John Vere

Well I tested a few different interfaces and everyone of them was bang on if I used ASIO mode. You have something going wrong if your ASIO driver is not syncing up with Cakewalk. You might want to try a different interface. 

Here was a Behringer USB interface that used a generic Codex 

Here is a Crappy Sound Blaster card but with ASIO it seems to be OK.  Notice WDM mode which always seemed to be early in my tests. 

Good advise as always and I will add that for me a lot of buggy issues have all disappeared as they upgraded CbB. I used to have to save after every change for fear of Cakewalk freezing up. It's latest version is definitely the most stable, solid version ever. I could never go back to Splat. It was not stable for me. 

And your issue with vocals going weird after too many takes needs to be looked at. It sounds more of a driver issue than DAW. 

There seems to be changes made as time goes on. I set up a laptop over a year and a half ago for my bandmate to record his parts at home. It ran without an issue until this July when he finally got that pop up. Took me a 10 minutes to update it and all is fine once again. He doesn't have internet were he lives. Only a Cell data plan so the update thing sucks. I could always set him up running Sonar Splat, but it so nice to have the software up to date when transferring.  

Does it appear in the Command Center? 

Did you not save and backup all your files from the CCC download folder back when Gibson gave us the boot?  

These files are worth a lot of money and it's best practice to have them all backed up to a few safe locations. I certainly wouldn't count on those old Sonar servers being around forever.  

Great, The offset is calculated by Cakewalk and it needs correct information which can only be supplied by the ASIO driver. This is why you will see timing offset errors like this in all the other driver modes. 

Have you tried a loopback test? 

Take a midi drum track,  just a kick or snare will do, Freeze it to audio. 

Now patch the output of your interface back to an input and set up a new audio track to record this input. 

Turn OFF input ech for that new track. 

Record the loopback,  and then zoom way in to see if the transients match up. 

If you do this with a 3-5 minute track, you can check at the end of the song to see if it drifts off time. 

Ya you're getting confused by a weird tutorial. Toss that out. 

You absolutely need to use ASIO to get anywhere with a DAW like Cakewalk. MME is the worst driver mode possible. 

The Steinberg VST folder is created automatically by a lot of 3rd party vendors. But the version of Cakewalk you install using the Bandlab Assistant does not need that folder for any of the  free VST plug ins that are included.  

Install the latest ASIO driver for your interface. 

Download and run the latest Bandlab Assistant

Download and install Cakewalk and also the addition content if you want it. 

Open Cakewalk and under preferences/ Audio/Playback and recording choose ASIO make sure nothing but your Focusrite interface is selected as inputs / outputs and timing master. 

Load a basic project and choose the correct input from the track header menu. Activate record for the track and the meters should move when you sing or play. Now hit R and record.  

The Solo has very limited routing and does not come with Mix control software. ( at least it didn't in the past)  The 6i6 I think is the first in line to use mix control. That would also give you a one click option to change the output like Neol has mentioned. I don't think any DAW has a option to mute your monitors when you hit record. That's why you need a sound engineer in the studio, that's their job-- and I'm afraid now that's your job!! 

Your screen shot shows me that you have instrument tracks for 16 Ezdrummer parts.  

Track 52 is a midi track. That is not the audio track for the EZ drummer VST so changing it's level might not do anything. .  Midi tracks generally do not seem to change the volume of the VST unless your track 53 contains CC 10 ( or 11) for that VST. I just tried this just to double check. Volume changes in my drum kits are made in the GUI mixer for each drum part and by the Audio track of the VST.  But I don't use simple instrument tracks, I use a dedicated midi track for each part and they are all assigned to the VST. 

I don't know where you created that midi track but it also seems assigned to EZdrummer5? the header seems wrong. 

Ditto for me last time I updated. The assistant has been buggy since day one. I almost always have to uninstall and then go download the latest version. 

Did you read my post and follow through?

I don't understand why you have to upload to Bandlab to listen to a song? 

Export it as a wave or MP3.

Burn a CD or put it on a USB stick if your car stereo supports that. 

If your using Bluetooth and a cell phone copy the MP3 using drag and drop, itunes or Email the song to yourself. Put it in Drop Box or One drive, Make a You Tube video,,, I can think of a lot of way I can listen to my songs. 

