jkoseattle

Is there any way to print out a "manifest" of a project? I'm thinking a text document that lists every instrument, every plug in, every effect in a piece. I want to use the same guitar patch I used in project X and I don't remember which patch that was, so I have to open project X (in safe mode) and dig in to see it. When I've finished a piece, I'd love to be able to print out something that lists everything I used for future reference. I don't even know what such a thing would be called to look it up. Is there such a thing?

Looks like Shift-Esc doesn't work in PRV.

@Chuck E Baby

At some point I probably changed it. what you're saying is Clear Selection. I don't have any keyy associated with that. Good idea to add one though for this very reason.

Talk about a feature I never knew I needed....

I'm so amped about the Show Note Names feature in the latest update. Didn't even occur to me that I would need this. OMG, that's going to be soooo helpful! THANK YOU BANDLAB!!

1 hour ago, HIBI said:

Yes, I believe normal selection is black/dark gray if with Mercury theme.
If theme is set to Tungsten, it's green.

Ye that's correct, sorry I forgot about Themes. I'm using Tungsten.

On 9/27/2019 at 6:56 AM, Chuck E Baby said:

CNTRL+SHIFT+A

Its a shortcut I've been using since the beginning of time.

I don't know what you're referring to. For me that adds a new Audio track.

Yes. I understand what it does. What I don't understand is what advantage that gives me. What are some use cases where having the selection indicated by the green bar is better than how it used to be? 

Here's how it's worse:

In PRV I selected a passage so that I could edit velocities. The green bar sits up there representing that selection. Now I want to add something else,  to the track and I want to start right at the beginning of the selection. I used to be able to just click in the ruler to the start time I want, but now I can't do that because that's where the left handle of the green bar is. So I have to either de-select before I move the now time, slide the green bar out of the way, or drag the shuttle. 

I'm confused by that new green selection bar thing appearing in the timeline. what exactly is that getting me? I use the loop tool all the time which creates a similar bar in yellow, but I'm finding that green one just gets in the way most of the time. I see that it shows me the selected range, but I can see that in the main pane anyway and usually don't care that much.

For example, when a loop range is selected, I often rewind to the start of the loop. Rewind doesn't put me to the beginning of the green bar though. Also, when I want to move the now time to the beginning of the green bar, I have to slide it out of the way so I can change the Now time.

I do appreciate the mouse cursor change depending on what you're hovering over - that became instantly handy. But what exactly do we need that green bar for?

I have a project template which when loaded pretty much maxes out my RAM, about 6 Gb. I get a warning from CbB which I ignore. There are a few dozen EastWest instruments loaded. (Too much, I know.) Anyway, I unload 4 of these few dozen instruments and the memory usage shoots down to about 4 Gb, then when I check a few minutes later having changed nothing, it's down to 2 Gb. When I re-load the instruments I had unloaded a few minutes prior, the memory only goes back a little bit. So now my project has all the same instruments loaded that it had when I first opened it, but the memory usage shows ~2 Gb whereas it was over 6 Gb when I first opened it. Why is that?

The newest version of CbB claims to have fixed the bug in which the Mouse cursor becomes boxed in Time Ruler when right-clicking Time Ruler Zoom. This appears to be fixed in Track View, but is still easily reproducible in PRV.  As usual, Alt-Tab switching out of CbB and back in fixes it.

Oh of course, I forgot about Ripple Edit, thank you.

Big piece, full orchestra and rock band and multiple vocalists, about 60 tracks. I've decided I need to remove bars 88 and 89. From a musical standpoint it's extremely simple. Cut those two bars. Go straight from bar 87 to bar 90. But trying to accomplish that in CbB is a MAJOR PITA.

Tried selecting all tracks, then highlighting just those two bars, with snap set to whole measure. I chose Edit > Delete Special, check every box in the dialog, and only SOME of the measures are deleted and the remainder slid over. Some just sit there stupidly and don't move.

Every time I run into this hassle I'm astounded at how unmusical this action is. Is there some magic way I don't know about to simply cut a few bars from the whole piece ? This should be a very straightforward act. How do other people do this?

Wow, that was fast. Let me try it out....

OK, you have to hold SHIFT while clicking on the file name itself. You can't select the file, the hold SHIFT while you click the Open button. Works, thanks!

My projects are usually huge, taking over 10 minutes to load because of all the Play instruments it needs to load. That's fine, but sometimes I just want to look at a project to see a tempo marking or a measure number or whatever, I don't want to work on it, I just need to check something out real quick. 

