bitflipper

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.

Technically, that second one would be a host, not a plugin.

Curiously, I can't recall ever having a stuck note issue with anything other than certain Kontakt instruments. There must be some scripting trick that's not universally known, as evidenced by vendors whose products never seem to exhibit this problem (e.g. OTS, Indiginus, Spitfire). Probably not coincidentally, those vendors are also known to employ sophisticated scripting, suggesting deep expertise. OP: which synths have you experienced stuck notes with?

Give it a try. I think you may already have my email address, but I'll send it to you via PM if not.

I once counted up all the reverbs I have. Sheesh. Way too many. Some of them are unique, e.g. D16's bizarre Toraverb, Valhalla Shimmer or tritik's otherworldly irid. Some are especially adept at disappearing into the mix if that's what you want, e.g. FabFilter's infinitely tweakable Pro-R. I suppose MTurboReverb falls into that category too. Very versatile. But despite all those options, 95% of the time it ends up being Valhalla Plate. (No Nimbus for me, though; I have a Pace-free system and aim to keep it that way.)

Bapu is a compulsive collector. Like that weird person you know that collects clowns, salt shakers or dream catchers. Ask him how many he actually uses. Or has ever used. I've heard enough of Bapu's mixes to know he's good at it. I doubt he's scrolling through a hundred compressors trying to decide which one to use. I admit to being a reformed collector myself, although I'm down to 339 at last count. I could easily reduce that to a couple dozen.

There is no link in your last post, Annabelle. A wav file would be much easier to restore than a Cakewalk project file, even if the file header is gone. Adobe Audition, for example, can treat a file as raw data with no file header, open it, and re-save it as a RIFF WAV. I'd be happy to try that if you like.

I think so. Here's a comparison of features between Elements, Standard and Advanced.

When I add a new plugin, the subsequent scan takes about 3 seconds. A lot longer if I do a reset first, in which case it's more like 30-40 seconds. Either way, significantly under a lifetime. OP, how long do your scans take? Could be one plugin that's holding up the process.

When I read the thread title, I took it as literally one plugin. If that were the case, it would have to be an EQ. Everything else you can do with painstaking automation. But now that I realize the OP meant "third-party plugin", and presumably does not include virtual instruments, then my answer would be Ozone. (Although technically if you use Ozone Advanced, that's actually a bundle of, iirc, 21 plugins.)

"Underrated" will be laughable if you're Dutch or Scandinavian, but here in North America Floor Jansen is, sadly, relatively unknown.

It's not surprising that smaller plugin vendors don't have the resources to test every version of every DAW out there. Note that when they do include one, they specify the exact version they support. Cubase 10? Sorry, we don't support it, even though the idea that any VST might be incompatible with any Steinberg product is silly. Looking at iZotope's list for RX, I see a lot of DAWs that aren't included. Samplitude, Tracktion, Bitwig, Audacity, Ardour, Mixcraft, ACID Pro, Digital Performer, MuLab, GarageBand and many others. Too many for any company to properly test on a frequent basis. Also note that they never make any mention of hardware console compatibility. The list, I think, is just there to reassure novice buyers who might not understand that the whole idea of a standard interface is to assure universal compatibility.

That was my first thought, too. It looks like an encrypted file. Although in my experience ransomware targets files with specific file extensions, e.g. .docx, .xlsx, .mdb.

Was going to say the same thing. They have frequent sales and loyalty discounts. The Rain Piano is quite nice if you're looking for an upright. The 7CG is a deeply-sampled Yamaha if you want something brighter than a Steinway. There is also a cheaper version of it, presumably with fewer samples.

Since somebody mentioned bagpipes...

Verify that the vst3 version is in fact installed and in the right place, then rescan. All vst3 plugins should be in the same place, e.g. c:\program files\common files\vst3. As long as it's there, the scanner should have no problem finding them. If the file is in the right place, run the scanner with its log enabled (Preferences -> Files -> VST Settings -> Generate Scan Log). After rescanning, open the log (%appdata%\cakewalk\logs\vstscan.log) with Notepad and search for the name of the dll. If the init failed while scanning that plugin, an entry in the log file should indicate why.

Cakewalk has no concept of "end of song". It tries to figure that out based on where the last event occurs, which might be the end of an audio or MIDI clip, a MIDI note, an automation node, or an ARA region. Quite often, the "end" that it comes up with doesn't land where you think it should be. The good news is that it doesn't really matter until you export your final mix. At that time, you have to decide where the beginning and ending are and select the region in between for export. I deal with this by placing markers labeled "Start" and "End". When you export, you can specify those markers. If it really bothers you, you can find that last event and move or delete it. It would be nice if Cakewalk would let you indicate Start and End markers as references that the export dialog would default to, but I've been lobbying for years for that feature with no luck. But as I said, it's really not a problem.