pulsewalk

31 minutes ago, Bristol_Jonesey said:

Not seeing this behaviour here. Scrub works fine in the prv on a midi track, switch to Track View and no freezing, even with the scrub tool still enabled.

By the way. It is not clear whether you're pressing the left mouse button in track view with the Scrub Tool selected.
Doing what you describe you're doing, doesn't result in any freeze for me either. It first freezes when I actually press the left mouse button in track view with the Scrub Tool selected, which is equivalent to actually using the Scrub Tool there.

27 minutes ago, Bristol_Jonesey said:

Not seeing this behaviour here. Scrub works fine in the prv on a midi track, switch to Track View and no freezing, even with the scrub tool still enabled. 

The only thing I would say is that scrub doesn't seem to work on audio tracks, just midi. 

But definitely no freezing/crashing when switching views

The best thing would of course be to just disable the functionality of the Scrub Tool in track view, so even if the user accidentally press the left mouse button in track view when the Scrub Tool is selected, then nothing happens.

I'll check this again when updating to the latest build. But I couldn't find anything about this in the changelog for that build, so I guess it's still the same.

Still no words on a fix for this?

It is really a pain to have Cakewalk freeze when accidentally using the Scrub Tool in track view. It freezes for several minutes. Last time it didn't even recover after several minutes. Had to do a CTRL + ALT + DEL and force it to close, and restart the whole thing. Good thing I saved just before this. Otherwise it wouldn't have been pretty.

Why can't they make the Scrub Tool non-responsive/unusable in track view? That way, the whole DAW wouldn't have to freeze or freeze + crash.

This is certainly a BUG, not least since several users indicate the same thing. Please fix this!

5 hours ago, Bapu said:

I'm a neophyte when it comes to EDM, please explain what are the things that make a  DAW more EDM friendly.

Well, there are actually many things, but some are the way to side chain which is easier to do in some DAWs, and more difficult in some, it can be included VSTi's / VST FX. For example, there's no integrated VA in Cakewalk, not even the most basic one afaik.

Some integrated instruments in Cakewalk are the Virtual Drum Kit, Virtual Bass Guitar, Virtual Electric Piano and Virtual Strings. These are not quite EDM oriented even though they may be used in EDM sometimes or even often to a certain small degree.

More EDM oriented DAW's like Logic for example, comes with at least one really good integrated VA. The ES2 in Logic is fantastic by the way.

As a person working with all kinds of Sequencers/DAW's (at least to some degree) since the 90's, I can't see how Cakewalk would be EDM oriented.

However, since I'm so used to Cakewalk, I use it anyway. I like the workflow. There's a few EDM producers that use Cakewalk, but they're indeed not many.

Logic, Ableton, FL Studio are on the other hand all huge DAWs among the most known EDM producers in the world.

There's also other stuff that has been mentioned here, which makes it easier to work with loops and such. etc.

On 9/2/2023 at 12:39 AM, Starship Krupa said:

The competition is now Mixcraft, REAPER, Studio One Artist.

In the earlier years Cubase was the biggest competitor for Twelve Tone Systems Cakewalk.

But then came Sonar and it seems it could not really keep up with Cubase which then rather was competing with Logic and so forth.

Now there's an entire line of DAWs of which many competes in the TOP, like Logic (of course) Cubase, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Studio One, Reaper, and so forth.

For some reason Cakewalk (even though it is FREE) is not even considered by the professionals. Which I think is a shame. Though I must admit there are certain things in Cakewalk which are kinda old fashioned and just can't keep up with modern music production, especially for EDM.

I wonder how Sonar will place itself among these strong competitors listed above. I really hope it'll be more EDM friendly, something which today more or less affect most of music styles, not least considering the need for proper mixing.

5 hours ago, Larioso said:

The E-cores, even running at half speed give you some theoretical boost in ratings, and you have to decide if worth it with 13th generation.

Yeah, and this is what's bothering me. AFAIK, Cubase had some problems with the new e-cores in 2022, I'm not sure if that problem is solved or if it is solved in a Windows 10 or 11 update etc.

Question is if Cakewalk can handle e-cores well, and only The Bakers can answer that I guess, or if there's been a test that verifies this.

Quote

I'm just giving you a perspective what to expect. Maybe you have a MB that you can swap cpu alone if that socket is there, and not an awful amount of money.

