John Bradley

Thanks for the kind word, guys! I've been doing nothing but covers on-and-off in CW since the mid-'90s, mostly as an intellectual "try to figure out all the bits that make up the song" exercise. Other than my wife (who wishes I'd wear headphones while I'm looping two bars of a song over and over again — she has a point), and a handful of friends that I send them to (where they're probably deleted, unlistened) nobody's ever heard my stuff. It's nice to think that the end result isn't wretched, and that I'm not necessarily living in some delusion bubble. We all knew that one guy who sings and plays guitar and was determined to 'make it' in the (now deceased) music business, despite having no talent for either. Don't be that guy. And while it's lovely of you to compliment my singing, I can assure you it's entirely a function of the Power of Computing. "The computer sees the off-pitch warblings as a series of 1s and 0s..."

I won a free copy of Breaktweaker from Sonicstate years ago. It's neat, and gives you a way to do all those Skrillexy slowdown/stutter effects and whatnot. Can't say I've ever used it for anything — not my scene. If you've ever wanted to do something like that, it's certainly a bargain at $18. I've also got Vocalsynth (1). I've at least used it once or twice for some vocoder-ish effects. Not an everyday effect by any stretch, but somewhat useful. Of the three listed in the deal, Trash 2 is the only one I use on any sort of regular basis. Can be useful to destroy a sound and then just mix in a touch of that signal via an aux or whatever.

Agreed!

Not saying they shouldn't display the octave # in the blobs as well; it's very useful information. Just that shouldn't be an all-or-nothing proposition tied together with the accidental. In image #2 I can tell that it's a Dsomething in the 5th octave by context. Both by the existence of an E5 right above it, and also the piano keyboard (not shown) on the left edge of the PRV, which has a C5 aligned with the white octave line below the D.

Howard the Duck -- something George Lucas can look back upon and say, "Y'know, my Star Wars Holiday Special wasn't so bad after all!" The kids today think they know 'cringe' -- they didn't live through the '70s and '80s. We were there at cringe-zero!

Other than Photoshop from 5 or 10 years ago... They clearly have the 'B' team (at best) doing the PS and Illustrator development these days. They introduce new bugs faster than they stamp out old ones, which isn't saying much since there are well-documented bugs that the users have been complaining about for years. But there's no time to fix old bugs (or improve stability) when there's exciting new features to develop that no one ever asked for -- like a spellcheck in Illustrator. But I'm completely down with you re. the $600/yr "designer tax". A merry go round I can never get off, without losing the ability to access anything I've created in the last decade.

As someone who spends a lot of time in the PRV, I feel that the note name display glossing over a crucial bit of data here. See the highlighted line, which is a C# (or Db as the PRV insists, but that's another matter). In the first image there's almost certainly enough space to stick a lower-case 'b' after the D. In the second image, there's enough space to stick a '...' (and definitely room to stick the lower case 'b'). Not until the third image is it willing to mention the most important aspect of the note, that it's a Db and not a D. Not telling me that until there's room to also tell me what octave it's in isn't entirely helpful. I don't care what octave it is; I can already tell that from context. Ideally, I'd like to see whatever the PRV prints in the note blobs clipped to the printable area within the blob. If that means the flat or the octave number is partially truncated, that's fine. Better that than it tell me something that's flat-out incorrect: the note is not a D! Or, if clipping the text is a performance thing (seems unlikely), I'd settle for it displaying as many characters as it can fit within the blob (e.g. at least display 'Db' in image #2, rather than waiting until there's room to display the full 'Db5' within the blob. Not telling me that it's a Db, instead indicating that the string has been truncated via the '...' is of debatable utility.

Bit of UI weirdness has shown up in 2020.05 build 039. I have a project saved with multiple tabs open in the Multidock. Open it, display the Console, save the project. Close and reopen the project, and the Tempo window is displayed in the Multidock (or whatever the rightmost tab in the list happens to be), even though the Console tab is the selected one (no black line above it, has the close tab 'x' on it). Touching the Console tab fixes the issue. Running nVidia driver 432.00 on a GTX750, haven't changed either in probably a year. FWIW.

I had the Focusrite 4.64.15.598 beta driver on my machine for a while, but at some point started getting auto-BSODs on boot. Booting to safe mode and removing the driver fixed that. Went back to the previous official release: 4.63.24.564, which BSODs sometimes when I change the buffer size, but at least the machine boots again. Just went to Focusrite seeing if they'd ever updated the beta driver to a less problematic version. They currently list no beta drivers for their USB interfaces. But that's because they put out a new official release: 4.65.5.658 I've booted (once so far) with the new driver installed and no BSOD problem, so good so far. Maybe I can even change the buffer size without crashing the entire system... fingers crossed!

