John Bradley

I was able to Claim the Perk via my iPad - neither desktop browser worked, for whatever reason. Redeemed it, and was able to add MangledVerb to my cart for $25 off. Quickly added the other 9 to the cart, and the code had been fixed to knock $2.50 off each, rather than $25... So, I've just saved myself $40, kinda. Worth noting that the Groove code knocks $25 off the full H9 Set (from $199 down to $174), which isn't a bad deal for 10 plugins, but it's not like I need them. Update: $40 successfully spent, $4 at a time...

Called it! Oh well, I suppose the $20 ebook I bought will still be of some use.

Well, I apparently broke it. Bought a thing on Groove3 so I'm now eligible for all the various Perks. Clicking Claim Perk on any of them puts up an "Error: Invalid Data. Reload the page and submit the form again" pop-up. In both Chrome and Edge, with all the privacy extensions disabled.

Huh. I also got a free year of Groove3 last year when I bought MPS 4.1, but in the Perks it says I need to purchase something from Groove3 to unlock the deal. Tempting to drop $20 on some videos I don’t need just to take advantage of this bug, but I’m pretty sure that the moment I do so, Eventide will have fixed it to be 25% off, not 25$, which would serve me right.

Recently got promo email from the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City announcing an upcoming Chubby Checker show. I mock Elton John for taking a 2 year period of admittedly top-notch work and pretty much coasting on that for the next 50 years, but Mr. Checker has been living since 1960 on the strength of a single song, God bless him! That said, to be 81 and have people only remember you because of a hit you recorded when you were 19… that has to be it’s own special form of Hell. Who wants to even be reminded of anything they did when they were 19?

I could happily go the rest of my life without hearing or playing Hard To Handle or What I Like About You ever again.

Note, if you have Native Instruments KOMPLETE, I'd also recommend adding process exclusions for Komplete Kontrol.exe ScanPluginsApp_x64.exe So that Komplete Kontrol doesn't take forever to launch. It'll still scan all your VSTs on startup - doesn't seem to be any way to prevent that - but not running a virus scan on each one every time speeds up the process dramatically.

...thanks to the over-aggressive Real Time Protection offered by Windows Defender (MsMpEng.exe). Some people suggest adding exclusions for all your VST folders, but that seems dangerous to me, given that VSTs are the only executable code I routinely download and run on my rig, and "check out this great new free VST from some guy" seems like a pretty good attack vector. Note that adding folder exclusions excludes the files from being scanned ever, even in scheduled/manual Quick or Full Scans. Instead, in Windows Security's Virus & Threat Protection settings | Exclusions add a pair of Process Exclusions for C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Shared Utilities\VstScan.exe C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\Cakewalk.exe The latter is probably unnecessary, but what the heck. Anyway, Cakewalk startup happens much more quickly (over 1000 VSTs scanned/installed on this system), and any Defender system scans will still check all the VSTs for naughtiness.

Nevermind! Apparently Chrome got cranky for some reason. Exiting and restarting it, and now (non-Admin) CW can launch 'help' tabs as usual. "Have you tried turning it off and then back on again?"

Default browser is Chrome. It used to work, but I recently upgraded my system SSD from 512GB to 1TB, which has mildly upset a few things (IK Multimedia activations, etc.). Possibly related? Any thoughts? FWIW, none of the items in the Help menu that would launch a browser window, such as Documentation or What's New? work.

I’ve only ever tried pitch shifting monophonic signals. Shifting polyphonic sounds (I assume the acoustic is strumming some chords, as they so often do), I’m not sure if you can do that at all and not have it sound weird, even if you have Studio with its polyphonic support. Maybe on a nice clean piano, but guitars are jangly creatures full of weird overtones and tuning compromises. Good luck!

In my experience, you can pitch shift +/- about 2 half steps. Beyond that vocals and acoustic instruments start getting noticably wonky. If you record your electric guitars DI and do the amp modelling in-the-box, you can go a little further with pitch shifting, as feeding the shifted (DI) through an amp sim will mask quite a bit the added artifacts. Obviously you can get away with more shifting if the amp is heavily distorting the signal. Not so much if you're feeding it into a squeaky clean Fender Twin or Roland JC-120 model.