Unfortunately, the socket is different for 13th gen CPU from 10th gen, so I can't easily swap CPU's just like that. Need new mobo and even memory if I go the DDR5 route.

Waiting for 14th gen (14900K) is not much of an idea I guess, except for the case that it'll cost just the same as the 13900K on release, because then one could as well go with the 14th gen, and thus get more or less a 13900KS on steroids. But other than that, the only thing is to wait for the new architecture with that 15th gen, but that's quite far away.

So yeah, there I am. Cakewalk is just to slow for me with the 10850K right now, too big projects for it to handle it well I'm afraid.

So the questions remain, does Cakewalk handle e-cores well?

@Larioso this is the difference:

Link to Passmark comparison: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3824vs5022/Intel-i9-10850K-vs-Intel-i9-13900K

The performance increase is a 51,3% on Single Thread performance, (from 3087 to 4670), according to Passmark, and there's no e-cores involved in that as far as I know.

My current CPU

Intel Core i9-10850K (from Q3/2020)
Socket: FCLGA1200 Typical TDP: 125 W
Clock: 3.6 GHz, Turbo: 5.1 GHz
Cores: 10, Threads: 20
Average CPU Mark: 22618, Single Thread performance: 3087

Planned CPU

Intel Core i9-13900K (from Q3/2022)
Socket: FCLGA1700 Typical TDP: 253 W
Clock: 3.0 GHz, Turbo: 5.8 GHz
Cores: 24, Threads: 32
Performance Cores: 8 Cores, 16 Threads, 3.0 GHz Base, 5.8 GHz Turbo
Efficient Cores: 16 Cores, 16 Threads, 2.2 GHz Base, 4.3 GHz Turbo
Average CPU Mark: 59782, Single Thread performance: 4670

@Larioso so you mean that e-cores are not only slower and worse than what one might think and hope, but in fact, and on the contrary, also even a disadvantage?

So Cakewalk runs faster wtih e-cores disabled? Than with e-cores enabled? This is horrible news, since a lot of that extra speed that you can see in the benchmark comparisons with older processors, like with the 10850K for example, is in that case just "on paper" and will not affect the use of Cakewalk positively.

The 10850K have 10 cores (comparable to p-cores (performance cores) I presume), which is 2 more than the 8 performance cores on the 13900K. Could it be so bad that the 10850K thus is as fast as, or perhaps even faster, than the "only 8 core" 13900K?

In that case, it might not be an upgrade to get the 13900K, it could be a downgrade?

Is there any information about whether Cakewalk handles Intels "new" efficiency cores well?

So if one want to upgrade from a 10850K (that only have "performance cores" (10 of them)) to a 13900K which have both 8 performance cores (p-cores)  and 16 efficiency cores (e-cores), will this in reality give a good increase in speed?

Cakewalk need to be handle the p-cores and e-cores well to fully utilize the newer CPU's with e-cores.

Any info on this?

On 3/30/2023 at 4:11 AM, Starship Krupa said:

Indeed they do, and it may be of value to them for you to wrap it up as a .ZIP or .CWB and get it to them. I think if you send it to BandLab/Cakewalk support and notify them that it's for the devs, that will close the loop.

While they probably won't be able to figure out the initial cause, they might at least look at how it is now and get some idea of how to prevent it. They can also possibly slip you a build that has error reporting triggers in it that will write to a log file. Their call.

I'll emphasize this because a few years back, I had one project that exhibited multiple issues with sluggishness, and submitted it to the devs. As it turned out, it exposed multiple issues with Cakewalk due to some uncommon settings I was using. So the devs wrenched on the code and it resulted in multiple improvements to things like drawing speed and input response. This was across the board, whether someone was using my settings or not. This kind of error reporting can help all users.

I rather don't send out my complete projects. The best would be if they could release a tool that could run such a check on the users computer and save the info in a text file or whatever form it should be saved, which the user could send back to the DEV's. Also, this log file shall not contain any musical information etc., as there's sometimes quite rigid copyright issues and what not.

On 3/30/2023 at 2:04 AM, rfssongs said:

Are you sure your hard drive is OK ?

(again just a thought)

It does not matter if I copy the project to another location on the harddrive or to another harddrive. No difference.

And I'm quite sure my harddrive is ok though. Have not had any problems with it. No read or write errors.

