bitflipper

I wasn't going to suggest Process Monitor, at least not until every other avenue of investigation had been explored. As you've discovered, diagnosing a problem via Process Monitor often requires some deep archaeological digging. Unfortunately, the log isn't revealing anything you didn't already know, namely that CW is unable to overwrite the CWP file due to a sharing violation. There is another tool that's more explicit in identifying which process has a file open, but it's been years since I've used it and can't remember what it was called. I'll see if I can dig it up. [EDIT] Ah, the tool I was thinking of is called Handle, another one written by Mark Russinovich. It lists all open file handles. This is a DOS command, so you'll need to write its output to a text file and then search the text file. Open a command prompt and type: Handle64 > junk.txt & notepad junk.txt You can also use Handle to search for a specific file name, using the -u option: Handle64 -u {filename}

Semantic distinction: YMMV <> BS

Yes. Just don't use any computer-based effects while recording, and then raise your buffer sizes while mixing if you'll be using a lot of effects. (You may think you won't be using a lot of fx, but everybody eventually does. The cornucopia of cheap digital effects available is just too alluring.)

My pulse noticeably quickened just looking at that slideshow. I would not want to be the guy on the downstairs end! How spoiled we've become with smaller, lighter gear. For years I packed around a PA that required two guys to load each speaker into the van. Today, my PA speakers weigh about 35 lbs each and are smaller than just the horns from that old PA. This past Sunday I went to jam at my friends' house, way out in the boonies. It was surprisingly fun, despite being uncomfortably warm. We played outdoors, widely spaced and separated by clear shower curtains. But doing this required packing up and moving my 80 lb. synth for the first time in 9 months. I also took one of my old Roland keyboard amps, which I hadn't used in years. Those things are made out of real wood, and heavy. That night I went to bed with an aching back.

You might want to consider using track templates when inserting Kontakt. That way, you're assured of getting exactly what you want without having to fiddle with Kontakt's sometimes obtuse UI. Well, that is you only have to fiddle with it once. The issue, I think, is that Cakewalk is going by the number of outputs the soft synth advertises, not the number of outputs you're actually using. I don't think it would have any way of knowing how you've got Kontakt configured internally. Again, you can avoid all that by setting up some generic track templates. I have one specifically for strings, for example, with separate outputs for violin, viola, cello and bass. Each audio track will then be pre-named and always in the same order, which avoids confusion when mixing. I do the same thing for Superior Drummer.

It does not. That's so you can enable/disable effects during playback without messing up the sync. You can, however, disable delay compensation independently.

To be honest, I didn't blame the movers. They didn't know what they were doing, and neither did I. I'd never moved a grand piano before. Yes, it has casters. But they don't work well even on a hardwood floor. Wouldn't have helped anyway, as the only way to get it in the house was to remove the legs and turn it on its side. Four guys could barely lift it, and there were steps. It got dropped on the concrete steps, hence the gouge. It's only a 5' 4" baby grand, but it still weighs probably 700 pounds. If I ever sell this house, I'm advertising it as "includes a pool table and a grand piano".

You've just revived some painful memories of moving my piano into my current home. Did I hire actual piano movers? No, I saved money by hiring a couple guys with a truck. Now my once-beautiful piano has an ugly gash along one side. I rearranged the entire living room so the blemish would face a wall.

Yeh, that's the ticket. I'm always delighted when a simple tweak makes a radical difference. The guitar tones are richer, lyrics more intelligible, drums punchier. Great job.

What makes it confusing for newbies is that DAWs are made to look like their hardware precedents. Animated pixels that look like faders and buttons, but don't actually do anything themselves. They're just a place to aim at with your mouse. While that does help make controls' functions more obvious, at least if you've used hardware in the past, no piece of software will ever actually do everything a hardware console does. One of those things is inserting a trim pot at the front end, ahead of all active electronics, that can reduce the signal that the mixer sees. There simply is no such thing in your computer, despite what the pictures show. Cakewalk actually gets the signal way down the line and must work with what it's given. It has no direct connection to the outside world. Bottom line is that you have to set input levels outside the computer, in the real world.

In the 80's I had a gig in a fancy athletic club, the kind of place where people wear their sweaters on their backs with the arms tied in front around their necks. To look athletic, I guess. Mostly it was a place where movers and shakers cut deals while dining on their company's credit card. My job was to noodle quietly in the background while people ate. Hey, it paid really well and how many gigs go from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM? It might have been a dream gig, except that the piano sounded absolutely dreadful. Trying to play it quietly just made plinky dead-sounding notes. One night, I opened the lid and to my shock the entire piano had been stuffed with cardboard. Not in any manner remotely respectful of the instrument's tone, not using some kind of "acoustical cardboard" - just flattened boxes laid atop the strings.

This article describes methods for measuring touchweight. They suggest using stacks of nickels taped together, as nickels are 5 grams and unlike other coins that weight hasn't changed over the years. That piece says most pianos are around 50 grams, which is surprising, even counter-intuitive. It means the average acoustic piano takes far less effort than the average electronic piano. Steinways vary from 47 at the top of the keyboard to 50 grams at the bottom. Acoustic pianos vary a LOT. I remember the first time I played a Steinway and was blown away by how lightly I could hit the keys and still make a sound. It was a solo gig at a fancy-schmantsy wedding. I was there just for ambiance, and I'd never before been able to play so quietly with such ease. Only then did I understand why Steinways fetch the prices they do. There is nothing else like them.

