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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Review of Cakewalk Plasma - Great for DIY home studios !
By A Customer
This is the first cakewalk sequencer I have purchased since the one bundled with Sound Blaster AWE32 soundcards, which was very basic. (Sorry can't recall the name) It is very good value compared to the competition, ie Acid or Ableton Live, but is less intuitive in terms of the user interface in my opinion, which tends to be a bit cluttered in some ways.
Plasma is essentially a midi sequencer (in the feature packed tradition of cakewalk products) with the ability to record audio straight to disk, and to sequnce that Audio in the form of Loops much like Acid from Sonic Foundry. Unlike Acid to use a loop more than one time in a track you cannot simply draw the loop with the cursor. You have to actually load it in again from the loop preview window, or copy and paste from the last occurence of the loop. This is somewhat annoying when you are in a hurry to complete a mix of reasonable length, and is not near as intuitive as Acid's loop drawing feature. As usual midi sequencing is very good , with plenty of different and usefull quantize and midi editing features, as many have come to expect from cakewalk.
A great strength of plasma is it's bundled effects module known as FXPAD , it is quite usefull for getting a quick idea of the type of effect you are after, though (to my ears) it is somewhat lacking in sound quality compared to stand-alone third party Directx plugins.
Another great feature is the bundled loops, which are on the same install CD as the software itself in the form of .wav files. They are mostly usefull loops, though some of them are a bit cheesy sounding, also only some are marked with actual speed in BPM in the filename, which causes headaches if you are in a hurry. There could also be more hi-hat patterns and lead-ins in the percussion section.
What I like the most about plasma is actually the sound engine itself. It is very LOW LATENCY in terms of the time for a sound to enter the soundcard , be processed, and be output. This makes it great for use with realtime effects and softsynths. (Be aware though that it only supports DirectX plugins, no VST).
It achieves it's low latency performance, by bypassing the microsoft API known as KMixer which is responsible for latency issues for realtime audio processing under windows. Kmixer can cause latency to be minimum 30ms (+ that of your particular soundcards drivers) which is terrible for live recording/performance. I got 20ms latency on a duron 800 (KT-133A chipset), using the built in AC-97 Codec and the latest drivers from VIA !
Even better realtime performance (less than 10Ms !) is available using a run of the mill soundblaster Live card plus driver from the Russian Kx-Project. (I cannot recommend enough for SB owners to switch to these awesome replacement drivers , which by the way are free, and about 3MB in size compared to Creative's 20MB garbage) Try doing a search in google for this.It is very good in my opinion to have such good realtime DSP performance (Thanks to the well optimized SONAR Engine) without having to shell out for a Pro-Spec soundcard such as those based on the Envy-24 chipset. They are great cards but are not cheap.
Cakewalk Plasma is basically Sonar minus a few features. The feature that I personally regret not having is the ability to use more than one soundcard at a time. There are more differences that I don't have the time to cover here. Cakewalk are quite helplfull answering questions (I have found) so write to them to clarify the differences if you are seriously considering buying this product.
I am currently mixing together a rap demo-CD for a friend from the pre-made loops plus his freestyle rapping. Overall it has been a hassle free experience so far... :)
All in All - Cakewalk Plasma is A good Value Product , with plenty of Bang-for-Buck. I hope this review has been usefull to you. Best of Luck ~ Cameron
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Good potential but technical problems
By Christopher L. Bradshaw
This program is the first MIDI sequencer/audio mixer I have bought and have been quite pleased as long as it's running. There's no manual for it but the help section is wonderfull and in no time I was creating beautiful pieces. Firstly if your computer has higher than DirectX 8.1 it won't install unless you find the patch utility file (provided by Cakewalk's website) and use it to help the installation. That didn't bug me too much but sometimes when I work with the program it will freeze or crash. My puter is not that old with 3.06 Ghz Pentium processor, plenty of RAM, Hard disk space, and the stock SB Audigy sound card. I'm currently waiting to get a Service Pack CD for Windows XP as I suspect the problem to be stemming with XP and not necessarily Plasma. The effects that you can use are great and importing new soundfonts is easy. I do think though that Cakewalk didn't want to spend too much time on this program as there isn't much support or chat about it in the musician world. I think I'm going to get serious and try Sonar 3 studio or even better professional but man that's a lot of bread!
3 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
plasma is the best software arround
By mahesh
Creating new music is easy with Plasma.It doesn't matter what you want to record-keyboards, vocals, live turntable scratches, CD samples, or any other sound source.And you can do it all on the PC you already own - no expensive hardware is required.
yeah this looks cool to all the peoples in town well what u think about this go get this gear and be adj!.
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