jkoseattle

I have some CW projects that I will be exporting to another DAW. I would like to get some detailed info on the instruments and FX I have on the tracks in this song so that I can mimic it in the new DAW as best as possible, but I'm having trouble. I don't know what I did, but for some reason the project barely opens in CW anymore, and usually crashes. I opened it in safe mode so that I could at least export as Midi, but I need to know what instruments and FXs I'm using. When I try to open an instrument on a track (using Opus), the Opus player opens but does not go to the instrument being used by the track. Somehow it's forgotten that connection, don't know why. Is there any other way to learn what instruments I'm using on tracks in CW?

Hey everyone, so sorry I ghosted you all! As for Studio One, the Sphere subscription does include their notation software, called Notion, which is super easy to learn. After a couple videos, I transcribed a string quartet of ten pages, and added all the articulations and dynamics no problem. And printing hasn't been a problem either. It even allows for a handwriting input if you have a touch screen with a stylus, as I do. Sort of amazing. Studio One also has this Project feature which is designed for entire albums, mastering, overall effects, track order, normalizing, all at the album level, and you can drill into any song in the project and edit it like normal, and the project just integrates it. Also amazing. @markno999 I don't want to use multiple DAWs no way no how. I have to get in the zone which is easier if you don't have to think about which DAW you're using. God knows I have enough applications I already have to know... That said, I'm going to still be using Cakewalk regularly as well as Studio One, as my next album is almost entirely trunk songs for which I have Cakewalk projects. I'm going to try migrating them into SO, I'll see how that goes @Starship Krupa I heard from EastWest that THEY are not supporting Cakewalk, not the other way around. EastWest tech support is where I got this information.

Goodness me! Why would anyone have 6 DAW's! Yours is a good question though, here's why I'm switching: 1. Most of my sounds come from EastWest's Composer Cloud library, which is not cheap. Recently they came out with a new engine called Opus, which is a major improvement over their previous one. Game-changer. And does not run on Cakewalk. That was really the dealbreaker. 2. While I've developed a muscle memory over the years with Cakewalk, there are just far too many obvious things never fixed or improved that cause me to question what's been going on over there all these years. I've sort of lost trust in their dev team. My muscle memory, I came to realize, consists of too many workarounds that I've long since forgotten were workarounds. As a former software dev myself, the fact that so many obvious things have never been fixed over the years points me to one dreaded conclusion: Spaghetti code whose authors are no longer available. 3. The nagging refrain of "you get what you pay for" kept coming back to me, and Bandlab's unique business model makes me nervous as to Cakewalk's future. I have no evidence to support this, but I have a history of hitching my wagon to bum stars (as my attempt as a Windows Phone developer bears out, among many other examples). 4. I was interested in a creative shot in the arm which a forced new workflow would provide. -------------------- So now it's been over a month. I am reluctant to rag on Cakewalk here of course, but I must say, my Studio One learning has presented me with nearly constant moments of "Oh wow, that's so much easier than how Cakewalk does it". I've also learned that the dreaded DAW learning curve really isn't so bad. Most of my most common functions were programmed into my fancy gaming mouse buttons anyway, so all I had to do was program those same things into a new mouse configuration. Also, Studio One has a keyboard shortcut importer which supports Cakewalk, so yay. So far, the one major thing I'm missing from Cakewalk and which SO does not feature, and it's HUUGE for me, is Cakewalks ability to scrub through PRV at the speed at which you move your mouse. SO only lets you scrub at playback speed. Grrrr. Oh there are two, actually. The other one is the ability to playback all takes in a track simultaneously. And while Cakewalk gets way too clever with gradients and color schemes, SO doesn't get clever enough. It's super clean and simple UI is sometimes TOO clean and simple. But overall, SO has so many features that reflect a deep understanding of how people like me really compose music, and is chock full of features you didn't know you needed until you learn them. Lots of "oh yes, of COURSE!" moments. Hate to say so here, but, well..... it's better. However, I would not recommend switching unless you are a real power user of through-composed non-repetitive music, as at the basic level, they are mostly interchangeable, and it's hard to beat 'free'. What is better about SO is primarily the weedsy advanced stuff. OK, no seems like one can play my Spotify link, so after many hundreds of CW projects here's the 3rd to last one I ever did. 100% Cakewalk: https://spintunes.bandcamp.com/track/snorkeling-snorkeling

Hello again. So far Studio One is proving to be pretty wonderful, only 1-2 things I really miss from Cakewalk. #1 being the ability to scrub in the PRV timeline at the speed of my mouse rather than at the song's actual tempo. That one is a big loss. HOWEVER... I realize that I've got all these years of unfinished projects in .cwp format that I need to go through. Starting a new thread here for that mammoth project.

