bitflipper

I don't want to seem argumentative, Craig, as you've done a fine job of illustrating a case where oversampling offers a clearly audible difference. However, it's an edge case. We have to be careful generalizing from edge cases, lest beginners read more into them than is justified. This, I think, is the hole many users step into: that because oversampling can make a difference in unusual circumstances, it must therefore be useful or even necessary much of the time. This fundamental misunderstanding, I believe, is the genesis of hyperbolic phrases such as "game changing". In the few instances where I have encountered aliasing from internal processes, it's been a poorly-designed processor or synth. Find me a patch in Omnisphere that benefits from oversampling, and I will immediately concede your point without reservation.

CTL-Z works fine for me.

So I could have been watching Futurama and King of the Hill in Ultra High Definition?!? Damn. Maybe they wouldn't look so cartoony.

Well, we ended up having to cancel last night's gig anyway. Our singer came down with a 103.5 fever on Saturday. It wasn't COVID though. She's a farmer, so it was probably some exotic bug you can only get from goats or something.

Yes, I do. My strategy is to not explicitly use it, not Cakewalk's feature nor any plugin's built-in oversampling option. An exception could occur someday, but it hasn't yet. Granted, this strategy works for me because I rarely put myself into a situation where oversampling would be necessary. I realize that's not the case for everyone. Some people like hard clippers, for example. I don't. Some use a fast-attack compressor on bass for distortion. I don't. Some like extreme limiting and brick-shaped waveforms. I don't. But that's just me. Everyone's entitled to their own preferences. As for EQ cramping, I do not have any EQs that are subject to cramping, because it's not 2003 anymore.

5 out of 6 Russian Roulette players think that game is perfectly safe. Almost everyone I know who's had it merely experienced an unpleasant few days and then got over it. That is the case with my granddaughter, who's returned to high school today. But I also know people who have died from it. I have a relative currently in the hospital with it, who has no immune system due to chemotherapy. For him, 5 of the 6 slots have live bullets in them.

Paul Allen is a musician, and $65M is pocket change to him. It could be as simple as that. Wouldn't you donate some pocket change to help a developer you appreciated? I happily paid for SONAR for years. I'd happily pay for CbB, too, although I think Craig's analysis is correct. Then again, I'd probably have been content to keep using SONAR 8.5 forever. IMO everything that's come along since has been frosting on the cake.

So my granddaughter, who lives with me, has COVID and has been symptomatic since Friday. No one else in the house has symptoms, and we all tested negative with home tests. We're all taking precautions, with my granddaughter pretty much staying in her room. And of course I'm in my usual state of isolation out in the garage - all I need is a couch here and I'd almost never have to leave (but I can't have a couch because it'd be too tight for band rehearsals). Now the band is arguing over whether or not to cancel Saturday's gig. We've cancelled two this year, but in those cases band members were positive for COVID so it was an easy call. So far 3 of the 6 of us have had COVID. We decided that if I test negative again Thursday and Friday that we'll go ahead with the date. I can't get proper lab test results before the weekend, so we have to trust the home test kits. I don't want to cancel because this is a frequent venue for us, audiences are great, and it's my kind of hours: 8:00 - 10:00. I've heard that the home tests are unreliable, but I don't know if that's because they suck or that many users just can't follow instructions. What's been your experience with them?

So, so true. I feel disconnected from the keys, as if I'm miming a performance in a bad movie. OTOH, playing organ on piano keys is literally painful. That's why I used two instruments for years: one with weighted "hammer action", one with waterfall keys. The Kronos attempts a compromise between the two, with progressive weighting to feel more piano-like but rounded edges for organ glissandos.

I actually tried that for a while. Mainly, I wanted a lighter-touch keyboard for organ so the plan was to run VB3 on a laptop and use my 49-key Axiom controller. Once I got that set up, I thought it would be super cool to also have Omnisphere, Keyscape and Kontakt available. And it was, sonically-speaking. Ergonomically, not so much. Then one night I bumped the laptop and sent it crashing to the floor. It was OK, but I realized that depending on a laptop had its own perils, as Mark noted above. One thing I love about the Kronos is the 8" color touchscreen. Nobody else has that. I can create thousands of programs, e.g. a set list for a specific gig, or put my favorite pianos on one screen, or group programs for songs that use multiple patches. The Kronos is incredibly full-featured. It's 9 synths in 1. Got its own drum machine. Dozens of effects. Heck, it's a frickin' DAW, if you want it to be. Oh well, maybe it's true that you can't have it all. Or if you insist on having it all, you'd better have a strong back. Or a road crew.