The "click the marker and hit Delete while keeping the mouse button held down" is handy, and does what I want... but you could see why someone might use CW for decades and never run across that tidbit. We're used to trying various combinations of Shift, Alt, Ctrl and Left/Right clicking and double-clicking to see 'what can be done' with an object. And the modifiers come before the click, typically. Clicking and hitting some non-standard key mid-click is somewhat alien to the Windows Experience. Anyway, the request for a more intuitive (albeit slower) way to delete markers via the pop-up still stands. Even if I no longer need it... until I forget how to do the cool thing!

On more than one occasion, I've double-clicked in the timeline - like a fool! - and been treated to having all of my tracks un-minimized and made slightly taller than minimized but considerably shorter than they used to be when opened. Presumably it's doing one of the Fit xxx to Window commands, which I've never ever wanted to do at all, either deliberately or accidentally. Whatever, my bad. But unless I'm missing something (which is likely enough), there doesn't seem to be a way to Undo that little slice of heaven. It's not an event that was added to the Undo/Redo stack. And selecting all tracks and doing the Quick Group ctrl-click thing on the minimize button only minimizes the track you clicked on. Nor does 'minimize track' appear to be a bindable command in the Key Bindings place. So you get to click the little double-up-arrow thing on every track in your project (at least the ones that weren't hidden away in Folders), which could be quite many. Tedious.

Right clicking on a marker opens a pop-up window that lets you rename it and adjust its time/pitch. It'd be keen if Delete was also an option. Yes, I can open the Markers window, find it in there, and delete it that way. But it's good UI to have common operations on an object available via direct manipulation of the object itself, not finding it elsewhere in a list of such objects.

Used to use Bias FX. Sounded fine, but what a sluggish UI, and everything about it screamed "designed for iPad". These days I swear by Blue Cat's Axiom. Very CPU efficient, and if you've got the screen space you could have every single module in your signal chain open with the knobs tweakable simultaneously. (Rather than the 'one-at-a-time' of Bias.)

Picked it up from PluginBoutique when it was on sale for $19 back in February. It wasn't worth it. Glitchy and problematic, at least on my rig.

Select a number of tracks in the Track View. Right click the first one, select Move To Folder | New Track Folder Tracks appear in new folder in an order that makes no sense to me. It's not the order they were in, nor is it sorted in any apparent order. Ideally, I'd like them stay in the same order they were. Note: If you create a track folder, then select all the tracks and drag them into the folder, that works - they don't shuffle around randomly. So there's that. But I invariably do it the first way and then fix it, because that "saves a step". At least until I remember "Oh yeah, the order gets shuffled and now I have to fix that." This is in 2022.02 patch #1.

I'm pretty sure there's a couple ex-priests who've said the same thing...

Awesome, I was just thinking "my desktop needs a few dozen new icons" - and I need the keyboard focus stolen from this window constantly as I'm typing this, so bonus!

$19? Where? I've got a Boz account and have bought several VSTs directly from them, and it shows $49 as my price.

That's a killer price, and I highly recommend grabbing it. Picked up my copy a few months back for $54 after a $25 voucher, and have been very happy with it. And I'm not even an EDM guy - never used the 'glitch' effect - but you never know when you'll want to animate a filter to give motion to a pad, or do a rhythmic gate effect on a guitar or what have you.

The intrusive questions to set up an Antares account and then the various hoops you have to jump through in order to get Duo installed and authorized - far too irritating for Just Another Vocal Doubler that I'll never use. I've got Nectar 3, MUnison, and use them already, so whatever. But the $10 Objeq Delay I picked up looks semi-useful and unique...

Meh, wouldn't upgrade (from VC8 + SQ80) for any price. Already have an MS20 from Korg, and by all accounts the Augmented Strings thing was quite the CPU-hog. I assume Augmented Voices will be similar. In any event, neither Augmented product is a recreation of a classic hardware synth, so seems like mission creep.

It'd be nice (and presumably trivial) if the color picker that pops up when you click the tiny little rectangle at the bottom of the console strip (or at the left edge of the track view) had a choice that said "follow output" rather than "follow bus". I typically do guitar parts in pairs, panned hard left/hard right. These two tracks have their outputs sent to a 'submix' Aux track so I can do volume automation on the pair in a single place, common FX, etc. The Aux goes to its own bus on the console. (I prefer not to do volume automation on the buses for various reasons.) Anyway, the Aux track can be easily set to have it's color "follow bus". The individual guitar tracks have to be set manually. I'd like them to be set to automatically follow the color of whatever they're output is set to, be it a bus or an aux track.