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Matthew Carr

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Posts posted by Matthew Carr

  1. Hi,

    Wonder if anyone can shed any light on this,  I have a strange re-producible issue, but you'll need the Waves Tune Real-Time plugin.

    1. Create new project from the basic template 'Basic.CWT'
      image.png.06db1513c0e66889a2aab92665b07a22.png
       
    2. Add Waves Tune Real-Time Mono in the FX Bin of the audio track

      image.png.a5dad335e48a6d5a585e5e7b99a3d243.png
       
    3. Insert Rapture Soft Synth as a simple instrument track (not Rapture Session)
      image.png.2b42d377e4c2e11af35b50c0b2c0e30c.png
       
    4. Cakewalk crashes, UI of Rapture is white
      image.png.297075aca9e744b7664cb829e1f2f994.png
       
    5. Only way out is to kill Cakewalk via task manager
       
    6. Rapture can be inserted without issue , if I:
      1. Don't add the waves auto tune audio fx
      2. Add the waves auto tune audio fx, but bypass it (i.e. click the off switch in fx bin, so it's greyed out), before adding Rapture

    Tried it on 2 systems, with the same results. Haven't used the auto tune plugin before, so maybe I'm missing something that is causing the crash - maybe? Seems like it causes issues with other synths as well if it's enabled in the fx bin (e.g.  might cause some kind of audio feedback in the output of Air Xpand2 when selecting some presets), but Rapture seemed like the most clear cut issue.

    System is core i7, windows 10, CbB and Waves all updated to latest.

    Thanks in advance for any help,

    Matt

     

     

  2. Hi HardDrive,

    Sounds like there's plenty going on in your setup, but my 2 cents on your points would be:

    1) Make sure you always plug the same gear into the same USB socket on your PC every time, particularly any controllers and your sound card. The device and the port it's plugged into are used by Windows to identify the device. If devices are plugged into ports different to when the file was last saved, you will get CbB prompting you to assign ins and outs to devices when opening the file (even though they may have the same name in the dialog)

    2) Try un-checking the Reset All Controllers to zero at start / stop option - sometimes these messages are interpreted by plugins as a controller change, so the project gets marked as dirty, and it has to be saved before closing. (Would be great if there was a command line switch to open a CbB project in read only mode - I did raise it as a feature request, but no traction so far)

    3) No experience - sorry!

    Cheers,

    Matt

  3. My advice would be to avoid Dell laptops - I recently bought a Dell Latitude 5480 with an  i7 7820HQ thinking it'd be just the job. It's a lovely laptop, but useless for music production. DPC latency is terrible, and nothing I change in the config will make it usable for music production. Researching it, it seemed pretty much all newish dell laptops have the same problem. Dell promised to fix the DPC on the the XPS 15, but as far as i know they never released any updates that truly made it better - the newest incarnation may be better, but I'd be ultra cautious buying dell unless you can get a reliable DPC result before buying.

  4. Fantastic work on this release Bakers, great effort!

    I tried out the new Playlist functionality, and this has really improved. The ability to  discard project changes during playback is great, and loading the next song at the end of the current song gets rid of audio glitches and other problems that used to happen when loading the next song whilst the current song starts.

    I think there's still room for improvement though, to make this really useable in a live environment

    Possible Bugs

    •  When loading a project from the playlist, the now time is always set to the start of a project, rather than respecting where the now time has been set to when saving the file. Perhaps this is by design, if so there needs to be an option to respect the saved now time in projects.
       
    •  When a song is manually loaded by double clicking on an entry, any existing projects are left open - manually jumping to a new point in the playlist should close any open projects (and respect the option to discard any changes made)

    Enhancements

    I'd like to be able to  control the playlist from my master keyboard transport controls - having to press keys on the laptop isn't so practical, and reminds the audience that a computer is involved. There are a few changes that would help in this regard

    •  In the delay dialog, add an option along the lines of  'Just Load Song', which will mean 
      • The project is loaded, but not started.
      •  The project transport obeys the standard transport controls, so can be started, stopped, rewound etc using the transport controls
      •  When the project plays past the end, the next project is loaded as per normal
      •  No MsgBox dialogs are shown when the project starts. E,g right now if I press play on my master keyboard, the project doesn't start, instead it displays a dialog which I then have to accept on the laptop in order to start the song - Useless if I'm trying to cue backing to a live band member!
         