Is there a way to open such a project quickly and tell it I don't need all the instruments to load, I just want a quick peek and out?

On 8/11/2019 at 10:47 AM, mdiemer said:

I close CbB down every night, but only put my computer to sleep. It opens fast the next day. If I shut my computer down, it takes considerably longer, as I have multiple orchestral libraries. I don't know why you would want to keep CbB projects open overnight. There is no good reason to do that.

1) It takes over 10 minutes to load my project

2) Soak time! As you know, work on something for a long time and you can't hear it fresh anymore. It's a habit of mine to go away from a piece for an hour or three, then quickly pop in and take a listen, then maybe again a few hours later. You hear things that are now obvious that you'll miss otherwise. So I leave it open so I can pop in quickly. Maybe I should get in the habit of closing it at bedtime and then re-opening my project before I start making the coffee the next morning. Hmmm.... 

On 8/12/2019 at 12:08 PM, rlared said:

Kind of vague info to work with but here's some thoughts.

When you open up task manager next time it freezes, make note of the CPU and memory usage of Cakewalk.   That would be interesting to see if it is taking a huge amount of memory up.

Is there a VST plugin that you always use in your projects that could be the culprit?  

Have you had this issue with other DAWs?

Is your PC in "High Performance" power mode?  If it's in a lower power mode maybe it's suspending the USB peripherals or something related to power-saving features could be causing issues.

All your drivers for your hardware up to date?

That's what's weird, the task manager never shows anything out of the ordinary. Though sometimes after I think I've exited out of CbB it will still show up in task manager, and I have to force quit that. (This never happens after a reboot of course)

VST Plugins are a great idea to look into. I do have a few that I don't use really often but that sit patiently in some seldom-used Bus... hmmmmm.... Thanks!

Never used any other DAWs. Blasphemer!

On 8/13/2019 at 1:39 AM, Promidi said:

There may be tasks that Windows itself performs over any given night that could adversely affect an open Cakewalk session.

For instance, you do nightly backups don't you (at least I hope you do)?.  Even though backup programs generally can backup open files (which your project and its files would be), it would probably be safer to have your machine logged off and at the log on screen for things like this.

There many be other task that happen overnight that could affect an open project.

My Pc stays on 24/7.  It gets restarted every 2nd Tuesday of the month (Patch Tuesday) after the installation of Windows updates.   However generally, overnight, the screen gets turned off, but the PC is at the logon screen.

I don't back up anything!! (But all data files are stored in Dropbox :-))

Cakewalk is reliably unstable on my Windows 10 machine. While I do occasionally get the instant crash, which has over the years caused me to save compulsively as I work, the more reliable instability is that every morning when I get up to work, my project is frozen, and I need to end Cakewalk from Task Manager and restart. It always starts up just fine, but this is actually the NORM, not an exception. This is true regardless of whether anything else is running on the machine. Basically, I leave a Cakewalk project open overnight, and it's usually frozen by morning. Any idea why this is?

So maybe it's that old habits die hard, or maybe <likely> I just never really knew what I was doing </likely>, but I am wondering about exporting to audio.

for years when it's come time to export to audio I've painstakingly frozen every track and then exported, choosing the "What I Hear" preset. However, last week I wanted to export midway through the project, so I simply opened Adobe Audition, hit record, and simply played my project, which was then collected by Audition, then saved that as a wav.

So now i'm wondering what the difference even is. My quickie export sounded as good as the painstaking export. Is there any reason I can't simply eschew my old method of freezing and exporting and simply play the beast while Audition is listening?

I have an Instrument Track with Volume and Pan envelopes, and at some point they have stopped working entirely. I first thought it maybe had something to do with having frozen it, so I un-froze it and restarted CbB, same result. I can turn the knob and slider and that works fine. And I can write enable the track and when I move the knob and slider both actions create all kinds of appropriate envelope nodes. But then playing back immediately afterward and those fresh envelopes have no effect on the track. What am I doing wrong? I tried an adjacent track and it works as expected.

Moments after posting this, I discovered that there was in fact no audio from the Midi track. I re-loaded the synth and all is good. So as not to waste a perfectly good post here, the questions are now:

1) Is there a known cause for synths to just up and quit and need to be re-loaded again? Is this a thing or is something wrong that I can fix?

2) Is there a way to freeze all tracks in one operation?

