I know it may seem redundant to purchase an application that more or less replicates a lot of built-in functionality for a program, but if you’re a user of Cakewalk’s Sonar or, especially, Project 5, you will probably be well served by Agitated State’s forthcoming MenuMagic v1.0.

MenuMagic extends your control over plugin organization in both of Cakewalk’s flagship sequencers in just about any way you might care to have them extended, from global renaming to cross-application synchronization to intelligent categorization and beyond.

This has been in development for quite a while - I think it was first announced shortly before Sonar 6, and to be honest with you, not only had I forgotten about it, once Sonar got the plugin manager I thought it would probably go away.

Fortunately, it did not. The built-in Sonar plugin manager is quite handy, but even it has its limitations. This appears to address most, if not all, of those.

What really sold me on this is that it takes care of a major oversight in the Project 5 v2.5 update. Hey, swell, we got the plugin manager, but for some odd reason there is no plugin organization in the program itself. Being that the primary focus of Project 5 was as a softsynth studio this is a rather bizarre omission. And since that update was, what, a year ago? one wonders if once again Cakewalk doesn’t really have any idea what to do with the program and that sooner or later, when they milk the last few dollars from it, they’ll retire it for good. Which leaves one wrestling with absurdly messy plugin management.

Anyway, MenuMagic will now take care of this, one of my two biggest gripes about the program (non-configurable hardware outs being the other; seriously, if I’m not using outs I should be able to not have them cluttering up my workspace). So even if/when Cakewalk lets Project 5 wither on the vine I’ll be able to squeeze a few more years of life out of it.

And now is the time to act. Agitated State is extending the pre-release price of $24.99. Which is about the perfect price for such software.

Further my explorations in finishing my audio rig, I’m getting close now. So very close.

I had ditched the Alesis i|o 26 a while ago due to its really poor drivers. This pretty much convinced me that I don’t like firewire audio interfaces. I don’t see the point really when you have a desktop computer and latency is important. In my experience, PCI drivers are more solid. Perhaps on a Mac this is different, but even the heralded RME drivers used way too much CPU when I pushed them at all.

For a while I reverted to my EZbus/Audiophile setup. M-Audio may make absolute crap but they know how to write a driver, or at least a solid PCI card driver. And I didn’t have to worry about the quality of the card’s converters or clock since it was handing those duties off to the EZbus Mixer. But I quickly remembered why I ditched this setup in the first place. Sure, the output amplifiers on the EZbus are really nice, but the pre-amps have little-to-no headroom which makes them pretty useless for any sort of line-in. I’m guessing that the converters and clock are above average at best. And the loop-back latency is huge. Plus there are a few other limitations that I won’t bother to enumerate but make it a less than ideal recording rig, digital lofi or no.

So, after another round of reading specs and gearslutz.com threads, I bought a Lynx L22 card. I contacted the guys at Mercenary Audio, who are fortunately just up I95 about 20 minutes, and they had one in stock.

Let me take a minute to say a few kind words about Mercenary. Obviously, I’m lofi. And kind of thick. On top of which, I don’t have a lot of money to throw around. I’m not entirely their target customer. But they treated me with complete respect, answered all my stupid questions, and helped me understand my purchase. They also showed me around their studio and workshops, which was very inspiring. I can’t recommend them enough. I really look forward to being able to business with them again.

The Lynx was a painless install. More importantly, the difference in the sound was stunning. The same night that I installed it, the friend that I record with came over. I didn’t tell him about the upgrade and just pulled up a song we had been working on. “The bass sounds great,” he said a few bars in. “What did you do to it?”

Seriously, insert your favorite audio snob cliché: “Blanket lifted off the mix…” “…punchy…” “tight bottom end…” et cetera. I just know that a lot of the muddiness that I/we had been struggling with was either cleared up or much easier to sort out. Even running into the EZbus (via SPDIF, so clocked and covereted by the L22) the improvement was stunning.

But the problem was basically, what to use as an interface. The EZbus wasn’t going to cut for the aforementioned reasons, and I don’t have the dosh to splash out on a summing box, outboard converters or an AES mixer. Nothing was really worth my trouble in my price-range after blowing my load on the card itself. Then it occurred to me: just use the Alesis as an small mixer, and save myself a lot of expense and hassle.

So I get all the advantages of the Alesis (multiple in and outs, SPDIF, optical, phono) but I don’t have to worry about its shortcomings. It’s converters, as near as I can tell, aren’t all that bad, but since I’m summing to the Lynx, as well as sending my analog signal to the L22, it is basically souped up patch-bay. And for that it works pretty well.

All I need now is a decent pre-amp.

So my advice to you bedroom producers and project studio jockeys: scrimp and save and get yourself a decent soundcard. It’s worth it.