    •  Allow the playlist to be toggled between minimised / maximised via a learned midi command. When using a laptop, the playlist obscures too much of cakewalk when always on top, but we need a way to quickly bring up and then hide the setlist during a show
       
    • Add midi learnable commands to 
      •  Scroll up the list
      •  Scroll down the list
      •  Manually load the currently selected project (the same as pressing enter, or double clicking a file name)
         
    •  Consider an additional 'Live' view of the setlist, which just displays the Status, File Name , BPM and Key in a larger font. The extra columns are needed for setting up the playlist, but not during the show - a larger font would be far more use!
    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1
  5. 1 hour ago, Emiliano Branda said:

    WOW!!!! Thanks a lot, although I would have liked a staff view improvement.................     😭

    Agreed, the amount of time and effort being spent in quashing bugs, fine tuning features based on feedback, and adding genuinely useful enhancements is really making Cakewalk shine... the current development approach rocks! Great work all at Cakewalk and Bandlab

    (I too would really like to see the staff view get an upgrade.... that probably sounds a bit needy given all the efforts to date, sorry!)

    • Like 1
  6. What would be a really helpful  addition is to allow Cakewalk to open a file in a read-only mode, perhaps via a command argument

    e.g.   sonar.exe -readonly "C:\songs\my very bad song.cwp"

    In read only mode, the save changes dialog would never appear, and changes would never be saved. 

    Of course this could be dangerous without understanding it's meaning, but I doubt anyone would set this switch unless they knew what it did. Would be fantastic when using other programs to manage a setlist though..

    (Maybe some element of the UI could change colour in read only mode, to make it obvious)

    I tried using the playlist app again the other day - wasn't very successful. I send midi data to control outboard gear when I load a backing track, and having two projects open at once seems to foul this up..

  7. Pretty sure you can set 'Midi Automator' up to automatically click on the 'No' button in a confirmation dialog, if it's present, when changing songs... haven't tried it myself though.

    Agree it'd be good to get an update to the official app though.. as the official app uses the API, it can preload songs in a setlist for quicker changing.

    Are the details of the API available? I might be interested in creating an open source project for this, if they are.

    Or maybe Bandlab would consider open sourcing there existing playlist app, so we could add an option to always close dirty projects without saving?

  8. Thanks All, some good advice given - I might be making some progress but need to do more testing.

    I'd read that the battery system could cause ACPI.sys latency in a laptop, so I disabled the 'Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Method Battery' driver under battery settings. Seems to make it appear to windows there is no battery installed, so easier than physically removing the battery. That did seem to help somewhat, but still was getting spikes (wifi / ethernet was disabled)

    I then tried setting the processor affinity for Cakewalk.exe to cores 2,3,4 via Task Manager, and even though latency Mon was still reporting high DPC on core 1, audio seemed to be OK with a buffer of 128.  Unfortunately, doesn't seem to be a way to set processor affinity for APCI.sys (even using Process Lassoo) and as I want to use this laptop in a live setting, I'd be nervous that ACPI.sys might for some reason  move off core 1 and wreck things - although I haven't seen that to date

    Guess I need to do more testing, to see if I can get ACPI.sys under control, or build my confidence up that setting processor affinity will do the trick. 

    Either that, or I sell the laptop and keep lugging my racked I7 desktop to gigs.. 😫

  9. Thanks Jim, Everything is updated to latest versions, so I'm out of options there. 

    13 minutes ago, Jim Roseberry said:

    There is no work-around for extremely high DPC Latency.

