Kilohearts is known for their Snap Heap product, which is quite is perhaps another review in itself, though it will feature here.

They released two Equalizer products a time back: Carve and Slice.

There will only be cursory testing of the DSP itself to make sure it's operating as presented in the GUI... unless I find something interesting.

I will be mostly focusing on the workflow in Carve and Slice, along with the Snap Heap integration.

I'm not going to make a normal post this week, but I'd like to let readers know what's happening.

It's not exciting, just life things.

A while ago I wrote a bit of an article about what I hated in Digital Performer. (I have updated that post as well!)

Well, Digital Performer 10 is out!.

I had a bunch of prepared content for DP10, but it appears that other press, including MOTU, managed to cover the same topics I was going to. I hate duplicating content and I avoid it if possible. I sorted those posts away. THIS IS NOT A THOROUGH REVIEW. It's just the things I like about the update.

Let me walk you through what I like about DP 10, and why I'm back to using DP10 as my main driver. (I switched to Cubase in Aug 28, 2018 while waiting for DP10 if you don't remember.)

Last time I set out to show that DAWs are different in common use, and folks were curious about the automation part.

So let's dive deeper and let me show you how to replicate (or refute!) my tests.

Other posts in this series:

Digital Performer 10 is out! and one of the big features is VCA faders. Other DAWs have had them for a while, but I love DP and it's now time to talk about VCA Faders in more detail.

What are VCA faders and why do they matter? Allow me a few minutes to explain.

NOTE: DAW Chart has been updated for DP10! Look at those points soar!

Recently on the EDM Production discord that I help administrate, I held a Q&A with Fabien Schivre from Tokyo Dawn. We had a free for all this time!

Click through for the whole Q&A as I've transcribed it.

You hear it again and again. ALL DAWS SOUND THE SAME. Set them up properly and you can null them, no difference.

That's true. It is true. No doubt. Scientific fact that you can verify yourself.

If you control for all variables that may invalidate your result, then the static output of nearly every major DAW is bit-for-bit identical.

BUT...

Other posts in this series:

First thing my wife said was "Wow, these look legit."

I'm reviewing the Kali Audio LP-8 Studio Monitors today.

I didn't think they looked legit personally. I thought they were just your standard cheap studio monitors. They don't have that intimidating heft when you take them out of the box, or the firmness on the baffle.

My disclaimer about paying for the product is at the end of the review this time.

Let's see how they stand up!

Uh oh. AVA Multiband Compressor was serendipitously broken. I reviewed it broken, and I liked it broken. Harrison Consoles has issued an update that fixes this, but what's happened? Why? How? What's new? What happened to the old behaviour?

And more importantly, should you be mad?

Harrison AVA Multiband Compressor is out, and I spent some time looking over it and using it in some projects.

What follows are the results of my investigation and general thoughts.

I DID NOT PAY FOR THIS PRODUCT I am both a beta tester and received an NFR review copy. If you feel that this has possibly coloured my review, please let me know.

IMPORTANT! IMPORTANT! After reading this article, please read the followup article.

Often people say that they enjoy my website because of the detail that I go into. I recently acquired a Panasonic G9 and some lenses, so I thought that I would take some time to do some photography in the studio.

What follows is some macro photos, along with a wider angle shot, of various things around the studio.

These images were stacked for me in Zerene Stacker. The necessity of this is something that may be covered in another post. Getting these photos took me about 12 hours, and even then I'm not fully happy with them.

ALL OF THESE IMAGES ARE CLICKABLE FOR LARGER VERSIONS!

This is also my second article in a row without an accompanying video. I have nothing to really talk about on video, so I'm not making a useless video of me just jabbering. They'll come as they come... especially after NAMM.

Hunter has been an absolute titan and powerhouse in the EDM industry for many years. An original co-creator of the insanely successful blogs and networks RUN THE TRAP and Too Future, he has also been instrumental in building and supporting the growing careers of artists like K?D, Autograf and Medasin through his management agency and record label, ALT:VISION, which recently partnered with major label Republic/Casablanca.

