Light Grenade

2 hours ago, telecode 101 said:

It looks cool but man, that is a lot of $$$. Does it really make that much difference workflow wise?

For me, absolutely.  It's the the best audio product I've ever bought. Cakewalk has full integration too which really helps. 

It's a bit of a departure at first, but once you commit to it, it becomes as important as the DAW. The main thing for me was that it stopped me buying countless plugins I didn't need. I choose a few C1 channel strips and learned them well. It makes everything much quicker, and mixing is genuinely more enjoyable. It's hard to conceive what it's like until you have C1 instances all over a project and you can just fly through a mix. This new model should only make things better. 

Happy to see a new Fader with scribble strips. It was such an oversight not including them on the original version. I'll definitely get that once it comes out. The MKII consoles don't even feel dated at this point, so I'll likely stick with the standard channel for a while, but I'll wait and see. 

2 hours ago, Sidney Earl Goodroe said:

Lord Tim mentioned a "rent to own" option for the upcoming Sonar release. Is not that the same as subscription?

'Rent to own' is time limited and ends once you pay off the full cost of the software - essentially like interest free finance. Splice do this with a handful of DAW's and plugins.

Traditional subscriptions are eternal. 

The Cakewalk team have been outstanding since the inception of CbB. It simply cannot be overstated just how much better Cakewalk is now since the days of X2. 

I am not joking when I say I used to have one desktop and two laptops running X2 because project files became corrupt every day, and I needed two backup systems to access mixes. It was honestly a nightmare and essentially unusable for heavy, time crititcal projects. X2 forced me learn Reaper. CbB could be better yes, but it's simply a joy to use in comparison to the X series. 

I'm happy about it going paid, as honestly I didn't feel confident in the longevity of a truly free product and I didn't feel 100% comfortable reporting bugs and suggesting feedback for a free product. Like, what more can I expect for something that is free, and does 90% of what I need, when a lot of the competition is upwards of £300 annually? 

On the flipside, once it goes paid, there's an added impetus to make things better and get things fixed. I'll feel more comfortable pushing longstanding issues to the team knowing that I'm paying for it, and I mean this in a productive way, not a threatening way. 

If something goes majorly wrong, which I hope it doesn't, I'll just flip to Reaper full time. In general, it's not a bad idea getting a handle on more than 1 DAW. 

1 minute ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Next is a completely new DAW designed from the ground up by us over the last five years. It was developed to be cross platform and works equally well on Mac and PC with full AU and VST support.
The focus so far has been on creation centric features as opposed to the more production centric features that Sonar has.
For example, it has very intuitive lyrics entry and song arrangements, a built in sampler and pad controller which is quite powerful, allowing you to set up sampler or instrument pads. 
While Next might look visually similar to the online web based BandLab Studio that's only because we followed branding guidelines. The product itself is quite deep and includes many of the bells and whistles Cakewalk users have come to expect, like multiprocessor support, background plugin scanning and flexible routing. Routing is very simplified and elegant in Next and can all be done via track folders (unlike Sonar). There are many more exciting features coming in future roadmaps. I'm sure in the upcoming weeks Jesse will post more information about Next.

In the interim, interested users are welcome to request beta access if you want hands-on experience with the application.

This sounds exactly like I hoped it would. Great news.

Although I really like Cakewalk for traditional recording and mixing, I've never found it the most intuitive to create electronic pieces from the ground up. I tend to use Bitwig 16 track to get an idea out of my head onto the computer.

Will certainly be giving Next a try. 

38 minutes ago, sjoens said:

It sounds like it won't look much different but will be vector based instead of image based. So doubtful there will be much interchange but there will be a new easier to use theme editor.  There's screenshots on the new site.

For some reason I assumed these screenshots were of CbB and were just place holders. 

"exciting, new visual identity" implied to me that the UI overhaul would be more substantial.

Really happy about the vector upgrade though. CbB really doesn't look great on a 4K display laptop.

I wonder if Cakewalk NEXT projects will open in Sonar. This would be handy for those who collaborate between Mac & Windows. 

Interesting to see Cakewalk Next being offered on MacOS.  I can't see SONAR going MacOS any time soon, but it would make a big change to the user base. 

I wonder if this will see marketing efforts increase, as marketing for Cakewalk by Bandlab was virtually non-existent. It looked like a defunct product from the outside, despite multiple great updates being implemented. 

Pricing is key, especially when Reaper costs $60/$225. Definitely interested to see what happens. 

I agree. 

I have bounced silence or duff files more times than I can remember, and it is irritating. 

Having the export module override DAW selection also makes the most sense to me, but the current way of working is so baked in, it will likely cause issues. 

Export project is a good solution. 

1 hour ago, John Vere said:

When I do remote recording I will not use a external drive for my working project storage. I use my data drive of the desktop, I copy the project folder to the laptop using a thumb or external drive and date it. 
I record using the local disk of the laptop. Before I transfer it back too the external drive I rename with new date. 
I then most likely will just drag the new tracks to the original project if that is all that changed. 
But I will definitely copy the updated version to the desktop. Storage is cheap. The more backups the better .  Having one copy of a project is only asking for Trouble. 
 

The only thing comes to mind about what happened to you was if the recording somehow was not streaming to the external drive but was using the global audio folder. 

I've recorded onto an external SSD for five years and genuinely never had one problem and I back up to two places, backups aren't the problem, I was just curious about why the project didn't update even though I saved multiple times.

