stereo (e.g. choruses) don't seem to work when followed by a mono effect (e.g. an amp sim). In some rarer scenarios, you can even get severe audio quality degradation.

A week ago I saw a headline "Helene Expected to be a Disaster". I made a joke of it, sending my daughter a text and suggesting perhaps she should have a talk with her daughter - the joke being that my granddaughter's name is Helene. A good kid but with boss-level smarts that always teetered between genius and, well, evil genius. Now I'm seeing the reports coming in from the SE US and holy moley, Helene's no joke. 90+ dead so far, an equal number missing. A whole lot of people with no internet or cell service so no way to call for help, no way to check in with family. Homes knee-deep in mud, and you just know that some of those included somebody's music room and that some woke up to find their guitars and pianos destroyed so they can't even write a song about it. Up here in the rainy Pacific Northwest we joke a lot about our famously-incessant precipitation, but sheesh, hardly anyone here ever dies from it. I know a bunch of us here hail from that part of the country. Please check in.

A widely-held belief that's actually a bit more nuanced than that. What ASIO (and ASIO4All) bypasses is the old Windows mixer and all the tasks it used to perform such as sample rate conversion -- not the actual hardware drivers. Once upon a time, that was a huge advantage of ASIO that native Windows audio couldn't match. But Microsoft has been steadily improving audio performance over the years. Nowadays, WASAPI Exclusive does the same thing, which is why it has comparable performance to ASIO. The reason ASIO4All is able to bypass the mixer is that it relies on WDM-KS under the hood. One of the advantages of WDM-KS over the earlier WDM was the ability to bypass that pesky mixer. Today, the mixer isn't even there anymore and is only emulated for backward compatibility. WASAPI is superior to WDM-KS in many ways, although WDM-KS is still available and still supported by Sonar, further making the need for ASIO4All moot. Now, if you have a well-written ASIO driver from a top-shelf interface manufacturer such as RME, then you should absolutely use that over WASAPI. For most of us, though, WASAPI Exclusive is a reliable alternative. That is a true statement. Nobody should be using MME unless they can't get anything else to work. The only nice thing about MME is that it always works. Sorry to have contributed to taking this thread so far off-topic. I totally agree that a GM synth would be a great addition to Sonar. I love the TTS-1 and am glad to still have it installed. But it was a Roland product from a time when Roland owned Cakewalk, and Roland wants nothing to do with it anymore. Will it ever be replaced as a bundled component? We can only hope. After all, V-Vocal was also a Roland product that went away and it was replaced by the far-superior Melodyne Essential. But it shouldn't be surprising that they won't announce plans in advance, nor that they are unwilling to say "no, not ever".

No duh.

Oh, don't I know it too well. I once bought a plugin after forgetting that I'd already bought it in the past but had never used it. That's because I had also forgotten that it had turned out to be useless the first time.

Ah! You're right. Silly me, I was expecting a standard save-as dialog.

When Keith posted this question, I thought "Oh! I know the answer to that" and brought up Sonar to take a screenshot. However, when I tried it the "+" button doesn't appear to do anything. You can select a factory preset and overwrite it with your own, but can't save and name a custom preset. I don't know if it ever did, because I don't use export presets myself.

Don't take this as a sarcastic reply - that's not my intent - but pretty much any equalizer with an integrated spectrum analyzer can do all that. You might also take a look at multitrack analyzers such as MMultiAnalyzer from Meldaproduction or SPANPlus by Voxengo. Both let you overlay spectral graphs of multiple tracks and reveal spectral overlaps that are likely to result in loss of clarity in your mix. Conflicts can exist across the frequency spectrum, not just kick/bass vs. everything else. A piano or distorted rhythm guitar might be masking a vocal, for example.

Listen to "Rainbows". I hope they played that at her service.

Thanks! I usually take an organ solo in that song but that day I had just happened to discover a nice sax patch on the Montage and switched to that on impulse right before hitting Record. I think it'll be part of the arrangement from here on out - at least until we play in front of any real brass players. If Notes is ever in the audience, I'll be switching back to organ. Or kazoo.

Very sad indeed. Seems like it's the nicest people who leave too soon. I opened this post with the intention of linking to Janet's music, which seems appropriate when a contributor passes. Unfortunately, her SoundClick account seems to have been deleted. I don't know if she shared her stuff anywhere else.

True. You can say that because their interfaces both conform to the ASIO spec. "Interface", in this context, means a set of standard functions that a host program uses to communicate with the driver. From the host's perspective, they do not appear any different from any other ASIO driver, since the host has no knowledge of what goes on under the hood. But ultimately it's Windows that talks to the hardware, not ASIO. Where ASIO drivers differ is how host calls get from the interface to the underlying Windows audio components. Some gain efficiencies by skipping over some of the Windows audio components and shortening the distance to the hardware. But ASIO4All and similar universal drivers are sometimes referred to as "wrappers" because they don't do any real work themselves but rather pass along the desired actions to the O/S. In the case of ASIO4All, its purpose is to translate ASIO calls into WDM-KS calls. According to FlexASIO's author, his wrapper calls a third-party library that in turn calls WASAPI. Although this provides an easy path to code for multiple operating systems, that intermediate library will necessarily impose a small but unavoidable performance cost. I wouldn't expect it to match the efficiency of a DAW such as Sonar that is designed specifically around Windows audio and that calls WASAPI or WDM-KS directly. As with ASIO4All, its value is to users who want to use ASIO for some reason but whose hardware does not have a bespoke ASIO driver. IMO, though, if your audio interface doesn't support ASIO the logical solution is to use WASAPI. But I'll admit I'm thinking in terms of a Windows environment. It could be a whole 'nother can 'o worms if you're on, say, Linux. [P.S. My audio interface has a fine ASIO driver but I use WASAPI. If there is a difference in performance, it's too small to notice.]

Occam's Razor. Laziness takes far less effort than malfeasance. Plus how stupid would it be to deliberately overwrite something that currently works - and that the user has paid for - with something you know won't work? Even NI isn't that evil.

Sounds great, with ducking, freeze and reverse. So yeh, even if "all the reverb you'll ever need" might be a bit pretentious, I think this would indeed be a pretty versatile reverb. Just one question: why is an algorithmic reverb 200 MB in size? Downloaded the installer and let it install the plugin, but was unable to take it out of demo mode because it's demanding a password. I never gave them a password, didn't create an account. Went back to the site and tried to create a profile, but it was rejected with an "invalid sign up" message. Sorry, UJAM, this is too much bother. I've got plenty of reverbs.

Thanks for the heads-up. NI should not be listing anything as "update available" if it's incompatible with your installed Kontakt version. That's just lazy programming.

I'm sorry, did I delete those posts before you had a chance to write down the phone number?

Unfortunately, the video captures their only gig this year. "The A&R man said, 'I don't hear a single'".

Locking this thread. Giving out this type of discount code is essentially software piracy. I don't think it's the OP's fault. It probably stems from this video. Note that Plugin Boutique has rescinded the code because of this abuse, so don't bother trying the method shown in the video.