12 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Given that the arranger section seeking uses exactly the same mechanism as looping,  I can't see having an inverted loop would help if you're having issues with the arranger.

But how come I can loop perfectly without delay and glitches? While the arranger track gives a delay when "jumping" and glitches and stuff? It's the same heavy project.

A loop is also jumping essentially, from the back to the beginning, every time it loops. And it does it perfectly.

If I could just take the loop markers, drag the end marker to the "beginning" and the start marker to the "end" then it would be the same thing as excluding that part. It would jump. But it seems this is not possible. Hence a feature request of this by me

19 hours ago, rfssongs said:

Sorry - Peter with the crash. It was just a thought - nothing more.

 

BTW: I don't feel like Cakewalk is buggy but I do feel like there are so many shortcuts assigned that it might seem that way at times. It usually doesn't cause problem but I hit wrong keys semi regularly. Strange things can happen. (Backups, Backups, Backups)

Unfortunately backups doesn't help the problems I have with corrupted tracks. The corruptions lay latent and can come up 10, 100, or 1000 (etc.) working hours after they was generated, it seems.

So backing up is really no cure for this. For sure, one can go a version back to avoid the latest corruption, but it will still be there latent, and explode once again if one touches the "wrong" track

20 hours ago, SirWillyDS12 said:

Isn't that what the Arranger tracks do?

AFAIK it can't just jump over portions of a track smoothly. Looping is smooth. Excluding a bit of a track would also be smooth. Not to mention both very quickly done. Arranger track is a different thing.

53 minutes ago, rfssongs said:

I have had a few problems like this. I believe that in my case an audio overload caused the crash. Could this have happened to you ?

Who is "you"? Me, the OP? Or PeterWalker87?

We have the Loop feature where we can select a time range in the ruler or simply selecting a clip to set the markers to loop between when the track is played.

What we are missing though, is an "Exclude section"-feature, where we could select a portion/section of a track that we would like to "jump over" during play, just to exclude that part.

Maybe we want to hear how the track sounds without those 8 bars, etc. Just select the time (or the clip(s) we want to exclude, and press the "Exclude" button, that's it. A portion of the track is prepared with markers (just like when we select a portion/section to loop), and when we play the track the "exclude-part" of the track is simply jumped over without pause or glitches or anything.

This would be a very handy feature!

The arranger is unworkable on heavy projects. The jumping it does is horrible. It pauses and glitches and what not.

Looping works perfectly even on my huge projects but arranger track does not. Not only that, just working with it f*cked up my track for no obvious reason. For sure, the project is already corrupted to sh*t, probably beyond repair, but markers has not corrupted anything for me before.. not yet anyway.

So a solution with markers seems to be a better way to do this.

"Inverted" loop-markers would be really good, but there doesn't seem to be any. I think I will do a feature request on "excluding" parts of the track, the opposite to loop.

3 hours ago, John Vere said:

I don’t understand why you would not use the arranger? That is exactly why they added it a few year ago it allows you to listen to different arrangements of your song. I’m guilty of never even reading the instructions yet but it seems intuitive how it works.  
And it’s none destructive to the song  you can delete the whole thing if you’re finished with experiments. 
It basically an extra track that can control the timeline of the project.  
Its brilliant for re arranging backing tracks using a download midi file when you want to make it longer by adding extra parts  . 
I also used it once to place the lyrics in the song . You need the correct zoom level but it works great . 

 

Oh, don't get me wrong. It's not that I "don't want to use" the arranger. I just would like to be able to very quickly do what I explained, to skip a certain portion of the track when playing.

This could be achieved with 2 simple clicks, exactly like setting a loop.

Click 1: Click and hold down left mouse button on the time ruler, drag it where you want, release the mouse button. OR select a clip/several clips that you want to loop.

Click 2: Press the loop button with one click.

= 2 clicks

The exact same way, one could (should? ) have been able to  exclude  a portion of the track. Just select the time you want to exclude and click the "Exclude" button OR select a clip which you want to exclude, in order to select the same time span.

Can the same thing be done with 2 clicks in the arranger? I'm not very familiar with arranger track, but I know it takes a little time to setup. For sure, when its already done, it might be quickly worked.

When I have sections set up in the arranger, how can I "jump over" one section? I can't find a function like that.

