Hi!
 
I stumbled across this info on how to use Pentagon I as a vocoder (http://www.cakewalk.com/support/kb/reader.aspx/2007013086)
 
I thought I'd give it a try but Pentagon I when inserted into the X2a project just shows a white window, trying to load a preset from the top menu (which is the only thing that shows) hangs Sonar.
 
It's not so terribly important as I have other vocoding tools at hand which work fine. I just had thought I give Pentagon a try since I never used it so far ... any hints on what might be going on here?
 
 

Are you running Sonar as Administrator? That might help.

Try loading Pentagon into a blank project.

I'm curious.

jb101


Are you running Sonar as Administrator? That might help.

Thanks, that fixed the white GUI screen.
 
Now that I've given Pentagon a try, I have to admit that I'm not impressed, mainly due to problems I don't see with other soft synths I'm using:

• I got crashes when saving with Pentagon GUI open, crashes when deleting Pentagon from the project (though I haven't had a crash in almost 2 months until I tried this ...)
• Some patches produce very hot notes / spikes (seems somewhat random) causing meters to got above +5 although the synth average output level was already brought down to below -10 (because of these spikes)
• Even worse, changing patches causes very loud thumbing noises in the monitors, with meters jumping to 99.9 - haven't had that before

I had just tested Pentagon for vocoding purposes but I get far more exciting results with NIs 'the mouth' or 'razor', so I reckon I just won't add Pentagon to my tool box.

Have you tried what I suggested?

Yes, I did it.

Until starting as Administrator I just got the white screen. Ever since I started as Admin, it does show properly (even if started the regular way ... but that should make much difference as there is just one user account on the DAW and that's of course Admin).
 
Maybe this thing just wrote some final config files or whatever registry stuff when I started as Admin for the 1st time ...???
 
The crashes I had when deleting the white GUI synth seem to have gone; I can delete Pentagon from the project.

the pentagon crashes are a result of valleys simulators in the programs.  if you use a dxi to vst wrapper on PI you won't get the errors or clipping.  kinda a bunk way of dealing with it but it works.  the other thing you can do is pop in a limiter on the track PI is on and it will keep your speakers from blowing out. ;)

hth

Hi,

I had the work of the world to get Pentagon to work in Sonar X2.  I tried several fixes and nothing worked.  I then simply set the Security on  C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Shared DXi\Pentagon I to allow users full security and it seems to be working.  (I also made the same change to the pointer in the registry but it was not until I changed it at the file level that things worked fine.

Keep smilin

@teunis - i would recommend you try pI with the bank a "Nothing" patch and see what you get.

Ít all seems to work as I would expect it to.  Maybe I am missing something.

Tony

swamptooth


@teunis - i would recommend you try pI with the bank a "Nothing" patch and see what you get.