bitflipper

I dunno, Larry. The loyalty discounts are year-round and pretty good. I just checked, and any remaining FF plugins I don't have would be discounted 59-74%. I think they still do the 10% off for first-time customers, too.

I realize you made that comment tongue-in-cheek, because nobody wants to think that the money they've already spent was for naught. But a more positive spin would be "I've got everything I need already, thank you". And I couldn't agree more. Everybody already does, and that's the truth. Anyone who thinks spending $$$$ to have "the best" of everything will make them a better mixer is missing the point.

I held off on FabFilter for years because of the expense. At the time I was pretty broke. Well, I still am tbh, but I've got my priorities straight now. A forum legend by the name of Billy Arnell (bamidi, sadly now deceased) went out and unexpectedly bought me a copy of Pro-Q as a gift. That's all it took for me to become a FF fan. Now I've got nearly the entire collection. And yup, they really are that good.

OTOH, I love having the built-in compressors in my Yamaha vocal mixer for live performance. It makes my job as real-time onstage mix guy much easier.

I went Firewire in 2006, after having some issues with a USB audio interface. My desktop PC didn't have a FW port so I bought a generic $40 card. When I upgraded the computer, I moved that same FW card to the new machine. Then when that computer was stolen I bought the same FW card again for its replacement. So I've been using the same cheap Firewire adaptor for 16 years now, with both Intel and AMD CPUs, four O/Ss (XP, Win 7, 8 and 10) and two audio interfaces (MOTU and Focusrite). Despite tempting fate with ample opportunities for the setup to fail, it hasn't.

Kind of. The search feature in Zebra isn't great. But then, I can't name another synth that truly makes it easy to search for patches - including Omnisphere, where they've really made a serious effort to do so. You just have to audition patches and mark the ones you like best as Favorites. One viable alternative to Zebra you may want to check out is Synthmaster. Both have confusing UIs and require significant effort to program, but both are very capable and both have extensive third-party patch collections if you just want to use presets. Unlike Zebra, Synthmaster is often on sale. That said, I have both synths and use Zebra far more often.

Well, I guess it is. But I've never run into a problem with any other plugin or instrument. Obviously, you want keyboard shortcuts to still work even though there's a plugin UI onscreen. Imagine if you couldn't stop and start playback because a plugin was up. So it's by design and probably what you want to happen. The plugin vendor could, however, handle it internally for just that dialog if he were so inclined. But Urs is famous for declining enhancement requests with a curt "you don't need that". Most of the time, he's right.

When I type into that dialog, any mapped keypresses are passed through to Cakewalk. Here's what happens when I try to type in "test": EDIT: Oops, I forgot about the "give all keystrokes to plugin" option.

Absolutely. It's been requested before, so I expect to see is as a new feature in Z3. I screwed up back when I first started using Zebra, by attempting to organize them by ranking, e.g. grey for just OK favorites, red for my favorite favorites, like Omnisphere's star ratings. It was a stupid idea, because how cool a patch is depends entirely upon the context in which it's being used. A thick, fat pad might sound awesome in isolation but not be very useful in a song. A boring sinewave bass patch might be just the ticket when you want to subtly fill out the low end. I'd also be very happy to have a dialog box that I can type in when naming and describing custom patches. That dialog needs to be "modal", meaning that all keystrokes are always routed to it rather than to the host application. Like the "click OK to continue" type of messageboxes where you can do nothing else in Windows except click OK. As it is, when I want to save a custom patch I have to open Notepad, type the text there, and then copy-paste the text into Zebra's dialog box. So yeh, as much as I love Zebra it definitely has room for improvement in the UI.

That's how I ended up doing it, via the context menu on the logo. Oh, I'm just getting started! Many of the instances only play a few notes, typically percussive effects. The point of the exercise is to identify patches that I can either apply as-is, or, more likely, to use as a starting point for a custom patch.

I started a new project just for exploring all the new soundsets. 24 instances of Zebra so far - and this is one of the reasons I like Zebra - the project takes 3 seconds to load. btw, a rough count of all these patches comes to around 3,000. I reckon I'll have thoroughly explored them all just about the time Zebra3 is announced in 2025.

