Craig Anderton

VSX asnd Sonarworks are quite different. VSX is designed to emulate the experience of listening on speakers in a physical studio (like the Waves NX series of plugins). Sonarworks comes with curves for a ton of different headphones that flatten the headphone response. It's not a perfect process because of manufacturing tolerances on headphones, but with a quality set of headphones, that's not an issue. VSX includes headphones, so that eliminates one variable. However, I've found you need a decent headphone amp to get the best performance from the VSX. A lot of the headphone amps in audio interfaces are underpowered, and I the VSX was a disappointment until I hooked it up with a good headphone amp. It made a huge difference. The VSX system emulates several different rooms, but it also emulates a flat response and a Sennheiser 650, which is really close to flat. It also has some emulations of cell phone, car, etc. although the Audified Mixchecker plugin does a good job of emulating real-world music butchering systems . The full Sonarworks version can also tune your speakers, which is a useful addition. I have Sonarworks and VSX, and wrote a review of the previous version of Sonarworks (Reference 4, which is quite similar to the newer ID version). It's in the Library section of craiganderton.org. One other VERY important aspect I forget to mention: mixing at low volume for the bulk of your mixing time is the best approach. Your ears have a natural limiting effect at high levels, and there's the Fletcher-Munson curve to contend with. If the sound is a little bass- and treble-shy at low volumes, and a little too hot at higher levels, then you've done the best you can. After mixing at low volumes, turn up the level as a reality check. If the bass and treble are too loud, go back and trim them a bit. You have no idea about the levels of the playback system over which your music will play. The one thing I can guarantee is that every single listener will hear a different mix--and it won't be the one you did!

The real problem isn't headphones or speakers, it's that every playback system will be different. These days, the differences are even more radical then they were a few decades ago - earbuds, sound bars, traditional speakers, portable bluetooth speakers, etc. Sadly, one of the main ways people listen to music is through computer speakers and even (the horror!) laptop/tablet/smartphone speakers. I believe earbuds are the next most common. No matter what the music sounds like to you, it won't sound that way to others. I used to mix on speakers and do a reality check on headphones. These days, I mix on headphones and do a reality check on speakers because I believe more listeners will be listening on headphones, or otherwise compromised playback systems. If you mix on headphones, I feel the Sonarworks system is essential. Most headphones "hype" the sound in one way or another. When you flatten the response, whether with Sonarworks or something like the Slate VSX, the sound will seem flat and dull. This is as it should be. Aim for a high quality, balanced, accurate mix. The consumer playback system will add the hype. The best you can hope for is a mix that sounds a little bit bad on everything haha, rather than superb on some playback systems and like crap on others. One trick I use to help rock mixes translate is tape saturation on bass. The added harmonics allow the bass to be heard better on systems that can't reproduce the fundamental frequencies. Psychoacoustically, your ear fills in the missing fundamental when it hears the harmonics. Because bass lines are usually single notes, you don't get unpleasant intermodulation distortion. When I "finish" a mix after using speakers and headphones, the reality is that it's not finished. I check it out on a Samsung S23, IK Multimedia iLoud, MacBook Pro, YouTube's nasty data compression, and a Honda car stereo. If I can hear all the elements I want to hear on those systems, then the mix is truly finished. (P.S. If you want to hear a mix that translates well over just about anything, set the time machine for 1979 and check out Tom Petty's "Damn the Torpedoes." It doesn't matter whether you like the music or not, just listen to how it uses the audio spectrum to create something eminently translatable.)

Personal bias alert: I try to use the minimal number of plugins, not because I'm an elitist or think I record such cool tracks I don't need them, but because I find that each plugin obscures the underlying sound to some degree. Sometimes it's an improvement, and sometimes it isn't. There's a famous story about Sound on Sound doing an installment of their Mix Rescue series, where they go to someone's house and write an article about what they did to improve the mix. In one instance, the owner asked if they wanted tea, and went off into the kitchen. While he was making tea, the SOS folks bypassed all the plugins so they could hear what the raw tracks sounded like. When the owner returned, he was shocked. "Wow! What did you do? It sounds so much better!" So, I'd recommend starting a mix with no plugins, unless they're essential (e.g., amp sims for an amp sound, or a dotted eighth-note delay on an instrument that forms part of the overall rhythm). Get as good a balance of the instruments as possible. Then, think strategically about which tracks are lacking in one way or another. Start with adding EQ where necessary, and then move on to dynamics. Once those are squared away, you can start thinking about ear candy effects.

Does Reaper install some kind of generic ASIO driver, like ASIO4ALL? I've experienced issues with playback on some systems if a generic ASIO driver is simply installed, even if Cakewalk isn't selecting it as a driver.

The only problem I've ever had with loading old projects into Cakewalk is if a plugin is no longer installed. Of course, you can still open the project, you'll just be missing the preset from 17 years ago that used AmpliTube 2 Some manufacturers are better than others at being able to load presets from old versions, but if a plugin has had extensive revisions over a decade or more, it likely won't be backward compatible.

Don't know if this matters in your case, but Windows running via Bootcamp on Mac systems is not supported.

I used to moderate a forum with a feature where someone could see their own posts, but no one else could aside from admins. When the "bullies" didn't get responses to their trying to stir things up, they became frustrated, and just left of their own accord. Banning people is only a temporary solution, because they can re-register under a different user name. As you said, "some people come for a fight." If no one fights them, their incentive to fight goes away. The only way I know of to deal with bullies is simply not to take the bait.

