bitflipper

Yes, bapu did the mix. I think he's getting better at it, too. Nothing better for polishing your mixing chops than being handed a big pile of beach detritus and then being asked to please make a beautiful stained-glass window out of it.

I agree. This thread has run its course and is unlikely to change gears into something helpful. Time to let it die.

Grammy's?

Step One: Instruct CbB to be more verbose about errors. That will usually reveal, or at least provide a clue to, the source of these kinds of problems. Open cakewalk.ini with Notepad. cakewalk.ini will be in %appdata%\cakewalk\cakewalk core. Search on an entry named ExceptionHandlingSeverity. If you don't find it, manually add it in. Then set its value to 7. It will look like this: ExceptionHandlingSeverity=7 This tells CbB to complain about any error. The default value is 1, which tells to keep quiet about most errors. After you've troubleshot this issue, you'll probably want to set it back to 1 again, lest it get too verbose.

You can preserve food in alcohol, why doesn't that work for humans?

Yup. In other breaking news, it turns out that the earth is indeed spherical. One reason I know this is the large number of people who have actually gone all the way around it. (Full disclosure: I've only been halfway around it myself, but I'm pretty sure the other half follows a comparable geometry.) An even greater number of regular people use Cakewalk (or Reaper or ProTools or Logic or Fruity Loops) every day without tearing their hair out. Heck, most people who drive Audis or use Samsung phones don't catch on fire, and most passengers on Spirit airlines get to their destinations on time. I say this not to belittle the OP, but only to reinforce Craig's point. Richard is obviously having real problems and is frustrated. But he's making a fundamental mistake by assuming that his issues are caused by the DAW, when in reality that's probably the last of many potential culprits to put in the police lineup. A computer system is a complex jumble of software and hardware and magic smoke that's not easy for anyone to grasp. I've been figuring stuff like this out since 1976, and I still routinely get stumped because I get stuck in a rut of erroneous assumptions. Not to mention the many times my UTK interface has failed me (UTK = User To Keyboard). Actual bugs in Cakewalk that bite me constitute maybe 0.001% of my problems. And I'm a beta tester. I'm trying to find problems. So Richard, this is actually meant to be words of encouragement. If you feel like switching DAWs, go for it. Moving to a new environment can actually be creatively inspiring. But I'd like to save you further frustration and get you back to making music, and concentrating your efforts on the wrong culprit is only going to delay that further.

His last performance...

Sacrilege! OK, I'll admit doing that, but usually not on purpose. When I do, I always immediately do it again because anything you do twice in a row is "jazz" and it's OK.

I've had exports where a 5-minute song wound up being 5 minutes of silence in the export. It took me awhile to figure out what I was doing wrong because like you, sometimes it was fine, sometimes it wasn't. Turned out I was pressing CTL-A to select all tracks while focus was on the PRV, resulting in all the MIDI tracks being selected and nothing else. Now I make a point of clicking somewhere in the track view before starting an export. Not that this is your issue; I mention it only to show how easy it is to do something "wrong" and not notice.

Glad you got it sorted. It's annoying when you have to substitute another plugin, but at least it's just reverb. Yeh, some folks like to wax poetic about their favorite reverb, but in reality there are always a dozen alternatives that'll do just as well with a little tweaking.

1. Is the plugin on a track or a bus? If the latter, is it a separate bus just for reverb? If the former, is it a mono or stereo track? I have seen odd behavior with some stereo plugins when placed on a mono-interleave track, including reduced volume. 2. Are there any other plugins in the track/bus fx bin that the reverb is on? I have seen weird interactions between plugins, where a specific ordering causes the signal to be lost. 3. Is there any automation on the track/bus? Volume automation, obviously, but pan automation can also cause unexpected drops in volume. 4. You're running the paid version, but I've seen cases where a plugin reverts to demo mode on its own. What are the demo restrictions, e.g. does it drop out at intervals? Maybe a screenshot of your minimal project that shows the problem might help, just to see how everything's routed. This might seem like a left-field longshot, but what happens if you substitute a different reverb in your original project?

I don't care how scarred the backs of my hands get, I am not going to bite him back. Bad enough that I take a hit off the milkshake straw after he's licked it.

This spoiled-rotten pup has a dozen chew toys and various chew snacks. It's not because he's short of things to gnaw on. There's just something about the texture of microphone cables that is irresistible. Yesterday, I turned around in my chair and thought he was chewing on yet another cable. I jumped out of my chair, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and shouted "NO!!!. As he turned those cute puppy eyes toward me, I saw that he'd actually been chewing on a stick that happened to be situated in a nest of cables. I felt just awful, and immediately took him to the store for a bag of pig ears. To let me know we were still pals, he playfully bit my hand. I deserved that, I guess.