Been wanting Omnisphere and/or UVI Falcon for years. I've got a lot of synth vsts that emulate ancient hardware (Arturia Collection, etc.), but they've all got arcane UIs and various limitations that I never get around to fully mastering. Or forget by the next time I need to use them. I like to build my own patches, and think I'd be better served with a single powerful synth that can do it all. But $499 for Omnisphere or $349 for Falcon is just never going to happen. I don't think I've ever seen either seriously discounted. (Given Spectrasonics doesn't do the annual paid upgrade thing, I can see why they wouldn't want to offer a huge discount, if any.) Oh well.

Excellent! I'll install the VST2 versions and pass along the info to the developer.

Cool, that worked. Thanks!

Thanks! Love the cat avatar, btw. Oddly compelling.

Does anyone have that AD2 drum map? The download link on Noel's page no longer works.

Yeah, I know, who covers a Dolby song that isn't "Blinded Me With Science"? Well, I did that one already, and Submarines has always been my favorite TD track. And I figure if anyone's going to know the original, it's going to be a bunch of old synth guys. We are a bunch of old synth guys, right? One of Our Submarines cover ---- Anyway. Technical data for anyone who might be interested: Drums: Session Drummer 3 + doubling with 2getheraudio's K1CK and SN4RE vsts Synths: Arturia's Mini (basses and various fx), Jupiter 8 (lead strings), Solina (more strings), CMI (old school 'pitch shift sample by changing playback speed' thing), and Prophet, as well as OP-X PRO II (brass and the delayed syn in the 2nd chorus), Spitfire's Epic Strings, iZotope Iris 2 (fx), and several TX16Wx's to trigger various samples. Guitars: The instrument I actually play (everything else is 'typed in'). Recorded direct, processed with Blue Cat Audio's Axiom (which I love!). Effects: standard ProChannel modules, BREVERB, Valhalla's Supermassive, FreqEcho, and Delay plugins, iZotope's Vocal Doubler, Nectar 2, and Ozone 8. Also a touch of GW MixCentric Stereo on the master bus, prior to Ozone. Adds a nice bit of 'secret sauce' in small amounts. And much Melodyne Studio 4 on the vox. I'm well aware that I'm not a singer, but I do it anyway. I'm what I have available. ---- This is the first time I've posted anything to this 'Songs' subforum. If I've committed some grave faux pas, let me know.

I recently picked up HoRNet's AutoGain Pro and AutoGain Pro Mk 2 plugins, which are automated volume-riders. Stick them on a track and they will monitor the difference between the track's volume and something else (another track, or a constant reference level). There'a a Gain parameter that is constantly moving up or down so as to keep the track output at the desired level regardless of the input signal level. So far so good. But all attempts at recording that parameter have failed. I set the plugin to 'write automation' mode, and in CbB I set the automation write mode to 'overwrite' ('touch' or 'latch' do not work) for that track, create an automation lane for the Gain parameter, and set it to write. If I hit play on the sequence, automation data is recorded by CbB. Unfortunately, it's all a constant "0.0db" value, even though the parameter in the VST is moving around. I know I'm recording the correct parameter, because if I set the VST to 'read automation', turn off write mode on the automation lane, and draw an automation envelope of some sort in the lane, the VST's Gain parameter (and track audio) responds accordingly to the drawn envelope. --- The HoRNet guy responded to my support request with this: thanks for contacting the hornet support-team; I must admit I am not an expert of cakewalk but few DAWs (even cubase) have some kind of threshold level that removes automation below it. Can you check in the settings and see if you spot it and deactivate it? I can't find anything like that in the CbB docs. Any ideas? Anyone out there using this plugin and gotten it to work? Any other volume-rider VSTs out there that do work, in the sub $30 category? Thanks!

Makes sense. I could see wanting a split within a single PRV as well for just that sort of thing. Run into your issue when I want enter a high string part while still seeing what I have the bass doing. If they're 3 or 4 octaves apart I have to have everything vertically scaled down to get both parts on screen at the time, and can't necessarily see what I'm doing at that point. Or consistently enter notes where I want them.

I'd sorta like to have Kontakt — if only for the free stuff from 3rd parties — but NI insists on never offering it for a price I'd be willing to pay. Like the current Summer Madness sale (or whatever), where they're doing 50% off upgrades, but not 50% off for first-time buyers who might be willing to drop $300 for (not-so) KOMPLETE, but are never going to spend $599 for same. Strikes me as bad business sense. "First one's free, kids!" and all. 'Lose' money to get people into the ecosystem, then get them hooked on relatively inexpensive upgrades every year or two. I even own $300 worth of NI stuff in the form of FM8 and Session Horns Pro. Which entitles me to exactly nothing towards buying KOMPLETE. Also, I find it slightly amusing that Session Horns Pro is a $150 Kontakt library (something like 30-40GB) that plays in the free Kontakt Player, but somehow someone's freeware "Yet Another Collection of '808 Samples" Kontakt instrument requires the full-blown version.