Keep looking. You'll find it eventually.

https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/keyboard-action-and-key-weight-experiment/?utm_content=article1-button&utm_source=insync&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20200822-t1 This was a test of how "heavy" or "light" the action is on different digital pianos and synths. I've always liked the feel of Yamaha keybeds and was surprised at how much pressure it takes to play them. I would have assumed that I'd prefer a lighter touch. The heaviest of all was the Hammond SK-1, not a piano but nice to have as a reference, and not an instrument I associate with requiring a lot of muscle to play. My own primary keyboard (Korg Kronos) was in the middle of the pack, interesting because I've always considered it a pretty stiff action. However, that particular instrument skews the results because it's a progressively-weighted keybed, meaning it takes more force to hit the low notes than the high notes (like an acoustic piano),. Now I know why I don't solo in the bottom octave.

The effects of a bad economy are not applied evenly. Premium ice cream, for example, always does well during recessions. I might not be able to afford new tires for my car, but dammit I can still enjoy some ice cream and I'm gonna splurge on the good stuff. Music software similarly falls under the category of inexpensive luxuries. I can't afford a new synthesizer, but a sample library remains in reach. It just won't be the full VSL suite. Sure, we could conceivably get to a point where collecting Kontakt libraries is no longer feasible due to NI's greed and/or mismanagement. But if that happens, another platform will appear to fill the void. Remember, Kontakt wasn't the first sampler, just the most popular. It could fade away. Remember when WordStar, Lotus 123, DBase and CP/M ruled their respective markets?

It's a child window of the main page, so its URL is not the one in the title bar, and is unavailable from a context menu.

Click on the "share" icon at the bottom, in the player window.

Just testing...had to re-figure out how to post a link to a Soundclick-hosted song, too. https://soundclick.com/r/s8e73k This WiP began as a demo for tritik's new IRID regenerative reverb plugin, which I'll be reviewing in next month's SoundBytes. I used it on the piano intro (that's not a pad you hear, it's reverb on the piano!) and on the violin (the amazing solo violin from AudioModeling that I reviewed in May).

Thanks! I knew there had to be a way. This is why musicians should not design software. Or skyscrapers, for that matter.

Love the tune, Keith. But yeh, gotta agree it's too loud. My ears are surely not golden these days, having been tarnished by too many decades on the stage, but even I can hear the distortion. Tom, I understand; you're a guitarist and tube devotee, so distortion is your native ecosphere. Tom does understand the math, though, and he's right about limiting for MP3 encoding. Mathematically speaking, you can only guarantee no overs in an MP3 by setting the hard limit to -3 dB. That's a little extreme, though, and -1 dB should soften the blow a lot.

Just visited my Soundclick page this morning to upload a new tune. I hadn't been there in ages and since my last visit they've totally redesigned the site. Now I can't figure out how to replace a file with a newer version. You can add and delete, but not replace. Kind of defeats the purpose of posting works-in-progress for your friends' comments. Anybody know how to replace an existing song with a new mix?

I just got a new headphone amplifier today, and have been surfing around looking for high-fidelity content to test it out with. I thought "hmm, I should find one of Jerry's tunes, that'd be a good test". And yay, here's a new one. Thank you, Jerry! No critique, just "thank you, Jerry". Love your stuff.

I have run into similar situations many times in the past, where Windows was insisting that a file was open even though I was sure I hadn't done it myself. On rare occasions, it was the O/S' mistake, but those always involved files on remote servers and required rebooting the server to resolve. However, the other 95% of the time it was a legit sharing violation involving some process/file association that I wasn't aware of. Every time, the tool I used to troubleshoot the issue was Process Explorer from sysinternals.com. Give it a shot.

When I started using EBU standards as my guide, the first thing I did was go through all my old mixes and see how close they'd come to meeting those targets. Surprisingly, most weren't terribly far off the mark. But I noticed that some of them were way too "quiet" when objectively measured. In particular, pure orchestrations tended to fall around -20 or even -22. "Now, that won't do!" I thought, and proceeded to pull them up to match the rest. To my dismay, those pseudo-classical pieces sounded just awful when raised up to match the pop/rock stuff. At the other end of the spectrum, some of the already too-loud mixes also suffered a little when turned down. Worst of all, when concatenated into an album, the subjective volume variation seemed to get worse, not more consistent as expected. The lesson learned: yes, it really does depend on the song: its genre, instrumentation, tonal profile and even its arrangement. Of course, loudness levels should at least respect if not conform to standards for movies, streaming, radio and television. But trusting a meter exclusively can have its own perils.

People use ASIO because it's efficient, allowing for reduced latency. However, latency is irrelevant to playback. These days, I use WASAPI for the reasons given by Noel. Some very large projects can take 10-15 minutes to load, so I often listen to music or watch Dave Gorman on YouTube while I'm waiting.