This blog? You should be so lucky.

My extended absence can be blamed on many things - you know, the work/life/relationship bits I occasionally allude to - but mostly it’s because as of my last post (or thereabouts) I’ve been sans cigarettes. Yeah, I’ve retired my beloved and longtime companion, American Spirits. The fuel for many late nights at my DAW, the thing that keeps me focused while I put together posts here, my blessing and curse. After almost 30-something years it’s finally time to figure out how I can live my life without this glorious crutch.

Of course, I’m great at quitting. I’ve done it many times. (As the old joke goes.) But I really want to become a non-smoker. I’ll really try not to become a complete asshole about it - hell hath no fury like a smoker reformed - but cost, potential ill-health and social stigma have gotten to be too much for me to afford.

It will be a couple of weeks soon, and hopefully I’ll be able to do something other than glower at life and obsess on justifications for something that ultimately makes me feel shitty about myself.

One of the more entertaining things I’ve read, here’s a great bit of legal smack-down served upon purveyors of audio-cable snake oil, Monster Cable, Inc.™.

I’ll assume most people who visit this site are well aware of what complete assholes Monster Cable, Inc.™ are. You know, aside from technical/marketing claims that are exaggerated at best, and that they sue like they were the first company to use the word monster. And now they tried to put the legal hurt on the wrong guy, Kurt Denke, who runs an independent a/v cabling company, Blue Jeans Cable.

I’m cynical, so I just assume most corporations abuse the legal system, but Monster Cable, Inc. ™ are just so blatant and egregious. So, it’s good to see someone with the balls to slap back.

Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.

I applaud you. It may seem a little dry, but a great read it is.

Further, if any of these patents or trademarks has been licensed to any entity, please provide me with copies of the licensing agreements. I assume that Monster Cable International, Ltd., in Bermuda, listed on these patents, is an IP holding company and that Monster Cable’s principal US entity pays licensing fees to the Bermuda corporation in order to shift income out of the United States and thereby avoid paying United States federal income tax on those portions of its income; my request for these licensing agreements is specifically intended to include any licensing agreements, including those with closely related or sham entities, within or without the Monster Cable “family,” and without regard to whether those licensing agreements are sham transactions for tax shelter purposes only or whether they are bona fide arm’s-length transactions.

Here’s something cool and unexpected.

Our heroes over at Soniccouture.com have gone and whipped up another product that makes you wonder why no one had thought of it sooner.

Scriptorium.

Rather than just produce another of their fine sample instrument libraries, Soniccouture have tucked into the guts of Kontakt and give us a toolkit for taking Kontakt to the next level. One of my favorite things in the Soniccouture libraries is giving us access to the hidden goodies that help power their masterful sound design. And now they’ve really gone to town and programmed up a whole 35 Kontakt scripts that range from “You’re fucking kidding me, right? Awesome!” (Group Sequencer) to, “Huh. Interesting…” (Morse Code). A few are borrowed/upgraded from some of their other product, so I can attest to their quality. And I’m damn excited to try the others: if you’ve ever hunted for useful Kontakt scripts on the web you know what a score this is.

So, if you haven’t played around with scripts in your copy of Kontakt you’re missing a whole lot of time-wasting fun. They’re dead easy to work, really; if a dilettante such as myself can use them then certainly most others can. And these look to open up a whole world of possibilities. Plus there are 60 instruments included to get you started, along with 3 demo 4 tutorial videos.

I have a great idea for re-building a certain discontinued softsynth that I missed out on buying, and this is just the ticket to get me started.

And, although this is both version 2 and version 3 compatible, it’s perhaps another argument as to why NI should allow for other upgrade options.

From what I hear, these don’t retain their settings between sessions… I’m sure there’s a joke to be found somewhere in there.

Gentlemen, the KammerlAudio Plugins.

Oh yeah, I guess I should mention, NSFW, if black and white cheesecake shots with animal heads digitally graphed on is something that offends you or your co-workers.

(more…)

This has to be the best licensing agreement I’ve read.

For The sounds found project:

You are free to do with them whatever you desire. Authorship is void here. Too many declarations of property are made by people who simply pressed a record button, this project exists to encourage a different path.

How can you not love any project that has samples of “20021217: Scissors, like any room, Heidelberg” or
“20020922: Mad violinist, bathroom, St. Wendel”?

I’m not sure how one goes about submitting but there seems to be a very cool community working over at http://www.intelligentmachinery.net. Grab your field recorder and explore the ambiance of your life.

Coming soon: The bucolic soundscapes of Pawtucket.