What was the topic of this thread again?

Well, I've just about reached the reluctant conclusion that at this time nothing exists that has the power of the Kronos in a lighter package. The Nord Stage 3 is very appealing, as it's got a more ergonomic layout for live use. But after sales tax and the cost of a case it'd come to well over $6,000. At my current rate of pay in the band, it would take two years to break even on that investment. Byron, thanks for reminding me that I have one of these, and should use it more often:

How true. On Saturday night I accidentally hit the "PFL" button on the mixer, which is perilously located immediately below each fader. It's also a grey push-button on a black background, making it hard to tell its state without a flashlight. "PFL" means pre-fader, like selecting "Pre" on the Pre/Post option for sends in Cakewalk. As a consequence, the singer's mic had no EQ, no FX, and was piping into the monitor channel at full blast. Had to turn the monitors down to prevent feedback. We played several songs like that, while I tried to figure out what was going on, devoting half my brain to troubleshooting, half to playing and half to singing. Yeh, that's three halves. If I'd been a DAW, my CPU meters would have been pegged and sound would have been crap, assuming the audio engine didn't just give up. Unlike a DAW, however, giving up with an "engine stopped" message isn't an option. You just have to muddle through as best you can. Did the audience notice any of this? Apparently not. Everybody's dancing, plenty of applause, a few bucks dropping into the tip jar - all the usual indicators suggesting all was well. But had I been in the audience, I would have walked out in disgust. Alcohol really is the true "Musician's Friend".

I've played the RD2000. It's got a pleasant action not unlike the Kronos, meaning the keys are "hammer action" (a marketing white lie in almost all digital keyboards) with the weights heavier in the low end and lighter in the high end, in an attempt to simulate an acoustic piano action. It's also got that V thing going on, which gives you progressive velocities rather than discrete velocity layers. Unfortunately, though lighter than the Kronos, at 48 lbs. it still falls short of satisfying my light weight requirement. Plus iirc the organs and Leslie emulation were weak. I've had a bunch of Roland keyboards over the years. All were good values for the money, but until recently I never cared for their keyboard action. Yamaha has always done that part well. IIRC, AKAI makes their keybeds. My best setup so far was in fact a digital piano / synth (Yamaha MO8) alongside a Hammond XK-1. That way, you get the feel of a piano when playing piano and the feel of an organ when playing the organ. But it takes up too much space on stage if they're set up side-by-side and when stacked you can't see the controls on the lower instrument (and on high stages the audience can't see me at all, not that that's necessarily a bad thing).

Went to bed last night with a back ache. My keyboard weighs 82 lbs in the flight case. So I started poking around online to see if there was something I could switch to that wouldn't be such a back-breaker. Spent some time listening to the Nord Stage 3, which is waay lighter than my Korg KRONOS. Sure, that thing's expensive. Sheesh, they want $700 for a soft-sided case! But I wasn't put off by the price (the Korg was about the same). Rather, I was put off by the weak organ sounds and Leslie emulation. I need a good Hammond-type sound since my "real" organ stays at home now to reduce stage space and setup time. Even the Nord's well-respected piano libraries were too special-purpose for me. They sound great in solo but would likely get lost in a rock band. The KRONOS, by comparison, has literally dozens of pianos and lots of third-party libraries available. So I pose this question to all the keyboardists here: what should I be looking at for a lighter-weight substitute for my Korg? Yamaha Montage weighs 64 lb, so that's out. The Roland Fantom could be a contender, being lightweight and having good organ sounds, and it's relatively cheap. But its synth action keybed won't cut it, as I play pianos about 75% of the time. Your thoughts?

