msmcleod

If I've decided to give myself some studio time and my inspiration is totally dried up, I'll resort to recording a cover. There's definitely a satisfaction in getting a song finished, and a cover is an easy way to do this. It gives me a chance to keep my DAW skills current, experiment with any new plugins I'm not yet familiar with, and improve on my mixing skills. More recently I've been messing around with various pre-amps so I'm familiar with their differences.

That's what I would have suggested. Remember to set the MIDI channel in the inspector to none though, if your track contains multiple MIDI channels that you want to preserve.

You could try creating a send to an Aux track, then inserting the VSTi in the Aux track's FX bin.

And testing a webshop for every combination of transactions from each pay provider is even more tedious. I only support PayPal, and that was a massive amount of testing.

That's actually what I use dropbox for..., but yes it's definitely worth storing the installers. I've got them on a portable HDD as well for convenience.

It came up as an update for me, I clicked to install it and it went through the motions but said the install didn't take. Once I restarted Native Access, it said everything was up to date... I hardly ever touch the factory selection, so not really an issue. Strange nonetheless.

I clone my HDDs at least once a month. I keep the most recent 2 backups. For projects, I also use a cloud backup. I've got a batch file that copies my projects & audio files to and from a backup folder. The backup folder is set to sync to Mega (You can also use dropbox, OneDrive etc.. in fact, I use OneDrive for syncing other stuff). The reason for having a backup folder & batch files, is because Cakewalk will crash if you have your cloud sync trying to backup audio files when Cakewalk is writing to them. The other reason is that I have control over when I want it backed up. The initial cloud upload took a few hours (which only needs to be done once). Now when I've finished a session, I just click on the short-cut to my batch file and it's sync'd with the cloud in about a minute or so. I can then go to my laptop, and click on the "copy from cloud" shortcut, and all my projects etc are available on my laptop. A complete restore is usually pretty quick... both the cloud sync & batch files only deal with recent changes, so it doesn't need to download everything... just what I've changed since I imaged my HDD.

It essentially allows you to remove clutter on the UI, by removing all the modules you're not going to use for a certain workflow task and making them easier to find.

Plogue Alter/Ego is a pretty good free alternative to Vocaloid: https://www.plogue.com/products/alter-ego.html I wouldn't say the voice is of the same quality, but it's easy to use and great for getting ideas down. And it's free. I use it occasionally when I've already got a good idea of vocal melody and lyrics. You just type (or cut/paste) the lyrics into the VSTi, then it "sings" the syllables as you play the notes. It'll even hold on to the same syllable if you play legato.

You can use the Move Tool or Smart Tool to move the clips up against each other. For example with the move tool, just left click on the clip and move it over. To join clips, you just select the clips you want to join and right click "Bounce to clip(s)".

As an alternative, you can use Melodyne for quantising audio tracks.

Back in the Cakewalk ProAudio days, you could use "Record Macro" to create a CAL program for you. There was pretty much a one-to-one mapping between the available menus and the CAL functions available. Of course in those days, MIDI functionality was king with only a basic support and a handful of functions for audio tracks / audio operations. When CAL was deprecated, new SONAR / Cakewalk menu functions weren't added and the Record Macro facility was removed. The old menu calls still work however, and CAL is still very useful for manipulating MIDI. I guess it would be nice if the CbB devs at least provided CAL functions for the new menu functions that are available in Cakewalk, but to be honest I've not really found a need for them for a long while. There's quite a few suggestions for 3rd party workarounds in the link in scook's post. So although it's unlikely CAL will be updated, there's usually some way of working around it.

I listen to similar stuff - mainly prog rock, hard rock and jazz fusion. I try to compose in the veins and styles of the genres I listen to... then it goes unintentionally to other places!

Link to Azslow's AzLUA plugin: http://www.azslow.com/index.php?topic=286.msg1363#msg1363

I used TDK tapes almost exclusively for general usage, but yes, I got the phazy effect when I used TDKs in the both the MT1X & MT8X. Swapping to the Maxells fixed this issue for me.

I find that the selecting the right detection algorithm can affect the sound quality greatly. Try changing the correction algorithm and see if it makes a difference.

Wow, that's strange. It works perfectly for me on Audio FX, MIDI FX, and Instruments. I guess it's possible %APPDATA%\Cakewalk\Library\Library.db has somehow got corrupted. How.... I've no idea. However, if you come out of Cakewalk and rename Library.db to Library.db.bak, and restart Cakewalk it should recreate it. I'm guessing that this might make your properties dialog re-appear. You can always rename it back if it doesn't. CORRECTION - renaming it back doesn't restore the layout

You can use CTRL + click to select multiple plugins in the browser, then right click to assign them all to the same category. Also, the category is not just a drop down - you can type into it to create new ones.

I tried out various Fostex & Tascam 4 tracks at the time, and I've got to say the Yamaha MT1X for me beat them hands down with fidelity (this was before the MT2X came out). The choice of cassette was pretty vital too - Maxell XLII's were matched the best for the Yamaha (I see you're using those too). The guitarist I worked with would record his parts live, mixed with my sequenced drums, keyboards & bass (Alesis SR16 / Roland CM64 sequenced in Music-X on an Amiga 500) to 2 tracks. We'd then use the other 2 tracks for vocals & additional guitars. I recorded tonnes of stuff on my MT1X that way... hardly anyone believed they were done on a 4 track with no bounces!

That looks like an old MT1X. I had one of those, and later upgraded to a MT8X which ran at double the speed. The increase in fidelity was significant. And when you consider that it was using half as much of the tape width for each track, that's saying something.

Awesome - thanks Noel. I don't use the app that often (partly due to the slowness), but this will certainly make it much more usable.

Good point.

The plugin browser layout equivalent of the *.pgl files is %AppData%\Cakewalk\Library\Library.db which you can copy between your desktop & laptop.

For the most part, you don't actually need the Plugin Manager: Manual scans can be done from Preferences->VST Settings Plugin properties can accessed be via the plugin's VST2/VST3 dropdown menu The plugin layout can be changed via the plugin browser by right clicking on the plugin The only thing you really need the Plugin Manager for is excluding problem plugins, but I'm sure the CbB devs will provide an alternative way of doing this before removing the Plugin Manager.

We've been discussing this in another thread. I found this to be worse than 4.2.0. I've found that once I set my default detection algorithm in 4.2.0, it remembered it and worked fine even after rebooting the PC. In 4.2.1 however, it consistently hangs cakewalk when dragging an audio track on to a MIDI track. The workaround is to create a region FX and manually select the detection algorithm. It'll then work for the rest of the session with that project.