Those are all freeware DAWs. If they were not probably full of invasive spyware etc I might download one just for fun, But I avoid freeware unless recommended by someone I trust.   I would imagine they are not very full featured anyhow.  Cakewalk is complicated because of its long history in development and not to mention,  it used to cost $500.  Just because it is free now does not put it in the same category as any Freeware DAW's. Not even close. It took me 10 years to "get it". 

The things to look for are first open your Preference Audio dialog and make sure only the Tascam is the ASIO device. 

Make sure you have the latest driver https://tascam.com/us/product/us-1800/download  2.05 is older. There is a 2.07 now. 

Example of what they are saying is you can create a 6 track midi song with 6 different instruments assigned to different VST's or to just the TTS-1. 

If you set the instrument patches inside the GUI of the VST and save it as a midi file all of that is gone. You would save it as a CWP file to keep the info. 

You have to set the patch and bank info in the track header menus to have them imbedded in a midi file.  Making GM midi files that play properly on all systems is a very advanced use of midi. Cakewalk is one of the better midi sequencers as it has deep roots in that world. 

https://sites.google.com/view/cactus-studios/part-1-midi-and-cakewalk

You really need to get rid of that generic ASIO driver, that definitely causes problems for me so I found the .dll and nuked it. ( it will be in a Steinberg folder)  It gets installed with Steinberg stuff like Wave Lab or Cubase. 

I find it a very useful feature and it really help when you transfer songs from another computer. In the past I would have to spent a few minutes just to get a project set up for my main DAW which has 2 monitors if it was coming from my laptop which only has a small screen. That and MIx recall save my huge amounts of time just repeating the same stuff. 

http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Lenses.2.html#:~:text=Cakewalk - Cakewalk Documentation - Using Workspaces&text=Click the Workspaces drop-down,then select the desired Workspace.&text=Configure Cakewalk the way you,menu and select New Workspace.

OK both will do the same thing, 

Not sure if you got this working but what I see in your screen shot is you do not have record activated.

You have Solo.

And you don't need input echo on to record.  I never turn it on unless it's a midi track and I'm playing a VST.  With audio it will most likely cause a echo in your monitoring due to system latency.  

This I believe is a long standing issue with the playlist. You might want to google it for an answer as I'm not sure anyone left here on the new forum still uses this feature. There were one or 2 on the old forum and they talked about this "bug" It's just that Cakewalk will think just about anything means the song has been altered and needs saving. Just ignore it. 

Funny you bring this up because I just was opening a bunch of old projects, hitting play then stop and closing, They all asked me if I wanted to save. 

Just to add you won't need to do this again if you download everything from your old Sonar Command Center and then copy and save the Command Center download folder to a back up drive. It's a good practice to have all that valuable content backed up to at least 3 safe places. 

The command Center folder is found  Local disk C /Program Data/Cakewalk/ Downloads

Funny how there's 1 in 10,000 who has an issue with what ever the latest OS version is. That's like when W7 came out and people stayed with Xp because W7 was terrible and causing issues. 

I Have 3 computers that run W10 and they all have the latest version of CbB. My studio has a proper audio interface the others I don't really record on but might open them to play files and they all work just fine.  It's been a long time since Cakewalk froze up on me.   

My remote recording laptop has W7 .  I just updated CbB and it warned me that W7 was not supported. But it installed just fine and I've used it for over 2 weeks now including two 4 hour sessions recording 16 tracks. Never hiccuped once.  The OS it sort of a none issue for me. But Noel did say they have tweaked CbB to be optimized on W10 so you should see better performance on heavy hitting projects. 

SI drums is a very basic VST I don't personally know how to change individual kit pieces. You can certainly do this is most 3rd party drum VST's.  It's a freebie so along with that comes limitations. 

If the audio track for the VST is not reacting to the volume changes then it is not assigned from the midi tracks. There is a MIXER you can use and it will have a master volume but the VST instrument track has the last say in level. Mute that track and if you still here the drums then you have something wrong. 

Here's a few tutorials a made that might help

https://sites.google.com/view/cactus-studios/home

In the past if you wanted to become a recording engineer you read a few well written books or you went to a college. You would then understand the terminology and "how things work" . It a bit annoying to have people think a software company is supposed to spoon feed engineering to the punters. Read the manual and study your craft. Book or videos it's you choice, but I highly recommend this if you want to get were your going without frustration. 

https://bgaudioclub.org/uploads/docs/Yamaha_Sound_Reinforcement_Handbook_2nd_Edition_Gary_Davis_Ralph_Jones.pdf