Many plugin developers already make use of the GPU. Maybe they've figured it out now, and maybe this product will make it easier to implement, but for years it was a real PIA to get GPU support to work reliably across all manufacturers' hardware because each one is different, even within a given product line. I was involved in one vendor's beta and it took months to get it working on my particular card, even though it worked flawlessly on cards from other manufacturers. My guess is that DAW developers wouldn't be in any hurry to take this route and incur the inevitable support nightmare that would follow. It would make far more sense for plugin developers. But what do I know? I once predicted the end of hardware-based audio processing, and now everybody's using TC Powercores or ProTools HD.

To the topic...I played around with this a bit. I've always imagined a MIDI plugin that would randomly pan each note, creating an effuse, or maybe twinkly effect. That plugin doesn't exist, AFAIK, but I hoped that this might produce a similar effect. It doesn't. At the default setting, most things I threw at it just laid lifelessly on the left and occasionally jumped to the center. Who'd have guessed that panning the quietest notes left and the loudest notes right isn't all that useful? That said, there are other modes I haven't experimented with yet, and I think that if you created a track specifically with this effect in mind it could still be pretty nifty.

You're an inspiration to us all, man. Kind of like those vegans who superglued themselves to the counter at Starbucks to protest the price of soy milk. I don't understand them, but I do admire their commitment.

Does it not emulate the MCU protocol? Most similar devices do (the "U" in MCU stands for "Universal"). If so, Cakewalk supports it natively. At least, that is my understanding, as I do not use that type of controller anymore. Azslow would know. Smart guy.

It varies from vendor to vendor. Some store factory presets separately from user presets. Many use proprietary formats, others use text or XML. Some location examples, taken from notes I made the last time I went on a similar hunt: ValhallaRoom C:\Users\{user_name}\AppData\Roaming\Valhalla DSP, LLC\ValhallaRoom\User Presets Factory presets: C:\Users\All Users\All Users\Valhalla DSP, LLC\ValhallaRoom\Factory Presets Native Instruments \users\{user_name}\documents\Native Instruments\{Product_Name}\presets U-He Zebra \program files\cakewalk\vstplugins\zebra2.data\presets\zebra2 -or- \vstplugins\u-he\Zebra2.data\presets\Zebra2 File formats and file extensions vary, too. FabFilter's have a .ffp suffix and are binary files, while Ozone presets are editable XML. Kontakt presets tend to be .nka files, but many vendors prefer snapshot files. U-He uses a proprietary text file format with .h2p extensions. Voxengo uses .cbf (compressed bank file), and lets the user specify where user-defined presets are stored. Omnisphere's are the weirdest, with separate (binary) formats for fx, filters, arpeggiators, oscillators, LFOs and envelopes. Multis and patches are stored in .db files. Since the majority use "presets" in the folder name, you could find most of them by issuing this DOS command from the root: DIR *presets /s /ad

I have to keep getting rid of my old Cakewalk installers. I like to keep the most recent one just in case, but tend to forget about them. Just looked and I had 2 GB worth of Cakewalk installers hanging about. [EDIT: Now that I think about it, though, that may just be me and my fellow beta testers, who sometimes update multiple times a month. I'm thinking that the BandLab downloader must get rid of installation files automatically, right?]

Isn't it strange, that a world where mutants want to eat you is still a more pleasant place to be than reality?

"1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8...I can't think of the finish." "That's strange, I can't think of anything else." "I think I went past it." "Well, if you come around again, jump off." This, I think, is the definition of free jazz.

Fallout 4 is totally worth deleting those for. (Admittedly not a universal opinion.) My solution to massive games eating disk space is getting a cheap external drive and copying old games to it before deleting. That way, I can always tell myself that I can restore them if I change my mind. To date I have never once re-installed a game that I'd previously tired of. Also, I keep games physically separate from the important stuff (e.g. sample libraries and DAW projects). It's one thing to blow away Skyrim and another thing entirely to decide if a Kontakt library I haven't used since 2011 needs to go.

You know what's gonna happen, right? Half way through that trip a viable hypothesis will pop into your head, but you won't be able to test it out. Then you'll think about nothing else for the rest of the flight, lest you forget that inspiration. This is why they give you napkins with your soda.