Doesn't appear to work, at least not as expected/desired. I've got two floating PRVs, both set to "Lock Contents". But they don't display different tracks. Clicking 'bass' (or whatever) from the track list pane in either of them changes both of them to displaying the clicked track. I can have multiple PRVs all displaying the same track, which isn't especially useful. Through a combination of random clicking around I can get one of them displaying the bass track (lit) and the drum track (ghosted) and the other one just displaying the bass track by itself, which is a thing... but what I want is just the bass track (lit) in one of them and just the drum track (lit) in the other. And in any event, I don't want a PRV track pane click in one of the PRVs changing anything going on in the other PRV.

A split in the PRV would be nice, though ideally I'd like to have multiple, unconnected PRV windows. I produce backing tracks for my band, and include bass and drum parts A) so I can have a finished produced track for my own purposes, and B) as a "here's what I'd like you guys to play" teaching tool. It'd be really nice to have the drum and bass tracks displayed in their own PRV windows (and dragged out of the multidock onto a second monitor). That way the notes won't potentially overlap, and I can zoom them differently to best display the respective note ranges. If for technical reasons the two (or more PRVs) would have to share the same horizontal scale, that wouldn't be the end of the world, though of course it'd be preferable of they could be set to different horizontal scales.

Re. Alt while selecting - Learn something every day! Still, a keybindable "Split at Selection" would be handy. I'd personally prefer to draw the selection first (and zoom in to verify I'm not trimming off the front or end of a phrase) before doing the split. Also, there are many ways of doing a selection that don't involve drawing (clicking between markers, for instance), and you then might want to use as the basis for a Split at Selection.

Not necessarily the case for all controllers. I've got an Akai MPK-49, which is bus powered. There's a power switch on the back, but it's inconvenient to get to in my setup. Left to it's own devices, the keyboard would be on (and glowing blue) whenever the computer is turned on, which is 24/7... so I have the MPK on one leg of a usb A/B switch, which let's me turn it on and off (and connect/disconnect it from the PC) via a more convenient location. Point being, I can turn the keyboard on while Cakewalk is running, and CW will pop up a dialog to the effect of "MPK-49 detected, use it?" It'll similarly complain when I disconnect it, but it's all good. But never ever disconnect a Focusrite Scarlett while CW is running. That is, assuming you're not a big fan of BSODs.

You can also unload all the patterns from SD3, just to avoid that sort of thing.

It would be very nice indeed if the PRV would remember the Note Names for frozen tracks (while they're frozen) and display accordingly. (e.g. Diatonic for nearly everything, or drum names for a drum track). As it currently stands, whenever you freeze a synth and look at it's PRV the note names are numeric, which is less than useful. You can temporarily override this by setting the Note Names back to Diatonic or whatever, but that doesn't stick between sessions. It displays note names correctly if you Unfreeze the synth, so it's not like the freezing process permanantly loses that information. Use case: I do covers, and always create drums, bass, percussion, and then the various synths, in that order. (All 'typed in', and done with VSTs.) Then I do the actual performed bits: guitar and vocals. In order to keep latency down during the tracking phase I freeze all the VSTs as I add them. But it's not uncommon that I want to look at what notes one of the frozen VSTs is playing when I'm adding one of the later parts. Yeah, there's the dark gray and light gray shading of the note lanes in the PRV, but that just doesn't look like a piano to me -- I rely on the more-keyboardy-looking scale shown in the Diatonic mode, and especially on the note names displayed in the note-blobs. --- Slightly related request: the PRV should acknowledge the current key and display in-key (at least) note names accordingly. As far as I can tell, it always displays that note between D4 and E4 as "Eb4", even if I'm in the key of F#.

Sometimes, when I right-click in the Track window to Insert Instrument it forgets the way I've organized my VSTi plugins, and presents me with it's own idea of a list, wherein most of them are filed under "Uncategorized". If I cancel that, and go to an existing track and pull up the Replace Synth menu, which always remembers to use the 'my synths.pgl' layout, that's enough to fix the Insert Instrument command... for a while, at least. Note that I don't have to actually replace the synth, it's enough to just display the menu of synths available. I suppose I could use the Insert Soft Synth from the top-level menu, but I've been doing it the Insert Instrument way for years, and it didn't used to forget the menu layout.