Byron Dickens

Turn off ripple edit.

I think it's nature's way of telling you you're way overdue for an update....

Yeah, I know that. That's why, in my former life, I was able to fix cars that nobody else seem to be able to fix. Because after some other Jackleg hack had thrown hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of parts at the car and not only not fixed it but created additional problems, I would inherit the repair order and the first thing I would do would be to close up my toolbox, grab a cup of coffee and go sit down and start looking through the service information. And then I would often go put all the old parts back on and start over from the beginning and find out it was something stupid simple. Simple that is for someone who's not scared to crack open a book. People wouldn't get it when I would tell them that I didn't know anything about cars, I just knew how to read. It just boggles my mind the thought process of some people: "this thing looks really complicated and difficult and the manual for it looks complicated and difficult too so I'll just start randomly plugging things into other things and randomly poking around on buttons and by some miracle I'm going to magically figure it out." Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure I'm in the minority here too as well, but what is there to be anxious about? Nobody had a heart attack, there's no arterial bleeding, no sucking chest wounds. It's just software. Nobody's going to die and nothing's going to blow up or catch on fire if you make a mistake. True, some things aren't in the documentation but most things are. Certainly "how do I get my MIDI keyboard to make sound" and "how do I get my microphone/ guitar to record " are. It constantly amazes me how much harder people end up having to work from being lazy.

Being new to all this is even more of a reason to RTFM. Maybe I'm just stupid but when FedEx drives by and drops off that box from Sweetwater, when I open it up and want to hook up my new toy, my first thought is where's the manual?

I suggest perusing the documentation for both Kontakt and Cakewalk. Everything works perfectly when set up correctly. Yours is almost certainly a routing issue.

99.9% of these issues can easily be solved in short order by READING THE F---- MANUAL. If they had bothered to look at the documentation that came with their audio interface, they would have downloaded and installed the driver for it and it would be working properly from the beginning.

Really? Are you naturally that obtuse or did you have to practice? I can tell that critical thinking is not exactly your forté. I suppose that since "no poly-ticks or religion" is the order of the day here that means no Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, certainly no Rage Against the Machine or Body Count and definitely no hymns either. Forget about Johnny Cash too. JS Bach is off the table as well; much of his catalog was composed as religious music. Probably ought to leave out much of the R&B from about 1964 through at least the '70s. And that's only a tiny sampling....

If you can't get the difference between a song about it and political and religious discussions themselves then I don't know what to tell you. You must be one of those people who thought IceT was actually encouraging people to go out and murder law enforcement officers.

They misspelled "vulture."

Lay off the poly-ticks and religion, please.

There probably aren't any. What bitflipper & I said is probably the closest thing.

One more time: "not saying you are doing this...." I don't know; you don't tell us. Some do. And they rapidly run into similar problems. Tell me how I'm supposed to know that. Nevermind that those 2+ decades don't matter much if you've been spending all that time with some cockamamie problematic working habits. Again, I don't know. What that really sounds like is "the last thing I want to do is consider any changes to my workflow habits that might make things easier." Once again, you've given no information about what you're doing in this regard. But you know, if you are piling on the instances of Kontakt, Spitfire and Amplitube 5 then you're probably gonna need that high end, top of the line $4K machine you accused Mark and me of having. Not that your suggestion doesn't have any merit but maybe, just maybe, there's something else going on besides just "Cakewalk sucks."

Nor do I. I have half the RAM and all spinner drives on a 6 year old refurbished HP. Yet I don't have the issues you describe. How can that be? Raise your buffers. Part of good project hygiene is getting the sound you want at the source so you don't have to do so much processing as well as thinking long and hard about whether or not you really need to add that plugin.... Not saying you are doing this but a lot of people ended up going around and around in circles because they don't know what they are doing and keep adding plugins to try fixing the problems they created with the previous ones.

That's what I was thinking. Sounds to me like a computer processing power issue, not an audio device driver issue.

Flip the switch on the wall. Simple. Elegant.

OK. So what's your suggestion? Keep fiddle- f**king around with problematic abandonware last tested for Windows Vista? Since it worked so well for you in W10, might I suggest buying a lottery ticket; I've seen pages and pages of people having nothing but headaches. Maybe pairing up with ASIO4ALL is the secret. And what are these missing "capabilities?" The ability to record and process your own samples? Whoop-de-do. How many people even do that? How many did it 20-30 years ago when this stuff was current?

There's no way BandLab could have taken the E-Mu software off the hands of Creative Labs because Digital Sound Factory has exclusive license to that material since 2007, still making them your best bet just like two years ago when I posted the link the first time in this zombie thread.

I'm in agreement with some of the others on this: the most realistic way to humanize a MIDI track is to have a human play it. You can slow the tempo way down if you have to. I have even gone so far as to record one chord change at a time. Even if you are a terrible keyboard player, I think you get better results if you go the opposite way of trying to "humanize" a part. Instead, play it in the best you can and then use the tools at your disposal to tighten the performance up. But don't lock everything strictly to the grid. If you are working with an already existing MIDI file, then you are in for a long slog of manual editing. when doing this, you need to be cognizant of how a real musician plays. Probably the most important thing is to put in accents where a player would do that. That all depends on the field and the rhythmic pulse of the material. For example, there is a very famous drummer who has a definite habit of playing the second of every pair of eighth notes on his hi-hat softer. Also, where the musician places his notes in relation to the grid is much of what determines the feel of a part. Playing slightly behind the beat gives a kind of relaxed groove while playing slightly ahead of the beat drives things forward. Understand that "ahead of" and "behind" the beat do not mean out of time. We're talking milliseconds. It is not really heard so much as felt. Stuff like this gets much better results than any so-called "humanize" feature.

I just refreshed mine a few days ago. No band lab assistant.

Oh yeah. I refer you again to George Carlin: https://youtu.be/WDUIX2-akuQ

I thought you were leaving.

It does. I haven't changed anything and Cntrl+S always saves .

Yeah, how do you think you're going to hear an output that goes nowhere?

I'm using it in the more modern sense of "misleading with truthful statements."