Paul Simon: "punk was invented for those who can't play a musical instrument, rap for those who can't sing." Now there's a third option for those who just can't be bothered, period. It's called "democratization". The same process that turned millions of people into infectious disease and/or international relations experts, strippers with an iPhone into millionaires, named a Royal Navy ship "Boaty McBoatface" and gave "Keeping up with the Kardashians" a Peoples' Choice award. Everybody gets a Participation Trophy! Of course none of that applies to those of us enjoying a million-dollar recording studio in a laptop, pretending to command a full orchestra, pretending to have perfect pitch, pretending to know what an oud is, taking credit for some loops we found online, and generally letting software polish our turds for us. No, that's completely different.

Two points: 1. Having a master bus is not a technical requirement. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have one. 2. A bus alone will not change the sound of your mix. A bus with no gain and no fx will be completely transparent. You can route that bus into another bus into another bus and the sound will not change. Normally, a master bus is where the mix is brought up to desired levels. That implies that levels going into the bus are lower than the ultimate target. Take a look at your bus meters; they should be well below 0 dB, preferably around -12 but no higher than -6. If not, lower every track until it is.

First thought this morning was I'll roll up all the cables today (gig this weekend) and will be able to get through the week without the puppy destroying any more mic cables. Sweetwater will be disappointed, but that's tough. So this happened while I was rolling up a different cable. At least he severed it near the end, so I'll be able to salvage a 19.8' cable from this 20-footer.

I did not, because a) I don't yet understand exactly what's happening, and b) it might turn out to be more of a Kontakt issue. Loading three identical nki's into one instance of Kontakt isn't a normal scenario for me. Especially not nki's that are so heavily scripted as SSS2 is. Usually when I have a lot of instruments, they're all different nki's.

I have been experiencing some weirdness with SSS2, although I am enjoying it. With all the new instruments, I thought maybe SSS2 might become my new go-to percussion library. But you can only load three instruments at a time, so that means multiple instances for a percussion-heavy composition. The first two instances worked fine, but when I added a third, some samples refused to play. I decided to load the third one into a new instance of Kontakt to see if that worked better (it did). In the process, I decided to save a snapshot of the original SSS2 instance to accommodate the move. However, when I attempted to load the snapshot into the new instance, it did not appear on the list. In the original instance, I had "User" and "Factory" categories, but the "User" group did not show up anywhere else. I went on a hunt for the snapshot I'd saved, and yup, there it was under Public User. But because I had renamed the previous SSS2 instance (I called them Perc1, Perc2, and Perc3), the snapshot was saved under a subdirectory there named for the instance and consequently unavailable to any subsequent instance that wasn't named Perc3. I use snapshots with other libraries without such confusion. They, however, just stash user-created snapshots with all the others by default. The only justification for using a LUA-approved folder location is that the sample library itself can then be made read-only. But who does that?

Self-taught guy here. We often underestimate how much self-education just seeps into our subconscious, simply by listening to music. Lennon and McCartney weren't formally trained, but musicologists still analyze their compositions. They drew from a rich tradition of English popular music, threw in some American influences, and mixed them up with a heavy dose of creativity. But would they have accomplished what they did without also leveraging the knowledge of the "fifth Beatle", a formally-trained composer and multi-instrumentalist? Personally, I just know enough buzzwords to use as incantations whenever my bandmates question my wisdom. Don't like my arrangement? Hemidemisemiquaver! Mixolydian! Diminished Seventh! Grovel, lowly acolyte!

We could all get jumpsuits and form a Bowie tribute band that plays at casinos.

To answer the original post: Is ripple edit necessary? Not at all. That doesn't mean it's not a very useful feature for some users' workflows. So is the Matrix View. I don't use either feature. Come to think of it, the list of features I don't use is pretty extensive. Somebody else likely considers each of them essential.

I use a Chrome extension called Fakespot. It's a handy addition because it warns you about fake reviews on Amazon. This is what it says about the site linked in the OP: Whois shows the ownership of worldofsoftwar (sic) has been obfuscated through a third party. This is common practice when the site owners don't want you to know who they really are. Their contact info is "withheldforprivacy.com". Registrant name is "Redacted for Privacy".

Well, I suppose technically I can play rings around Keith nowadays. By the same logic I play better drums than John Bonham, better guitar than Stevie Ray Vaughn, and better harpsichord than Amadeus Mozart.

That looks like a pirate site, Tim. As a general rule, Spectrasonics does not discount its products, You're just gonna have to bit the bullet. To quote Lucy from Disenchantment, "do it...do it...do it".