That's my experience as well.

FWIW - Sound on Sound remains one of the few media outlets that still prioritizes readers over advertisers, so kudos to them for that. Cakewalk didn't advertise in SOS, yet they ran my Sonar column from 2003 to 2020. The only reason they stopped running it was because according to their surveys, the percentage of readers using it became a tiny fraction compared to other DAWs. I did contact MusicTech (an online magazine owned by BandLab) about running Cakewalk by BandLab articles, but they weren't interested.

FWIW, some people prefer subscriptions. This isn't only about people who don't have enough cash upfront. For example, if you're collaborating on mixes with someone who uses Steven Slate's plugins but you don't have them installed on your machine, you can subscribe for a month or two, finish the mixes, and move on. Similarly, if you use Pro Tools Artist but need to do something more advanced for a particular project, you can subscribe to Pro Tools Studio for a month for $30. I'm not saying subscriptions are better, just that they work for some people even though they don't work for others. I think the most successful option for companies by far is offering both - subscriptions that include periodic minor updates or goodies, but these don't become available to owners of the "perpetual" version until they do the next major update. For me, the HUGE problem with subscriptions is if your work is held hostage when you stop paying. That's why I thought the old Sonar rent-to-buy approach of "if your subscription stops, keep using the program...you just don't get any updates" made a lot of sense. It was also quite generous compared to other companies of that era (I'm looking at you, Adobe). But putting all the pricing issues aside, the fact that Cakewalk continues moving forward and progressing is ultimately what matters. And it's much better news than "Thanks for your support over the years, we just sold Cakewalk to Wal-Mart, have a nice day"

You might find this article, Mastering a Seamless Album, helpful. Although it's about creating a seamless DJ-style mix with transitions/beatmatching/crossfading, it treats Cakewalk like a mastering program, and the requirements are similar to yours. To hear the album that's linked to in the article, which is pretty much rock despite the continuous DJ-style mix, scroll down to the Singles and Albums playlist. It's the second album in. I'll second OutrageProductions comments about mixes, so it's good you're going to go back and polish them. When you get a mix whose sound you really like, load it into the other songs you're mixing so you have a reference you can unmute and listen to from time to time. The main concern I'd have about the mixes is that the balances of all the instruments are right. If one song needs just a little less 300 Hz or a little more upper mids or whatever, that's easy enough to do in the mastering rather than tweaking multiple individual tracks to get the same results.

Just curious...were they authorized to your hard drive instead of the physical iLok dongle?

Can you just go into iZotope's Product Portal and uninstall the plug-in? Then you can re-install, and re-authorize it to iLok or to your new computer.

Another reason companies don't talk about features in advance is sometimes, something they think is going to work ends up being more difficult to implement than anticipated, or they feel it could be tweaked even further, so the decision is to put it off to a future release. Cakewalk learned this lesson the hard way with their anti-gravity module. But I've probably said too much already.

In ancient times, audio engines had 16 bits of resolution. Then came 24-bit, 64-bit, 32-bit, floating point, sample-rate converters, etc. etc. Technically, every time there was a jump like that, the company could claim an improvement in the sound's audio engine.

That's kind of shocking, isn't it?

I highly recommend disabling Nvidia's audio-related drivers.

The Ctrl/"raise or lower selected nodes" trick also works with track automation. You can think of it as an alterative to Offset mode (which is incredibly useful - it's amazing every DAW doesn't have this!) when you want to offset only a portion of a track's automation.

One of my favorite clip gain applications is altering the level going into an amp sim. It's like having a drive control (higher gain = more amp sim saturation, lower gain = less saturation). Bringing up gain over the course of a clip adds drama because the distortion increases as well, which emphasizes the sense of dynamics.

Cakewalk rule of thumb: The longer the delay between updates, the more cool stuff that's in the update when it appears.

Check that Preferences for VST locations includes that folder - navigate to the folder in your screen shot via Edit > Preferences > File > VST Settings, and check that the VST Scan Paths section includes the folder with the plugins.

You could record a loop of your favorite metronome sound, acidize it so it stretches with tempo changes, and use that.

These kinds of changes are another reason to render an audio track as a safety. It's not as good as knowing the "raw materials" that went into making a sound, but it's better than nothing when you have to re-visit old projects. It's not just Kontakt, if a project used AmpliTube 4 and all that's installed later on is AmpliTube 5, I'm pretty sure it won't know what to do with the AmpliTube 4 preset.

I also think there would be a major difference between feeding MIDI data in via USB, and via a DIN connector+MIDI interface.

I haven't done any testing, so I wouldn't know. There is a project I use for testing out different DAWs that consists of exported WAV files. I haven't noticed any significant difference when playing them back on different DAWs, but I haven't been looking for differences and doing deep tests, either. However, I did notice a significant difference after upgrading my monitoring to a Dangerous Music Source, which has really good DACs. I'm sure there are plenty of phenomena with digital audio that haven't been identified yet. For example, sometimes it seems there are "rogue frequencies" in a final mix that I don't recall getting with analog recording. Maybe it's interaction of harmonics? Running signals too hot? Not a high enough sampling rate? The phase of the moon?