Sweetwater’s patented Superficial Appearance Demarcation (SAD) technology…

Further my post concerning BeatBurner, I got around to installing it onto my DAW. Figured if I was gonna run my mouth off…

Though I downloaded the full package, I haven’t yet installed the included beats. While BeatBurner only processes 16bit wavs - we’re digital lofi so we don’t let that stop us, do we? - I have plenty of fodder for this thing. More than a few folders full of my early ACID loop collections, various freeware loops, stuff culled off Brit music mag cover disks - a bunch of crap to be sure, but some that have stood me well over the years - mostly shopworn breakbeats, but some other oddball stuff I’ve picked up. I thought I’d run them through it, let me evaluate the ‘burners potential on material I am well familiar with.

And it is indeed very cool. So, yes, not a beat-slicer. More like a very musical audio modulating filter synth wave-shaper thing. Every loop I loaded up sounded great and made me want to squirrel it away for later use. With just a bit of fiddling you can coax some unique sounds out of it, depending on what you’re feeding it. It’s a one trick pony, more or less, but it’s a great trick that sounds fantastic once you know what you’re doing, more or less.

It seems petty to fault the program’s shortcomings since it’s a few years old and, you know, free. They are what they are - off the top of my head I can think of 4 things I wish it did or did better - but since we’re all more or less in agreement that what sounds good is good no matter what goddamn bit-rate it was recorded at, it is a nice tool for getting some new use out of old sounds, and has a lot of inspiration potential. Tip: Disengage the sync on the delay and lfo for instant dub fun.

So I’m definitely going to kick into the coffer once the next paycheck comes in.

EDIT: Okay, so I’ve spent some more time with it, and not so right with the “one trick pony” thing. It actually has quite a few tricks up its sleeve. It would be great if it did 24bit samples, just for the breadth of shit you could throw at it. So, it’s not Kontakt. But it’s way more capable and interesting than a lot of commercial synths.

• I’ve said before, I’m not inclined to fault companies for what they didn’t put in their product - I generally know what I’m getting into when I fork over for a license and trust that it will meet my expectations. I’ll even be pretty forgiving for “bugs” and what I see as over-sights/blunders in the execution - to a point of course. And, as I’ve also said, most of the companies we’re talking about in the independent audio software world are benign to very cool. But indulge me in climbing on my rackety and feeble pulpit and address my benefactors over at Native Instruments.

Greetings Native Instruments Co.,

Congratulations on all the great products you’ve been releasing lately. I hope you’ve been having a lot of success with them. However, I want to specifically address your upgrade policy on your Kontakt line of products.

I’ve been using Kontakt since literally the day it arrived at a local Mega Lo Guitar Mart and upgraded to version 2 because of all the fine work you put into improving and expanding the product. It’s been great. I even purchased the tutorial DVD to more fully utilize it’s deeper features; to what extent this is actually the case is sorta besides the point. Suffice to say, I’ve acquired (legally it should be said) a lot of soundware that does fully utilize Kontakt’s deeper features.

The latest version Kontakt 3 looks pretty swell also. Looks like you improved a lot of the features. Perhaps not a whole version upgrade. But, you know, it’s your product you can give it what number you want really; who am I to judge the work that went into it? I look forward to trying it out.

My problem is this: Why do I have to buy the whole library that comes with it? Honestly, I don’t really use the 2 NI Kontakt libraries I have as it is. And while I’m sure you’ve done some stunning work on improving the included library, and the reports seem pretty favorable, I don’t see this being a whole lot different. I’ve got a lot of these sounds well covered, and the last thing my sample drive needs is more redundancy.

I’m guessing it’s because you want to keep it a boxed product, no? That even with your very well implemented registration management, and your high profile, a boxed product is more like a “physical thing” - shelf space and all that - and thus somehow less prone to being ripped off or dismissed as not worth the investment. Okay, I may well be grasping, but, seriously, couldn’t you offer an “engine”-only download update for users? Well, I know you *could*, but for some reason you don’t. No offense to the many sound designers and editors who put together your library. But I just don’t need it. And it seems a waste for me to buy a whole lot of packaging and content for what probably comes to about 20MB of program and plugin files.

And, yes, I know it’s only around $130.00 street. It’s not really the price so much as it is the waste of it all. Offering it for under 90 bucks from you website seems a reasonable amount to pay considering what you’re charging for the boxed upgrade.

I’ll just give in and get it I suppose. I’ll get sick of manually exporting MIDI files, or trying to built multis will finally drive me batty and I’ll get the packaging then go ahead then download the latest build. Either that or you’ll release Kontakt 4 and just upgrade to that. Or, considering how I’ve wound up with a lot of your products, just before the next version is released you’ll blow out the remaining stock of 3 and I’ll just pay what it would theoretically cost me for a download now. And then start the cycle again…

Do you see the folly?

Cheers,

Your Customer,
Digital Lo-Fi