    I'm a bit deflated by that. The laptop has 4 cores, and only one core is being impacted by high DPC latency - surely if the audio app only runs on the cores not impacted, it wouldn't be interrupted by the process which takes a takes a long time to complete. Or am I being too simplistic?

     

  10. Hi All, afraid I need some technical help.

    I (unfortunately) just bought a dell laptop (Lattitude 5480) for use with cakewalk. On paper, this thing is a beast i7-7820HQ processor, 16 Gb Ram, Pcie(4x) SSD. It's a great laptop, very fast and capable, but turns out it's completely unusable with any audio program due to DPC latency

    LatencyMon shows the culprit as ACPI.sys  - I'm getting latency readings of over 2500uS, which results in lots of audible clicks and pops with reasonable ASIO buffers (256)

    I've done all the usual: disabled c states, turned off speed-step and turbo-boost in Bios; Set all power plan settings to max performance; Disabled network, on board audio, camera, microphone array etc in device manager - but nothing works. The only thing I can think of now is  to try and set processor affinity so cakewalk only runs on cores 2,3 & 4 - the DPC spikes seem only to occur on core 1. Is this possible, and does anyone have any experience or knowledge of doing this? I did attempt creating a shortcut that set the processor affinity using this article :https://www.eightforums.com/threads/cpu-affinity-shortcut-for-a-program-create-in-windows.40339/  but without much success.

    Is it possible to restrict Cakewalk to only use certain cores, and is it a viable technique to get around DPC Latency issues?

    Any advice gratefully received, as this is starting to look like an expensive mistake... 

  11. This sounds like a great idea, it's a pain when I move my laptop between home and rehearsal room  - different interfaces and different master keyboard mean it's easy to get things messed up. Being able to choose between multiple 'hardware configs' from the UI  would be awesome!

  12. The tool that I use live is http://midi-automator.com - unfortunately the website explaining it (and with the windows download) doesn't exist anymore, but there are details and some videos on this link. It's free and very useful replacement to the playlist (which I never got on with) - just make sure you set the option in CbB to only allow one file to be opened at once, and you're all set. Also freezing any backing and removing unused VSTs from the project will help with the load times. No Lyric prompting though - it just opens cakewalk projects in order and in response to learned midi messages.

    If you're interested I can send you the install program - being free & open source I don't think the author would mind.

  13. I'm certainly not advocating a full blown score editor or a way to print/share beautiful scores - just a staff editor that works. If you spend any time with staff editor as is, you'll come across lots of aggravating  issues - try entering some lyrics and you'll soon want to throw your PC out the window!

    Updating the component that the staff view was based on with the new version from Sonic Scores would probably address many of the issues, without Bandlab having to re-work the whole thing and commit a lot of development resource..

    .. then again, it's never happened before, despite all the feedback and requests, so maybe there's a reason we don't know about.

     

  14. I'd definitely like to see the staff view get some love - there seems a fairly pain free way to upgrade it using the offer from Sonic Scores, so why not move forward with it?

    As well as benefiting existing users,  having a decent staff editor has the potential to make CbB great choice in the education sector, being free and all - that would certainly help drive adoption of CbB, and promote BandLab.

     

     

  15. I've used Cakewalk in a live scenario before. I found the best approach was to abandon the cakewalk playlist program, set options so that only one project can be loaded at a time in Cakewalk, and use a program called midi automator to to create a setlist which will open a project file for each track in order, in response to a midi signal (or keypress). If you have any backing in your projects,  freeze the backing tracks so the VSTs don't need to be loaded when the project is loaded.  Search for "Cakewalk Midi Automator" once the cakewalk forum is back up.

    • Like 1
  16. So maybe I'm missing something, but the search seems broken on the legacy forum. Enter a search term in the search bar, there are no suggestions, if you hit enter you get zero or very limited results.

    E.g. a search for midi returns 2 results... surely there's a lot more results than that?

    image.png.178f8f6e4ecb11a0310c22b88c3a655a.png

    No much point in having the old forum available if it's not searchable.. Anyone else have this issue?

    Windows 10, tried both Chrome and Edge browsers..

     

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