Over at EDMP Discord we had a Q&A session via text with him. What follows is the transcript.

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to interview Rob Stenson, who you may know better from Goodhertz or maybe as a banjoist. I use Goodhertz plugins as a reference for various plugin functionality, so I was excited to have this chat.

I tried to shy away from any information you can already find, such as this interview of himself(??) or this other interview of himself.

I hope you enjoy, and I'd like to thank Rob for the opportunity and his time yet again!

As you may know many people use timestretching software in their day to day operations, and it is common that people use timestretching for various things from setting an audio file to a specific tempo or fixing the timing such as in a drum recording, or even for creative effects.

However, not all timestretching systems are created equal. Some timestretching systems are significantly better than others, and this is evident if you have used something like Sound then you are fully aware of how terrible timestretching can truly be. There are also other naive timestretching algorithms that are complete garbage.

The most common timestretching algorithm is Elastique which is used all the way from the lowly Bitwig up to Cubase and Pro Tools.

There is a new algorithm on the market when it comes to DAWs, and that is ZTX. Digital Perfomer added ZTX and their 9.5 update recently, and it's interesting because it is the only DAW that currently uses this algorithm. They had a choice of many things and they chose ZTX over Elastique.

MOTU isn't fueled with a bunch of morons, if they chose ZTX over other algorithms (many of which are licensed), then you would expect that they feel that it is superior over the other options.

WELL IS IT?

I recently had an opportunity to interview one of the Software Developers and UX designers at Steinberg.

Often it is easy to forget that the people behind the software use are real people that are excited about working on the software and are truly trying to put out the best product they can under the circumstances of time and resources.

So this is just a short interview with one of the fantastic people working there.

(I'm not Steinberg biased, every company has similar people. This is simply the company that I choose).

FLStudio 20.1 is out. The official change page is here. I'm going to be going over the changes, see if I notice anything extra, and wade through a bit of the hype to see how cool this update is.

I wouldn't call it 'Exposed' for no reason though...

Other posts in this series:

READ - This Review is out of date. I do not suggest viewing it as anything more than a historical artifact. Please check the comments for potential corrections and criticisms.

Ok, you should know by now that I dislike Windows. As such I decided to get this all out of the way as fast as possible.

So what follows is my thoughts on nearly every aspect of Cakewalk. I intentionally left out some parts that I didn't think warrant mention, and I'm certain I missed a few things.

This post is 12,530 words, 71,893 characters and has 118 images/videos. Not to mention all the code I write to create media, extract information, cross-check the manual and other bits. I've spent countless hours (200+ now) digging into the software in the last month, reading the manual, scouring the forums, cross-referencing, etc... If I've made any glaring errors please leave a comment or contact me and I will fix it. If you disagree with my opinions then feel free to let me know and we can discuss it. I'm pliable and can be convinced by a rational well-reasoned argument. I will also update the post.

There's some things shaking up at Bandlab, so this may not be my final post in the series for now, but I intend it to be. My thoughts on Cakewalk as a whole are at the end.

The DAW Chart is updated with Cakewalk as well. As of publishing this, I don't even know what the final score is (that's calculated client side). I avoid looking so I don't subconsciously try to smidge an overall rating ahead of another DAW.

Without further ado let's hop into it.

READ - This Review is out of date. I do not suggest viewing it as anything more than a historical artifact. Please check the comments for potential corrections and criticisms.

Other posts in this series:

Anyone that reads this knows that I hate Microsoft Windows. I get questions fairly frequently about why, and the reasons require their own post.

This is that post.

This is a big one for me. Cakewalk is a Windows only DAW. I HATE Windows (which I may explain why, in depth, later).

I'll be spending 30 days working with Cakewalk as much as possible and leaving my thoughts as usual.

Other posts in this series: