bitflipper

Installed the update and was reminded of another Spectrasonics annoyance - the need to re-authorize after every update. I just went through this a couple weeks ago when I moved Trilian and Omnisphere to another drive. Sneeze, and you have to re-authorize. Anyhow, I checked my version numbers and did indeed need to re-install the patch library but not the samples.

No, no no. I'm saying Trilian is a demanding instrument. Any improvements are welcome!

The notes don't make it clear if we need to download the patches and samples, too, or just the DLL.

I'll believe it when I see it. User-friendliness isn't exactly Spectrasonic's forte. I'll be downloading the update today, regardless. Anything that improves that resource hog's efficiency will be much appreciated. Although I use it a lot, the decision to do so is often predicated on track count. Combine Trilian with Omnisphere and you can almost hear the CPU wheezing from the effort.

It's a channel strip. A very good one, but just one of many on the market. Cheap, too, when on sale. [Just checked; it's a bargain right now for $45] Personally, I'm not a fan of channel strips. Sure, there's the convenience factor. But I prefer to combine my favorite individual effects in any signal chain. A couple potential alternatives: Cakewalk's own VX-64 is comparable but not identical, lacking a gate but adding an expander. Unfortunately, it's not sold separately so you'll need to have SONAR installed to have it. iZotope's versatile Neutron is fancier than Omni Channel, adding a visual parametric EQ and a transient designer. It's not designed specifically for vocals, but its sibling Nectar is. These are just the first two that come to mind. There are a great many more out there, including modular FX racks such as McDSP's 6050 and Slate's VMR that let you basically build your own channel strip. But I suspect that if you polled serious mixers the consensus would be that they generally don't use channel strips. Some top-tier vendors such as FabFilter don't even make one. Even Meldaproduction, which makes every kind of effect you've ever heard of and a few you haven't, doesn't make a channel strip. However, if you feel the convenience of a channel strip is desirable, there are plenty of options. Just google "channel strips".

One of the benefits I've noticed is that Melodyne syncs better with Cakewalk, e.g. their respective cursors are better able to match up to one another. Under version 4, I'd often have to switch focus back to Cakewalk before stopping and starting playback to avoid having Melodyne show a different part of the track than the DAW. I don't have to do that anymore. It's a small thing, but much appreciated. This guy pushed me over the edge...warning: don't watch these videos if you're absolutely determined to wait until the upgrade is $79 come Christmas.

For me, the volume-normalizing tool alone justified the cost. Haven't tried the de-esser yet.

I'm sure she's too young for this to be right, but I could swear she was my college Geology prof. It's the reason I gave up my childhood dream of being a geologist. Well, that and the realization that professional geologists don't spend their days just walking around looking for cool-looking rocks to take home. Many musicians do that, though.

Mystery solved. I had a look at the source, and it reads... while (strcmp(username, "Paulo") == 0; So it really is just you, man. Sorry.

You have a luthier? I have a guy in the back room of a music store who also repads clarinets. Dude, casually mentioning your luthier is like casually mentioning your personal assistant, head gardener or therapist.

I have never criticized the quality of Waves plugins. They are among the best there are. RBass remains a personal favorite. It's just their unhealthy obsession with copy protection that makes the brand undesirable. Their LA2A is indeed quite good, but there are many LA2A clone alternatives that are equally good, including Cakewalk's own CA2A. Once upon a time, Waves offered products that were truly unique and available nowhere else. Fortunately for consumers, that is no longer the case. Name any Waves product and I can suggest a comparable alternative from a vendor that won't treat you like a criminal.

I've had to recover Waves licenses twice. Although aggravating, it really wasn't a big deal. Still, given that most of Waves' competitors will never hassle you like that, why on earth would you put up with any aggravation at all?

I don't remember it being a long download. It was 1.3MB. But I only downloaded to my PC; I have not used the Android version.

What does the error message say?

I upgraded my system last week, too. But my priorities have shifted during the pandemic and I'm spending a lot of time playing video games, so the emphasis has shifted from minimum audio buffer size to maximum FPS. Consequently, my upgrade included a fancy video card. And I do mean fancy - it has a built-in light show. Plus I appreciate the added heat output now that it's getting cold outside.

Depending on what your reasons are for avoiding Chrome, the Brave browser might be a better choice for you. It's built on the Chrome engine but runs faster and isn't as intrusive. I don't post to (or even read) forums on my phone - yes, I still call it a "phone" - so I can't testify re the Android version, but Brave has been working well for me on my computer for several months now.

Ah, I did not know that. However, the driver's just tacking on some zeroes. What happens if Cakewalk's record wordlength is set to 24 bits even though the driver is offering up 32 bits? Wouldn't Cakewalk just strip off those added 8 bits and then put them back on? Or would the issue be a data type mismatch when calling the driver?

The "64 bit engine" option means that SONAR and CbB use 64 bits internally. That does double the amount of RAM used but does not affect file sizes. Of course, you can save your project as 64-bit files if you want, but nobody does. 32 bits is already overkill for amplitude granularity. As for recording, 24- vs. 32-bit makes no practical difference. If you choose the latter, it just means extra zeroes are appended to the data while recording, something that's going to eventually happen either way.