Well, that was uplifting. Nothing affirms one's own well-being like listening to somebody who's clearly more screwed up than you. It's one of the reasons I keep coming back to the Coffee House. I once spent a couple hours in a wheelchair, at the Experience Music Project. It was an eye-opening experience. Some people opened doors for me, which was nice. But then they'd talk to me like I was 5. I'm thinking like, wtf, dude! I'm over 60, I just happen to be the same height as your kid, who btw, is over there licking the doorknob.

I was afraid that's what you'd say, ZincT, as it's exactly how I've done it in the past, and that's how I have my patch libs organized as well. This time, the drag 'n drop method just flat out didn't work. However, I was able to use the Import Soundset menu option from the context menu you get when you right-click on the Zebra logo. The problem was with the existing files. Some of them refused to show up in the browser after scanning. However, this morning I opened an existing project, ran the scan again, and surprise! there they were. I haven't checked them all yet, but I really only cared about the Hollo collections. Curiously, even though Zebra said they weren't there, it had no problem loading previously-used patches into the project, with their correct names. I suspect it may have been a display issue all along. But I do appreciate your reply; if nothing else it reassured me that I wasn't suffering from early-onset dementia. So it appears all's well. Now the fun begins, exploring all the new patches and flagging the favorites.

Well, although it irks me to buy the same product twice, I gave in and bought Legacy for all the cool patch libs. I don't need ZebraHK. I'm not Hans Zimmer and I've never felt the need for more than two MSEGs. But I reckon a thousand or so presets are worth the 99 bucks. I've got a problem, however. After this install most of my previous third-party patch libraries are now missing from the browser. For example, I have all three of Joseph Hollo's Padsheaven series. Padsheaven number 2 is still populated and useable, but 1 and 3 show "folder empty" in the browser. I've verified that the folder is not empty and the files are all still there, and I've done a refresh, but they refuse to show up. Neither the new drag 'n drop nor the "Install Soundset" menu option do anything with .H2P files. All the factory presets are still there, as are a handful of the previous third-party libraries and all my own custom patches. ZincT, you're a longtime Zebra user. Any insights or suggestions?

There are only a handful of musicians as universally loved and respected as Quincy Jones. I remember seeing Q in person, at a NAMM show many years ago. Other celebs had hurried past fans into their limos, but not Q. He took selfies with fans and autographed anything they stuck in front of him, smiling the whole time. Classy dude. Rashida Jones' Grammy-winning biography is on Netflix right now. It's worth checking out. His multiple brushes with death, often triggered by overwork, have made him philosophical about music and life in general. He would be such a cool guy to hang out with, I think.

I got to wondering if you could say that about any file. So I saved your last post and loaded into Adobe Audition as raw audio. It plays, albeit very briefly. Here's what it looks like:

Don't get me started on doors. If I ever sell this house, I'll have to replace 5 internal doors and 2 outside doors, all of which have been deeply engraved by the claws of this impatient pup who hates being impeded by doors. It's easier to leave them open when possible. Oh yeh. I tell myself that every Sunday after a Saturday night gig, when my back is aching from hauling gear. It takes a couple days to recover. I'm just glad we're not still moving those huge cabs from the 70's. A month to recover is something I could live with. I can gig one-handed for that long, or take a break and go to the tropics for awhile.

This is true. However, it's a compromise. Built-in compressors in consoles are primitive compared to what we have in a DAW. For example, they usually do not have sidechain filtering and can therefore react poorly when processing a vocal mic with a strong proximity effect. As a general rule, EQ comes first. There may be a separate EQ just for the reverb effect, but that's usually a filter within the reverb plugin itself. EQ can have a profound effect on compression, so you definitely want to do any highpass filtering pre-compression. Compression usually precedes reverb. Usually. There are exceptions, such as when you're processing drum overheads or drum room mics. Compressing the room sound or added reverb can create a pleasant wash (listen to the heavily compressed rides on early Beatles). But more often, compression does nothing for the reverb except make it overly prevalent on transients. Lord Tim nailed it above, saying it's about what you want to achieve. Then again, Tim's been doing this a long time and is very good at it. If you're at a point where you're not yet sure what it is you want to achieve, EQ -> Comp -> Reverb is a safe starting place. Then we can talk about chorus and distortion!