I'm FINALLY freezing my tracks to audio for this project, woo hoo! All 30-ish tracks are freezing fine except one, which when frozen, simply goes blank - there is no audio clip at all. Playback bears this out as well. I can play the un-frozen track just fine, then I freeze, it goes through its paces, then the track is empty and silent. What's different about this one track from all the others?

Most tracks use EastWest Play synths, including the troubled one. The only thing I can think is different about this track is that it has more notes in it than any other, being the piano. This is true whether fast bounce is on or off.

Thanks, that makes sense. I'm getting confused by this whole thing though. I'm also trying to set up track templates and synth presets etc., and am having a lot of inconsistent results. So now i'm wondering, is this even worth the effort? My old way was 1 synth per instrument, all on Midi channel 1, using simple instrument tracks. Is there any reason I shouldn't keep doing it this way, when I might have as many as 30 synths going? Is grouping instruments into a single synth really getting me anything?

I used to have one EastWest Play instance for every instrument in my project (violins, Cellos, Basses...). Now I am trying a different way, grouping a whole section into a single Play instance (one for strings, one for brass, etc.) and assigning each instrument to a different Midi channel. The aim here was to simplify and also hopefully save on RAM by having fewer total synths. HOWEVER... I didn't really realize what I was giving up. I can't adjust envelopes for any individual instrument, only for the whole section. I figured I'd just do all that tweaking after I freeze to audio. But now I'm realizing that freezing presents me with just a single audio track. This won't do at all. What is the best practice here?

Is it possible to bounce individual tracks in the same synth to their own tracks? How?

Am I really not gaining anything by grouping instruments to single synths rather than just having a separate synth for each?

I use the job function constantly in PRV, and could n't live without it. I've devoted a mouse key to "J" for that purpose. But trying to use it in Track View is asking for trouble. It's never worked for me, even many years ago.

Long time CW user, pretty new to mod wheels though.

I am finding the mod wheel instantly useful. However, I'm finding editing with them to be painful. What are some standard practices for editing mod wheel activity in PRV? 

1. My most common use case is this: I audition a track in order to set a wheel value to what will likely be constant throughout a passage. I move the wheel as the passage plays and determine about where I want it. But doing so during playback gives me no indication of what that ideal setting is. There's no visual feedback on where I'm moving it. So I have to record in order to see it. (And even then I can't see it until the recording is finished.) So I record, get the wheel where it needs to be, then delete all the wheel events I just recorded, make note of where I ultimately landed the wheel and draw in a wheel event just before the start of the passage at about that level. This feels kludgy, and seems like this isn't the way I'm supposed to do this.

2.  I notice that snap settings are respected when drawing wheel events, but not when recording them. This is true even with Input Quantize turned on. Is there a way to invoke Input Quantize on wheel movement? I usually don't need the millions of events generated by the wheel during recording, and it would be so much easier to have fewer events to manage. I can record basic wheel settings, then draw over them after the fact which then respects the snap setting, but again, this seems like I'm missing a best practice here.

3. I have both an expression pedal and a regular mod wheel. I still haven't gotten the hang of the different CC channels. Add to that the complication of different patches reacting differently to different wheels. What 'd like to do is permanently set the mod wheel to one channel and the pedal to another channel, then over time I will get the hang of it. How do I permanently set wheel channels across all projects, at least while i'm learning, or is this already the case?

4. In the velocity/wheel pane in PRV, I know there's a way to show more than one together, i.e. velocities AND wheel events, each in their own pane. I can't remember how I did this though.

I am trying to run a project with a lot of EW Play instruments. I don't need some of them, but I don't know what to unload or disable or otherwise remove that's going t get me mileage on reducing RAM usage. If it's cheap, I'd love to keep instruments I'm not currently using available. Of course, I'd like to have EVERYTHNG available, but I understand I'm taxing memory of the CPU. So what are the most band-for-your-buck things I can do to quickly bring my project down RAM-wise, and what are things that sound like they'd be big helps but maybe don't actually affect RAM usage that much?

This is quite irritating. Frequently, one or more EastWest Play instruments will play everything very staccato. It sounds as if a Note Off event is being sent immediately after every Note On event. Has anyone else experienced this? At this point I don't even know if this is a CbB thing or an EastWest thing. Turning off and back on mic positions in Play seems to fix it, which makes me think it's an EW thing, and yet I can't repro it in Reaper, which makes it sound like a CbB issue. Any ideas?