There was also no audio in the global audio folder, certainly a weird one. 

Hi folks, 

I encountered a really weird issue yesterday.  Unsure if it's a Cakewalk issue, SSD issue or both.

I took my SSD on location to track drums. I set up the project on my desktop a few days before.

Made some tweaks to the project, tracked the drums, saved, all good. Upon getting home and connecting the SSD to my desktop, the audio files weren't there and the project files hadn't updated. 

I then connected the SSD back to my laptop, the files reappeared in my audio folder, however they weren't in the project, and the project file had reverted to a version from 4 days ago. 

Connected again to my desktop, and I have the files in the audio folder but not in the project. I dragged the files into the project and everything was really slow and the audio engine was dropping out constantly. 

Made a new project, dragged the files in and everything is good. So no dramas, but just generally a really strange issue, ive never had files disappear and reappear in a drive, and have Cakewalk basically half save a project. 

Can anyone shed any light? 

Cheers

Their Bus Processor is the first plugin I've bought in two years, it really is great. 

The Chandler Zener-Bender & British Class A strips have been my staples for a while now. Highly recommended. 

58 minutes ago, azslow3 said:

When having problems, check routing. I mean which tracks are pointing to the synth and how its output is routed. I have never used MIDI-Output from synth (it was never working for me good), but I guess that also can influence some internal logic.

Yes, this was the cause of the biggest issue I've had with Cakewalk, which are somewhat similar to OP's. 

The inputs and outputs of some aux tracks were all over the place. For example, my 'bass master' aux input was set to a guitar delay send, instead of 'bass master'. It would make Cakewalk hard quit upon trying to playback. 

I have noticed there's an issue with hidden tracks appearing in the console view, even when set to stay in sync with track view. I'm sure @msmcleod indicated somewhere that there's some things being fixed for the next build. 

It's a minor annoyance but I agree. 

The export panel is great in general, but I can't tell you how many times I've exported tracks and stems with a big bit of silence at the end. 

Yeah, you can freeze aux tracks. 

You can either blanket replace busses with aux tracks and implement a record/archive/freezing workflow, or you can send your busses to another track that then points to your mix bus. 

For example, collect all of your drum tracks and effects in a bus called 'Drum Master' and send this to an aux track called 'Drums print'.

You can then record this aux track and disable the effects chain on 'Drum Master' and mute it. This is slightly quicker than freezing the aux. 

Idea, it would be nice if everything that sent to an aux track automatically archived once that aux track was frozen.

On 3/1/2023 at 4:19 PM, steve@baselines.com said:

Hi Lord Tim - thank you - I spent the afternoon setting up the AUX and Patch tracks necessary in my new project template.  It took a long time and some critical thinking, but I am hoping it will work out well for my next project.  It would have been so much easier/cleaner with the BUSS folders.  And hey, since I went to the effort of setting everything up as AUX tracks/Patch points, Cakewalk will probably implement BUSS folders in the next release. LOL.

Extra bonus with aux tracks is that you can freeze them to significantly lighten your CPU load. 

Record aux track, archive respective tracks and freeze the aux.

Still keen to hear any potential fixes for this if anyone has experienced it? I have sent the .DMP and lots of info to support but seemed to have hit a dead end. 

Giving this one last try before starting the mix from scratch. 

Cheers

I'm a big fan of this one. Looks and feels great!

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

@Light Grenade has 6 tutorials and likely more on the way.

Thanks for the mention @Starship Krupa!

37 minutes ago, marled said:

I tried this one, too! Sometimes it generates very strange spikes in the beginning of the clips and on certain ess sounds! Unusable IMO!

Fortunately, I can't say I've ever experienced that, and I use it pretty relentlessly. 

Check out The Normalizer by HorNET, it can do auto-normalizing with the grouping function.

Low-cost and fast. I use it all the time. 

Thanks @scook. I managed to generate a DMP and have sent it on to support. 

16 minutes ago, scook said:

So, excluding a subset of the plug-ins in the project is not enough. Does the project load when bypassing them all?

Look for a minidump to send to support.

If there is no minidump and the problem is plug-in related, try temporarily setting ExceptionHandlingSeverity to 7 in Preferences > File > Initialization File.

Yeah, everything loads when bypassing them all.

I forgot I hadn't updated the initialization file on this system, thanks for reminding me. 

I will give that a shot.

Hi folks

What do we think about adding the task queue to the 'bounce to tracks' function? It's only available in export at the moment. I'll sometimes bounce busses, or sum a lot of signals to cut down on tracks and preserve CPU. 

It would be helpful to have this feature here as I could save a preset to bounce all my main busses to pre-made tracks in one go. 

There is the option of recording into aux tracks, which I do a lot, but some plugins oversample/work at a higher quality during offline bounce. 

Cheers

Hi folks, 

A latest project, which is very big, has run into a plugin issue and hard quits when trying to open. 

I have tried to identify the problem with safe mode by disabling any plugins I think could be problematic, namely plugins I haven't got on other projects, or plugins I rarely use. 

In safe mode, the program quits at the same point every time. I have tried disabling the 5 plugins directly before the crash, yet the crash still happens. 

Does anyone know if a crash occurring at the same time means anything? I've never run into Cakewalk hard quitting during safe mode. The same is happening to all my backup files for this project too. 

• i7-8700k
• 16GB RAM
• Focusrite Clarret 4PRE

Cheers