bitflipper

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.

I found this, which says it's just a contact mic and a bunch of fx and a looper. And, of course, played with exceptional panache. Hmm, come to think of it I have some bassoons in my Kontakt collection...

Please upload your submissions to dropbox. A great compliment coming from you, Geoff.

My goodness, this vocalist has got pipes. Her pitch control is better than some analog synths. I can't tell if the bassoon is going through an exotic fx chain or being translated into MIDI to control a synth.

I knew my mixer could be used as a recording interface, but Yamaha documentation seriously sucks (always been that way) so it took a few trials and errors to get a proper recording. I still don't know how to adjust send levels over USB, so some tracks were very quiet and others were very loud even though the mix we heard while playing was balanced. Fortunately, the result is extraordinarily clean and even massive gain boosts didn't result in audible noise. I've been meaning to try this for awhile, ever since the whole band went amp-less and everybody now goes through the PA. I've done simple two-track recordings of rehearsals - that's as easy as plugging in a USB drive. But we're in the process of building a new promo package that will include a thumb drive of music samples, so I needed multitracks that can be properly mixed in Sonar. The hardest part was switching to an alternate interface. Windows would get confused, seeing a new interface and deciding on its own that from that moment forward I was to forever listen to Netflix through my stage mixer. Ultimately came up with a batch file to easily switch interfaces by swapping aud.ini files. Here's my first test: https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=14852856 This is a cover of a Janis Joplin tune, recorded here in my garage at last Sunday's rehearsal. There's been very little done to it post-recording, just some volume automation and added reverb/delay. It doesn't sound particularly polished, but it's an honest representation of how the band sounds live, which is the purpose of the exercise. I'm considering adding some fake crowd noises - would that be dishonest?

A Janis Joplin cover, recorded live, no editing other than some volume automation. This was my first experiment recording direct from the mixer. The drums are a little unbalanced because all I had was a stereo mix of the whole kit. But all in all I think it came out OK, and is an accurate representation of what the band sounds like live. https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=14852856