Cakewalk itself makes for a fine mastering environment. There isn't really any benefit to importing into other software unless said software has some unique tools that aren't available in Cakewalk. Here, I don't need anything beyond Ozone Advanced and its excellent metering plugin, Insight. If I'm mastering a group of songs, e.g. for an album, I just create a new project in Cakewalk for that purpose and import all the songs into a single track. If some of the songs are wildly different from the others, I'll give them their own track with an instance of Ozone on each. As I'm sure someone will point out, there are, however, advantages to letting someone else master your songs. You not only get the benefit of a fresh set of ears, but also a different acoustical environment that can help mitigate any shortcomings in your own playback space.

That's exactly the kind of reassuring information I was hoping to hear. How long was the recovery period after the surgery? Thanks for the exercise, Mark. I'm going to give that a go. That'll hopefully make Sunday's rehearsal relatively painless. Early yesterday morning as I was just stirring, the dog plopped onto my bed, stretched out his legs and stuck a paw right into my mouth. Disgusting. Could have been worse, I suppose. His utter disregard for personal space includes all aspects of personal hygiene activities.

tkdelay remains a favorite, even if it's been knocked out of my #1 spot in recent months by Valhalla Delay. The reverse delay and ducking feature make it very useful on vocals, especially ethereal BGVs . Also check out irid, the regenerative pitch-modulated reverb. It's like Valhalla Shimmer, except that you can tune the tail to harmonic (or inharmonic) intervals, up to three intervals to make chords. Basically turns any sound into a lush pad.

There's a guy who comes to the Wednesday night jams I sometimes attend who plays bass and is missing his right hand. He plucks the strings with a Captain Hook kind of appliance, and despite that challenge he's actually a decent player. Puts my whining about one sore finger in perspective. But still. I did made it through last Saturday's gig fairly easily, just by going easy on that finger. By the end of the night the pain had actually lessened, suggesting that exercising the hand is probably beneficial. It was throbbing the next morning, but I'm going to assume for now that continuing to play might be the best therapy. btw, it's my "naughty" finger that won't extend properly. So there's that minor handicap. Won't be able drive effectively in New Jersey.

One of my greatest fears is having something happen to my hands. Every activity I love requires manual dexterity, whether it's typing or playing the blues. I could lose almost any other capability and still manage to live a meaningful existence. If I went deaf I could still flip bits, if I lost my sight I could still make music. During the two years when I could barely walk due to back problems, I did both. But without hands, I'm screwed. This, you may recall, is why Keith Emerson killed himself. An extreme reaction, but I get it. A couple months back, my dog chomped my finger pretty good while we were playing tug-o-war with a too-short chew toy. It didn't break the skin, so I dismissed it as a bruise that might be painful for awhile but would eventually heal. Problem is, it didn't. One morning I woke up and the finger was curled and I couldn't straighten it without pulling with my other hand, which made it suddenly pop into position. I was eventually able to consult a doctor and have the finger x-rayed. It's a condition known as stenosing tenosynovitis, commonly referred to by the less-ominous sounding term "trigger finger". In extreme cases, the finger can get stuck permanently in one position. In my case, it's just painful to straighten or to put pressure on it (like when playing the piano). Now I wish I'd learned proper technique on the piano, curving my fingers instead of keeping them straight like I do. I'm also fortunate that it's my left hand, so I can still impress the drunken rubes with lightning-fast solos. I haven't tried playing guitar yet, but I suspect it would be prohibitively painful. I'd be curious to know if others have experienced this condition, and if so, were treatments effective?

If you've got a file that you think may contain audio data, send it to me. I'll tell you if it does, and if it does I can probably recover it.

Yes, you can export with mixed bit-depths. Cakewalk will convert the 32-bit files to 16 bits automatically. Use whatever dither algorithm you normally prefer.