Farewell Cakewalk! I bought my first PC in 1989, and Cakewalk 3.0 for DOS: was the very first software I installed on it. So exciting! I got married, bought two houses, raised a dughter, and went through too many different jobs, and Cakewalk was one constant all those years. Using only Cakewalk and then Sonar and then again Cakewalk I have produced: Songs for Disney * half a dozen musicals * 1 opera * 4 albums * countless miscellaneous projects * hours of as-yet unreleased music * much more. Cakewalk was my first introduction to digital music production, and up until this weekend, has been my one and only DAW for 32 years!! I finally decided it's time to move on, however, and am switching to Presonus Studio One as of this weekend. I have a month of downtime, (well not really, but only low-stakes projects to work on) and holiday break coming up, so now's the time. So I thought I'd write this little note into the the ether so just say an enormous THANK YOU to all the devs, support people and helpful forum chatters for all the great work and help. It's going to be really hard losing my decades-old workflow patterns, custom keystrokes, and general way of looking at music that Cakewalk has afforded me. But it's an exciting time as I acquire new ways of working, custom keystrokes, and hopefully will get new inspiration from it. Thanks, Cakewalk, I'm forever grateful, and I bid you a fond farewell (sniff)! I will leave you all with a link to one of the most enormous and complicated pieces I ever created using this terrific software. What you hear was entirely produced in Cakewalk. https://open.spotify.com/track/0Q3dd8ydsw2HK3n2Xi4LD4?si=38c375181ced4ff8

BECAUSE YOU KNEW WHERE TO LOOK. I went to Cakewalk.com, Technical Support. Seems pretty logical. Also, Cakewalk was crashing, not going to go in there to find help.. Nothing better when someone is frustrated to tell them why they are dumb to be frustrated.

I just installed the amazing Opus plug in from EastWest. I'm building a Cakewalk template using mostly Opus instances. Cakewalk crashes without warning or error messages consistently and seemingly at random. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Cakewalk is crashing regularly due to a recently added plugin. I wanted to ask support about this, so rather than post here first, I went to the support page > Contact > Email Support. I was then presented with several options. I needed technical support, so I went to the drop down for the product. Cakewalk by Bandlab is not listed at all. A bunch of versions of Sonar are though, so I picked one, and am given a link to articles relating to the product. There is nowhere I can see to contact technical support with my question. Bandlab people: Try and remember that when people go to technical support, they are already stressed out. Make it easy on us. If you don't offer support for CbB, just tell us so. If you do, then make it MUCH easier to access. As it is, I'm posting my question here.

When my orchestra really gets going, CW will respond with little short spurts of white noise. Because it only happens when the full orchestra is playing, I suspect it's some sort of overload of some sort. I have narrowed it down to the Piccolo playing high and the double basses, playing very low. What do I do to correct this?

Oh excellent! I haven't finished a project to export since my last update, guess I would have seen that eventually. (Tomorrow by 6pm eek)

@John Vere Wow wow wow!!! HUGE time saver! THANK YOU!! @57Gregy Wow wow wow!!! HUGE time saver! THANK YOU!! See, there's always a good reason to post here! My god, two huge time savers in the space of a few moments! You'd think when there are so many different ways of doing things in CW, that I'd have stumbled across one of them at some point. But no. Thanks again.

Plugging along with this complicated piece. I've got arranger sections all over the place. Why can't I drag and drop to an arrangement? Why can't a re-sort sections in an arrangement? Why can't I play the arrangement? All that is disabled. WHY??? Also, why can't I save an arrangement as a new project anymore? EDIT: Figured it out. Hover over the disabled Arranger play button and it tells you exactly why it's disabled. Region FX in my case. How arbitrary, but I get that there's some software developer-y reason for it down in the depth somewhere, so I totally get it. Sorry to bother everyone, maybe someone else will find this useful. I guess when a deadline looms and CW isn't playing ball, one can get into something of a panic, and it feels good to just post here in hopes someone will happen to be online and just know the answer. :-)

Seems to me that a pretty frequent cause of frustration in CW has to do with something being grayed out that is normally available, and we have no clue as to why. A grayed out option is like a locked door with no sign on it saying why it's locked. Terrible user experience. How about instead of graying out options, put them in parentheses to let the user know the option is not available, but they can still click on it, and when they do, they get an error message telling them WHY that option is unavailable. Tall ask I know, but throwing that out there.

No I've never used Ripple Edit much.

Well, question half answered. The remainder of the 83 minute piece WAS in fact successfully deleted, eliminating the sluggishness from the software, so victory there. However, hitting Ctrl-End still takes me to bar 4455, so it's still irritating but not quite so bad. How many people have been frustrated with this in the past I wonder. I just have to remember not to just Select All and then export to audio!

This project is super sluggish. So frustrating. On a whim I hit Ctrl-End, and I was taken to measure 4455, One hour and 23 minutes in. Went to the REAL end of the piece, at about 12 minutes. Hit Ctrl-A to select all Selected From=Now, so supposedly everything after the 12 minute mark should be selected. Hit Delete. CW still thinks it's a 4000 measure piece. Repeated the above steps, but instead of hitting delete, chose Cut Special, and checked every box that was checkable in the dialog. Hit OK No improvement. AAARRRGGGHHH!!! Please help

Yikes, I have a ton of pitch correction ahead of me today. Dozens of audio clips. All day long. First one.... My practice has always been to apply Melodyne (5) to a clip, then when done hit Ctrl-Shift-A to Apply Audio Effect, so that I don't end up with a whole bunch of Melodyne effects all over the place. (Once the pitch correction is done, I don't need/want the Melodyne effect sitting in there taking up CPU.) But this morning, Apply Audio Effect is disabled. Why????? (btw, I tried using Region FX but am getting unreliable results, so I'm going back to this way, my old method.) Help!!!

