Bruno de Souza Lino

The quality differences are not identifiable by humans ears unless you measure the audio and know which is which, but that opens the door to perception bias, confirmation bias and other cognitive issues. It's hard to suggest that people didn't think about audio quality when they developed the MP3 format 28 years ago.

As it's customary with Intel 10th gen cpus, check your thermals. These SKUs are known to run quite hot and enter throttling very often. If that's the case, consider undervolting them.

V-Vocal can be found in up to X2, it being the last Roland version of SONAR.

Even though you see purchase links and prices on the Cakewalk website, clicking on any of them will lead you to this page: http://www.cakewalk.com/announcement

In that case, add a brickwall limiter to the metronome bus.

You might also want to install X3 to have Perfect Space, Vintage Channel and some of the synths that were left behind, like Pentagon.

The last version of SONAR to have V-Vocal is X2. After that, Cakewalk was sold to Gibson and all the proprietary Roland stuff had to go. V-Vocal was replaced with Melodyne in X3 and remained like that until Platinum.

Set first and last beat to the same sound and same volume.

That's because some PCIe lanes speak directly to the CPU by means of CPU interrupts. The same can be talked about PS/2 vs USB. Sure. Any latency below 5 ms is considered real time by human ears. In reality, we have much more latency that that. Humans can cope quite comfortably with up to 40 ms of latency depending on scenario and you get 1ms of latency for every foot your ears are away from the sound source. If you're playing 10 feet away from your bass amp, you're already dealing with 10 ms of latency.

Cakewalk by default records at 32 bit, which has about 150 dB of dynamic range. Windows is set to 16 bits by default, which has 96 dB of dynamic range. There is a chance that your soundcard has some sort of gain compensation feature that's doing that to prevent the export from clipping.

Expecting everyone to have current or similar hardware is a dangerous assumption to make. One example would be Spleeter. It makes use of TensorFlow to work, but their initial build assumed everyone using the software had nVidia graphic cards, and TensorFlow was compiled with CUDA support enabled. Many people with AMD cards couldn't use the product unless they compiled TensorFlow from source without CUDA enabled. After that was fixed, many people started complaining that Spleeter wouldn't work and there were a whole bunch of errors. The developer didn't say anywhere that Spleeter doesn't work if your CPU doesn't have AVX instructions. The Appleseed Blender render did a similar thing with SSE4.1 but it just crashed Blender during rendering instead of throwing an error. There's also the argument of maximum performance. Not having things like internet on while you work or disabling some services could be the difference between being able to run one extra instance of that plugin or having to increase your latency samples. Windows will use all the resources from your machine it can to do its tasks without your permission and that's not the lack of control over my hardware I wish to have. As better as ASIO drivers are nowadays, USB still is a serial bus. If you have a device that's slower than your interface on the same bus, the controller will run everything at the speed of the slowest device in the bus and there's nothing you can do about it except for making sure your interface has its own bus and nothing else uses it. I'm yet to see a PC + USB interface combo that can match a PC + RME Hammerfall HDSPe combo. With the latter and a sufficiently fast PC, you can quite comfortably run under 1 ms of latency with little to no performace hit.

AFAIK only ESi had ASIO drivers that could make use of multiple interfaces. Another option is ASIO4ALL.

That would solve one of the issues with CbB's routing, which is the hard pairing of outputs. Every single output is paired 1,2, stereo 1 and 2, 3,4 stereo 3 and 4 and so on. That's all fine and dandy until you find a plugin which has, say, outputs 4 and 5 as a stereo pair. With the current layout, it's impossible to create a single stereo track that only contains these two routed left and right.

Presonus has a very good guide on tweaking your Windows PC for audio. There should also be a Creative Sauce video on that.

I would wait to switch. AT5 is slower and has some sharp edges still.

That would also boil with the fact that people make music with their ears and not eyes so if it sounds good, in phase or not, it's what matters.

For Platinum, the installation is automated and you have no control over what gets installed other than knowing which gets installed in each of the 10+ packages in Command Center.

Would be possible to provide a download source that's not MEGA?

You are forgetting the 180 day expiration date for sound downloads. Expired? You have to pay 10 bucks to have the download again for 180 more days. Not only that's dodgy as heck, but you can also have sounds for free products expire as well.

Not really. Lab works like a workstation pretty much. If you have the full version of the synts used, you can edit the synth parameters and also build presets using multiple synths and such. Think of it like Kontakt or Mainstage.

As a side note, if you happen to save your track setup as a track preset with a drum map to go with it, that drum map is not loaded when you load your track preset. It just adds a new empty DM entry that you have to reload your preset.

- Ability to replace FX Rack plugins like you can to with Virtual Instruments and ProChannel modules. - Either the ability of loading ProChannel as a sort of Channel Strip plugin with the same functionality of the standard or load ProChannel modules as plugins. - Allow us to hide some, if not all, track meters. - Ability to bounce audio coming into aux tracks without having to manually record it. - Move some of the settings to more localized places instead of having everything crammed up into the Preferences menu. - A more flexible and modern version of ACT. The current version is complicated for the wrong reasons, unintuitive and clumsy to set up and use. If you want a good example, look at how Studio One does it. - A more flexible and modern version of Drum Map Manager. The current version is complicated, unintuitive and clumsy to set up and use. - Improvements to the PRV with things such as ability to do pattern selection (selecting every other note, etc.), proportional editing and so on. - More flexbile audio routing. - LFO an an option for automation envelopes. - Some sort of Listen Bus or Monitoring track. - Improvements on the Metronome. - Improvements on latency handling.

If you're using Amp Simulation, it's a better idea to gain stage at the plugin's master volume, as hitting the plugin at a lower volume will change the sound that comes out. Also, your clipping might not be caused by volume, but frequency buildup. Grab a good spectrum analyzer, like Voxengo SPAN and check it. Or use Dan Worral's method:

I've disabled auto-save since it crashed the DAW the first time it happened. That is a bit more strain on you, as you have to manually save, but no more issues and I can even save with the project running.

Another alternative to consider would be ValhallaDSP Supermassive and Dragonfly Reverb, both free.