2 hours ago, tecknot said:

There is no such module I am aware of.  However, you may be able to use the Arranger to create the same.  I don't use the Arranger myself, but hopefully someone can enlighten us on its use in this regards, if it is possible.

1 hour ago, John Vere said:

Yes this is what the arranger does. Create your sections in your case it would be only 3. Now drag the 1st to the arranger at the bottom and then the 3rd. Click the playback and just those 2 parts play You can also export that version 

I just want to use it for quick checks to hear how the project sounds without a certain part of it. So it's something I want to do very quickly, like listening to a loop, without the need for "extensive" "editing" etc.
Maybe there's markers you could set to make the play cursor to jump forward in time?

I've searched the net but could not find this feature. Maybe there is one but I have no idea what it is called.

So, the feature I'm looking for is to EXCLUDE a portion of the project, during play, so Cakewalk automatically jumps over a selected time.

Is there such a feature? I want to be able to listen to the track with a certain selected portion excluded from the play

15 hours ago, PeterWalker87 said:

I did have one project go corrupt recently, but was able to recover from a backup.

What kind of corruption was it? Can you describe what happened?

Also, is there no tool/function to check the health of a project? Corruptions or whatever? There are such things for Indesign, for example, where one can check problems with the document and let the software auto correct it. Same for Adobe PDF files and so forth.

9 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Well, as you alluded to, I too suspect that your project is getting corrupted at some point and all subsequent weirdness stems from that. A software engineer colleague of mine described it using a “cracked windshield” metaphor.

Windshield gets hit with a stone, then over months of driving, the crack spreads. But it’s all the result of that one stone.

Once you see the first sign of corruption it seems like it only gets worse after that.

 I’m suspecting a plug-in less as you describe it more, but it is true that really bad issues with Cakewalk very often come down to plug-in conflicts. So it’s worth keeping an eye on. Serum, obviously, is a very popular synth, and if it were causing problems like this the forum and Reddit would be in flames.

It’s crucial at this point to watch for the very first instance of corruption and then see if you can remember what operations you did right before it happened.

QA engineers, which I used to be, maintain a mental “buffer” of actions so that they can retrace their steps.

It’s a challenge, but not an impossible one.

When I saw a similar thing, it was in a project with a low track count, and it involved a couple of MeldaProduction plug-ins. Melda are known for having a large amount of shared code, so that might have had something to do with it. I might have been doing some sidechaining, which could also have helped.

IIRC, it did corrupt the project, but since it was a small project, I just salvaged it into a new project and the error didn’t happen again. Haven’t seen it since, so I called it a fluke. 🤷‍♂️

Also, I guess it's a combination of plugin and DAW, in case a plugin is causing this, since if it only would be the plugin itself, it would've been happening in other DAW's too. What I mean by this is that Cakewalk somehow makes it possible for the plugin to corrupt the project, where's the same plugin can't cause this mess in other DAW's.

This is of course true if the said plugins problematic behaviour is not causing any problems in other DAW's. Well, if it's the plugin thats causing it in the first place.

Don't the DEV's have tools for opening CW project files and look at construct of them? Like opening an .INI file or something? So they can see what is what etc. Then, maybe it would be possible to check what's wrong. Becuase I very well know which tracks that are corrupt at the moment, so if one only could look at how that information looks "behind the scenes" so to speak.

Could it be a problem with the internal "naming" or "tagging" of clips and/or tracks? When Cakewalk adds a certain ID number (or however it is done) to a certain clip or track, maybe it somehow accidentally assign the same ID to another clip in the project, which causes lots of reference problems and such?

This would explain the automation ghosting problems that I've described earlier, but also that when handling one track is affecting another, completely different, track regardless of VST's or VSTi's used.

I can't really see a connection between VST's and VSTi's and my problem considering the used ones are different from each other in the corrupted tracks and clips and what not.

If the problem only would occur with say the Serum VSTi only, or a certain FX VST plugin only, then one could say that "perhaps that specific VST/VSTi is the problem". But AFAIK there's no such connection there.

12 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

I wouldn't worry about that. They definitely don't want people to have such troubles with the software.

I certainly hope so. I actually didn't even get a reply when I contacted the person I was told to contact regarding the below linked issue, which also seems to be a part of the problems stated in this thread. And this was like 4 months ago, so I'm not even sure they are listening to what I'm saying