As a guitar player, you might try playing them on your 6-string and then converting that into MIDI to drive whatever synth you like. I know guitarists who prefer this method, but know that slides don't convert well, and IMO a bass part without slides is like playing Snakes 'n Ladders without Snakes. Don't be afraid to hand-plant bass parts in the PRV. With the exception of pads, nothing works better with mouse-inserted notes in the PRV than bass. It takes practice like anything else, but you can get excellent results, even with expressive acoustic basses. Synth bass lines in EDM are the easiest of all. My go-to for synth bass is Uhe's Zebra2. But then, I like more traditional and/or subtle bass sounds. For modern dance music there are gobs of options, including Cakewalk's own Z3ta+ and Rapture.

All drum samplers work that way - the MIDI note is just a trigger that causes the sample to be played in full. The note's duration is ignored. Try shortening all the notes in your drum track until they're barely-visible slivers. The drums will still play fine. There is but one exception to this. Some samplers offer a choke articulation that simulates when a drummer grabs a cymbal with his hand to stop it ringing. I don't know if SI Drums have that feature or not. If it's a single hit that you want to truncate, you may be able to use volume automation. If it's every cymbal hit that's a problem, route the cymbals/overhead mics to their own audio track and insert a gate. That's how it's done with real drums.

Yes, that's what I meant - that CC7 and/or CC11 messages are included in the data stream. Those are normally the only way volume information is conveyed. There is, I believe, a SysEx command for setting the master volume (similar to the master tuning SysEx command), but that's rarely used and certainly wouldn't be applied by default. Of course, individual instruments can choose how they respond to any CC, such as some orchestral libraries that tie CC1 to volume to make it easier to automate swells. Given that the files do contain volume information and it hasn't been modified, and those are just numbers that presumably Cakewalk doesn't alter, then we have to conclude that it's down to the way the VIs are responding - either in Cakewalk or in Reaper. There could have been some CC scaling going on in Reaper, making the instruments quieter and now they're just back where they should have been all along.

To answer the first part, as long as you keep SONAR installed you'll have access to every plugin that came with SONAR, including the proprietary ones that are explicitly tied to SONAR and can't normally be used in other DAWs. As far as the software is concerned, CbB is still SONAR. The speed with which waveforms are redrawn isn't impacted by the video card, even if it's a fancy one like yours. The overhead is incurred while Cakewalk/SONAR scans the audio data to create a "decimated" (low-res) version that's saved in the picture cache. As you can imagine, it's going to take a while to go through a gigabyte's worth of data. But you should only have to endure that process once, on import. If the only editing you're doing is splitting the clip and nondestructive slip-edits, that shouldn't require updating the picture cache. You don't actually have to physically delete those sections. For example, let's say you're separating a live recording into individual songs and eliminating the dead air and chatter in between. Just split the clip and use slip-edits to trim the two pieces. After that you can slide them along the timeline if necessary. These operations do not physically alter the underlying data, only how they are played back.

There are two possible explanations (assuming we can ignore the VIs): changes to volume (including expression and aftertouch) or velocity data. I don't have a great deal of experience importing MIDI, but my recollection is that velocities are not altered on import. I can't imagine why they would be. You'd have to examine the original data in another application or (even better) open it in a hex editor to make sure you know what some of the velocities actually are. If somehow there is no velocity data in the MIDI file (if that's even possible), then Cakewalk would set everything to the default value of 64. Of course, if that was happening it would be obvious because every note would have the same velocity. From your description, it sounds as though the music sounds correct but is just too loud. That would seem to eliminate velocities as the problem. So I'm guessing volume or expression CCs would be a more likely candidate. By default, Cakewalk does not send any MIDI volume commands to soft synths unless they are already embedded in the MIDI data. If the value over the volume slider says "(101)" that means "not sending anything". You should be able to look at the event list to see if there are any CC7 or CC11 events in there. If there is, then I'd expect Cakewalk to simply process them without modification, in which it comes down to how each synth interprets volume and expression, as there is no standardization here.

The idea is to save it up for your entire lifetime. Then, when you meet your final reward (e.g. driving your RV to Arizona), you dump it all out. I've been there, and can attest that that's what they've been doing. So much of it has been discarded all over the countryside that now nothing can grow there but cactus. Another mess us boomers have left for subsequent generations to clean up. Scattered light. For myself, I'm doing my part by burying all my saved up light in the backyard. No way those ungrateful kids are getting it. You know they'd just blow it all on one gloomy Northwest December. So the sun sets at 4:00 and it's raining every day? Oh, boo hoo. When I was a kid, before my generation gave you global warming, it snowed every day in Seattle. And we liked it that way.

Whenever someone asks me if I'm an idiot (frequent occurrence), I respond by saying: "If I was, would I possess the requisite comprehension, self-awareness and perceptivity essential to determine this fact?" - UbiquitousBubba