John Bradley

That is one heck of a deal. I got Tantra 2 for $55ish a few months ago, and Thorn for $30, and thought those were good prices. And they were, because unlike so many things I’ve bought, I actually use them on a regular basis!

I absolutely hate the way Cakewalk can have multiple overlapping midi clips but can’t display them usefully in the track view. Copy a phrase from earlier in the song and past it elsewhere and you often get visual ‘holes’ in the track view even though there’s no such gap in the PRV. Problem is exacerbated if “Paste as new clips” is enabled, and it seems to be a default that keeps coming back. i’ve never wanted overlapping midi clips in the first place, and whenever I get one I have to bounce, resplit clips at the markers, and rename the clips because the name got lost in the bounce. It’s clunky as hell.

Tantra 2 at $25 and Thorn at $20 are both worth grabbing if you haven’t got them already. Good price on Knifonium at $25, but everytime I’ve played with it it’s failed to wow me. YMMV. I don’t get the appeal of analog EQ emulations or console emulations which is great – it’s saved me a ton of money! ?

The old Steely Dan trick – a relatively sparse mix with just a few instruments… impeccably well recorded and played. The songs virtually mixed themselves at that point.

I play a little game wherein I delete each one as soon as it appears. I call it “Arturia Solitare”.

Cool, I was just thinking “there’s not enough icons on my desktop”…

While I freeze synths as well, typically the tracks I’m freezing are audio tracks with multiple or computationally heavy FX on them. E.g. guitars and vocals, both of which get processed entirely in the box, other than a hardware compressor I have on the input. Yes, I could just go crazy with busses and put FX I’ll want to keep live on them, so they can be tweaked during the mixing stage (eq, comp, delay, reverb) and I do that already. But panning is a per-track sort of thing, and short of creating a bus per track… Anyway, just a (mild) desire for more sophisticated panning of stereo tracks within Cakewalk, not a huge problem that needs a workaround.

Wish we could get something like this built into the Cakewalk console. I have V1, but rarely use it, mostly because I freeze everything, and effect freezing is an all-or-nothing deal, so this effect winds up getting frozen on tracks. Can’t adjust the pan later without unfreezing and refreezing. Whereas the Console’s volume and pan controls are always ‘live’.

Which was handy, given that the synth’s simple architecture was pretty much only capable of basic patches. ? If they’d have glued on some sort of built-in reverb they’d have ruled the world!

Related. One of my fave videos, in which Mr. Synthmania demonstrates a BigSky on a number of synths, including the (crap) Casio VL-1 toy. With predictable results. Delicious reverb can fix anything!

I don't get the Juno love either. Had a Juno-6 back in the '90s and gave it away for free at some point after I got my Quadrasynth. Don't regret it in the least. Like most of the '70s & early '80s synths, it just didn't sound all that good unless you had the outboard effects to add the 'yum' factor. Like, say a Strymon BigSky that had magically fallen into a wormhole so as to appear 40 years ahead of time. And if we're talking VSTs, which I assume we are, why bother with the budget model when Jupiter 8 VSTs exist?

I've had the issue where I've used the freebie demo of a product (Steven Slate Drums), and then bought the full version of same - which removed the demo (they can't coexist on the same machine) and broke the projects I used it on. But that's another matter entirely.

That’s why I love the Arturia synths and just don’t ‘get’ Syntronik.

Anyone tried it out yet?

Y'know, for a free forum in support of a free DAW, this place sure does cost me quite a bit of money! ?

I’ll note that I misspoke in my explanation above. A “clean click” with zero movement of the mouse doesn’t draw a note at all. You have to drag to the right slightly to get a note to appear (with the current default length). If you drag right a little further, you get the wierdness where the note snaps to near-zero length. If you haven’t released the mouse already and keep dragging right, the note length snaps to where the cursor is, and eventually snaps to the next grid position if you keep going. This is all dependent in various ways on the snap magnetism setting, and how far apart the grid lines are in pixels. I’m often editing/creating drum parts, and as such want 16th note snap (if not higher) and want to see at least 4 bars at a time in the PRV, so my grid lines are fairly tight, and I run into this issue all the freakin’ time. Your mileage may vary. But preventing the notes from ever snapping to “to short to edit” would be most appreciated.

See the video below. I've got snap enabled, and the grid set to 16th notes. I'm drawing notes that are roughly a 32nd in duration. If you do a clean click, you get a note of the desired duration aligned with the grid. But if you move the cursor slightly to the right while clicking – because you're entering a bunch of notes and you're in a hurry – the note snaps to a tiny line (duration = 2 ticks). Once you've released the mouse (again, because you're quickly entering notes) it's not possible to stretch it because you can't grab the right edge. Pretty much all you can do (mouse-wise, without involving the Quantize command, etc.) is lasso them to select, delete, click one of the good notes to reset the default duration, and get back to note-drawing.. I can't imagine a case where having the note snap to a well-nigh uneditable 'zero duration' blob would ever be desirable. In any event, it's odd that the note does this snapping when the cursor moves into the rightmost 1/3rd (or 1/4th) of the blob, but if you keep dragging right it unsnaps to where the cursor is, before snapping to the next grid line as you keep going. Hardly fatal, but it's annoying and it happens frequently enough. At least for me. cakewalk prv.webm

Those would be known as “good developers”. ?

My biggest complaint with Massive X is that while I own it as part of Komplete 13, it’s the only VST out of over 1000 on my rig that I can’t run. Because it requires some instruction set extensions that showed up a few gens after my i7 CPU was made, rather than quietly falling back to generic x64 code and slightly worse performance. So, happy to hear it’s not all that. Pigments 3 (and this Phase Plant, presumably) run just peachy for my purposes.

But Waves is having their big Day That Ends In A 'Y' Sale!

T-Bone 2: $19 Big Beautiful Door: $29 Big Clipper: $29 Transgressor 2: $29 That Transgressor deal might be good for anyone who missed out on picking up Eventide's SplitEQ for $49 recently. They appear to do the same thing. https://www.audiodeluxe.com/category/brands/boz-digital-labs?f[0]=bm_field_on_sale_now%3Atrue

Yep, that juicy OME50OTC code just sitting there was too much to ignore, so I picked up SplitEQ for $50. Eventide has now extracted $90 from me that otherwise wouldn't have happened. Quite the 'screw up' on their part! Tried to get Physion for $25 as well, but the code only worked once. Just as well. Upon reflection, I can do everything Physion did (and more) by just routing audio to 2 tracks, putting SplitEQ on each at 'transient only' and 'tone only' settings, and then putting whatever VSTs I want to effect the two halves as desired - not limited to the few FX within Physion.

You got $25 off instead of 25%, were able to use it on sale priced products, and could use it over and over again. Other than that, it was a flawless promotion. Someone should lose their job over this. (Yes, several of us benefited greatly, AND Eventide got $40 from each of us that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, so win-win. But I’m not cynical enough - yet - to believe this massive screw-up was deliberate.)

Macrium Reflect Free Edition. Do a full backup. Generate the Macrium Restore boot disc/usb stick. Remove your boot HD and put it somewhere safe, replace with SSD. Boot the Restore media and restore the full image backup to your new drive, extending the partition out to the maximum size. Note: this is assuming your SSD is as large or larger than the HD it's replacing. It can grow the primary NTFS partition during the restore. I don't know if it can shrink it. Google that, if relevant.

UPDATE: The code is still working for me at least. I can only buy one plugin at a time, and have to keep going back to Groove3 to hit the Redeem Here button, but I've gotten a couple of them at $4 so far.