bitflipper

Picked this one up, my one and only BF/CM purchase. It seemed right up my alley, as I'm always on the hunt for interesting percussive sounds but not a looper. Unfortunately, it's been somewhat disappointing and may not be as useful as I'd hoped. Fifty bucks is an OK price, though. The normal price of $200 is just unrealistic.

You might be able to get a decent upgrade price on version 5. I think I paid about $150 (Studio edition). Version 5's levelling tool alone justifies the upgrade. A couple clicks and you've greatly reduced the amount of compression you need on vocals.

I haven't bought a reverb (or a compressor, equalizer, exciter or any other sound-massager) in years. At some point you realize you've got more than enough. Of everything. That said, I admit to having purchased a delay not long ago. Did I need one? Nope. But I was curious about what Sean was going do with a delay plugin. I was not disappointed. That idiosyncratic Quartz mode finds its way into almost everything I do.

They are different (I prefer the sound of ValhallaShimmer), but given the limited number of use-cases for this type of reverb, I'd still consider them redundant. If you're intent on having more than one flavor of a regenerative pitch-shifting reverb, check out irid from tritik. It's got a couple tricks all its own. It's only 50 bucks, too, same as ValhallaShimmer.

Valhalla never goes on sale. Doesn't need to; their normal price is a fraction of what comparable products from other vendors go for.

Remember when everybody was worried that any day Microsoft might do something to break SONAR? Some even switched to Macs to prevent such a disaster from ever happening.

Don't ya just hate it when you get an email announcing a product update, only to read that their big announcement is "MacOS Mojave support"?

Just playing with the new modes. The Scorpio mode for SuperMassive is quite nice. The new RitchPitch mode for ValhallaDelay is wonderfully weird. Just watch out for the feedback setting - set it too high and the plugin goes into self-oscillation and the delays literally never end. Good thing there's a duck feature.

Free update to Valhalla Delay, with a new mode. Of all the delays in my collection, this one is my absolute favorite. Supermassive has also been updated, with two new modes added. Supermassive is a freebie, so make sure to grab it if you don't already have it. It's not a daily bread 'n butter reverb, but it's a pretty cool effect when you can find an excuse to use it.

You could rig something like that up with an aux send and a gate. A gate is basically an envelope follower.

Me, too. Whole lotta potential here. You could stick with the simple ballad format or go full Disney epic with orchestration and choir, or anything in between. It's already got a nice dynamic structure that would lend itself to a gradual buildup that goes big before dropping back into the intimate vocal + guitar that starts it.

The obvious first step is to verify that the files are indeed present, e.g. c:\program files\cakewalk\shared plugins\sonitus*.dll. Then run a scan with the scan log enabled. Open the log (%appdata%\cakewalk\logs\vstscan.log) in Notepad and search for any of the missing plugins' names. If they could not be instantiated due to a missing C++ library, there should be an entry to that effect in the log. You'll probably also get a messagebox during the scan.

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.