@msmcleod Thank you so much for that explanation. I know that took a significant chunk out of your day to type up. This is pretty close to my understanding, but my experience has not mirrored that exactly. If I insert a new soft synth, my options are for Cakewalk to either create One Track to Rule Them All, or else a separate track for every potential output. If I choose the latter, then I get a shovelful of tracks, most of which I won't be needing. Yet. So I hide them, not knowing how many of those tracks I might need later if I add instruments to the soft synth. Once I have done this, however, Append Instrument Track is grayed out because CW has already made all the tracks so there's no more room. But if those tracks were hidden, you might forget they are there and try to Append. But wait... THIS one I'm looking at right now has Append Instrument track grayed out, yet Track Manager doesn't show all these supposed other tracks, so it's clearly NOT filled up. I have to then manually add another track. PITA. Also, it's cute how CW wants to help out by creating all these tracks, but it's actually more of a time suck than just Appending tracks as needed, because YOU CAN'T RENAME THE SOFT SYNTH FROM THE DIALOG. So all these lovely tracks CW makes for you ALL have to be renamed eventually. Not to mention you can't assign the audio output to a bus until after you've created the track, which means manually setting every one even though they are all coming through the same soft synth.... ??? Oh, and even Appending Instrument Track does not respect the output routing of the track you are appending from, so no matter how you slice it, you have to set the output bus one by one by one by one.... You said "the clips view shows the MIDI part, and the track view shows the Audio part". This confuses me. I'm using instrument tracks almost exclusively, and in Track View I have never seen the audio, only the Midi clips. It sounds like you're telling me there's a way to see the audio on these tracks? Lastly, while we're on the topic of soft synths, what's the diff between VST2 and VST3. My plugin has both versions but I don't perceive any difference.

Oh, THAT thing. An old friend for years. Yeah, I couldn't live without that.

I don't know where you are talking about. Sounds worth looking at, could you explain in more detail? Where do I drag it?

Seems like at one time I could select a track or three and then jump to PRV and PRV would understand what I had selected and display just those tracks in PRV. But I've done something whereby I select tracks in TV and then hit D to jump to the Multidock and PRV, but the displayed tracks are not the tracks I selected in TV, but whatever was last displayed in PRV. I don't have time to mess too much with this this week, but after this deadline is passed I should spend some serious time re-configuring everything including all these setup things. But I'm hoping maybe there's a quick answer for this. What I think I really need is to have someone sit down with me and help me get everything the way I used to have it. Again, post-current deadline.

@Noel Borthwick @John Vere Noel, perhaps this is an opportune place to explain a little about Append Instrument Track, which I am finding most useful in this whole multichannel world. However, John didn't know about it, and says it is always grayed out. For me, I have one set of tracks which share a plugin instance in which Append Instrument Track is also grayed out, mysteriously, and the other tracks which share different instances in the very same project have the option available. I can't see any difference, so why are some grayed out, or in John's case, why are they ALWAYS grayed out? As I understand it, all it does is create another empty instrument track using the same ins and outs. I just change the channels on the new track and I'm good to go.

Wow, yeah, interesting problem. Like I said, I've been an exclusive Cakewalk/Sonar/Cakewalk/Bandlab user since 1989, when I bought my very first 286 tower with Cakewalk 3.0 for DOS as my very first installation. So when I say there are certainly workflow grooves I have gotten into, I'm not kidding. My knowledge of Cakewalk is like this fine hardened swiss cheese. Firm and substantial, but with these huge empty holes. Maybe an approach like "Here is a thing I'm going to teach you about. This is what that thing is. Now, there are 9 ways of doing this thing. These are my two preferred ways. And if you are interested in the other 7, I will go over them very quickly at the end of this video." Also, I wonder if the folks at Cakewalk are hoping to deprecate some of those ways, and would be eager to point you to the ways they consider "best practice". Being a Cakewalk native so to speak, and also a newly minted instructional designer after decades in customer support, I might be pretty enthusiastic about helping you out any way you might need. Sounds like a fun project.

I think you're right about that being some sort of bug. The only evidence I have is that corrupted file and a vague understanding of what I was doing leading up to it. Doesn't the Undo History get saved with the file? No clues there?

All right, well I'm moving on, thanks for all the help. fwiw I followed a lot more closely to your video than you seem to think. BUT... I did NOT set the output channels. That was the problem. As is the case for 92% of all problems in my entire life, it turns out to be my screw up. However, constructive criticism: If you are going to scold someone for not following your video properly, might want to ask why that might be. This stuff is hard, man! I've been using CW as my DAW exclusively for 32 years, and I still only know what about half of the features do it seems.