Jonathan Sasor

There's 2 ways to monitor single going into Cakewalk (or any host). Direct monitor and (in the case of Cakewalk) Input Echo monitoring. The difference being Direct Monitoring is done directly through your interface and is your dry signal before it goes to the PC. If you're not direct monitoring, when you open a project in Cakewalk, you need to turn on the Input Echo button on a track before any audio passes through it. Input Echo is your signal after it goes through the track/audio engine. This will be affected by any plugins that are there. If you turn the Input Echo button off, and you still hear your dry guitar signal, that means you've got direct monitoring turned on on your interface, either via a control on the hardware or through a software mixer panel that's part of the driver. If you hear no audio from your guitar before you turn on input echo, then you still hear some dry guitar when you have an amp sim turned on, then it's something with how you have the signal routed in your project.

Your projects will retain all their settings as those are all kept internally within the project file, you just need to make sure you have all the same plugins installed. If you're using custom presets, you'll want to export those, and that will depend on what plugin and how you save them. When you're on the new system, you'll probably want to install SONAR Platinum and all of it's plugin content to have first, then install Cakewalk by BandLab after so you can keep using all of the extra included content there (as well as any other 3rd party plugins you're using).

This is by design with ASIO, it exclusively uses a single device driver at a time. You'd either need to connect the audio outs of the TD-50 to the Focusrite or use the Roland for both playback and recording. You just need to deselect everything from input and output drivers in the Preferences to switch between ASIO devices.

@Percy Ferry In your screenshots, you don't actually have an "Arrangement" per the feature design. The general workflow is that you have your sections in the top half of the Inspector, but then you add those to the Arrangements pane in the bottom section. This is where you can preview or export different Arrangements from the picker in the Inspector. The Sections pane at the top will list you the Sections currently in your project, and you can reorder and preview those sections from there, but it's not an "Arrangement". If you have a project file where all of the different Sections in an Arrangement export at once, you can send that to us and we'll take a look at it.

Can you provide a screenshot about the problem you're having?

per #2, do you have a workspace set?

It's likely that you didn't install EZ Drummer into the default location that Cakewalk scans for VST plugins (C:program files\cakewalk\vstplugins). You'll need to find the path where the .dll file for EZ Drummer did install to, then add that path to the VST Settings tab of the Preferences in Cakewalk. Check for places like C:\program files\steinberg\vst plugins or C:\program files\vstplugins or C:\program files\common files\vst2. Just be sure not to add something like "C:\" to the scan path because it'll hit a lot of things that .dll files, but not plugins and cause your scan to be slow and have problems.

It's unlikely the 2020.04 update would be the cause if you're getting dropouts, but the details and a rollback installer available here:

Are you on the most recent update? The behavior for this has changed in 2020.04.

Bundle files at one time were a very handy way to transfer stuff particularly before the advent of per-project audio folders. Personally, I send other CbB users a project folder as it's a direct 1:1 of your original project and packing the audio into a bundle doesn't really give you anything extra. Plus if you're collaborating with somebody, if you put a copy in a dropbox (or similar) folder and do a shared folder, it'll update your local copy as its changed. Per the original problem, if you want to upload a copy of the bundle file we can take a look.

I mean, the idea behind having it add the TTS-1 when no MIDI ports are present was geared more towards people who aren't super familiar with MIDI and don't understand why they can't hear anything. Back in the day when I was taking Tech Support phone calls, I answered that question... more than once. Having virtual MIDI ports installed is a little more of an outlier for the original use case as obviously you know how MIDI works. 😁 But I hear your point on having that as a global option.

It seems like there might be a little confusion over the fundamental way that MIDI works in the context of CbB (or really any DAW). If you're dragging in a .mid file there's some noteworthy differences vs opening it as a file. Importing/drag + drop to an existing open project will start with a focused track and keep the existing project tempo. Opening a MIDI file as a project then retains the file's tempo settings. If you do not have a hardware MIDI port for output, CbB adds an instance of the TTS-1 so that you can hear anything (because raw MIDI data going anywhere without an audio output does not have a sound). Beyond this there's Instrument Tracks vs MIDI tracks, with the key difference being that all an Instrument track is being a combined single instance of a MIDI input that is internally routed to a synth, then internally routed back to the track which subsequently has the audio output. Separate MIDI and Audio Output tracks can be combined to create an Instrument Track. It's a convenience/simplicity thing when you don't need to really think about all that internal routing. There's no real advantage to using one or the other. Back to the context of importing MIDI, when you get MIDI imported to a project, you can either output that to a virtual instrument, or drag and drop the MIDI data to a Instrument Track. Functionally it doesn't make a difference. In either case you've got a MIDI track component feeding the synth. Slightly more complicated in the context of multitimbral synths like the TTS-1 or Kontakt where you can have multiple MIDI tracks feeding a single synth instance that can have one or more audio outputs in a project. The core concept remains the same though, MIDI is sent to the synth instance which then gets outputted as audio. TLDR version: if I wanted to import a MIDI file and end up with just the bass and drums on Instrument Tracks, I'd import the MIDI file, add the bass and drum synths as two separate instrument tracks, then drag and drop the MIDI I wanted onto those two tracks and delete the tracks I don't need. Further note: the import creates new tracks per channel in the MIDI file because it'd be very difficult to work with all the MIDI separately on a single track routing to different channels on a per note basis.

I can't say I've ever run into a situation like this, but if you've got a project stuck in that state, send us a copy and we can take a look into what's going on.

Possible there could be a codec issue on your system, you could try installing the k-lite pack and see if that helps. Otherwise I'd suggest sending us a dump file for the hang.

Yes, please send us minidumps if you're seeing crashes.

We're already working on a fix and have been communication with Waves about this issue. It was just not in the scope for 2020.04.

The 700C does not require the R to work as a surface, though you do lose any of the inputs/monitoring present on the console without the rack unit. The driver is not officially supported on Windows 10, but it's a fairly simple process to modify it to run on Win 10 as has been detailed elsewhere. It will definitely work in Cakewalk by BandLab (I run a full VS-700 system every day), you just need to make sure you have the control surface plugin installed which can be downloaded if you don't have it already.

As Dave Said, by default Cakewalk shows the driver pairs however the driver lists them in Windows, so in this case, as opposed to see 1/2, you're seeing "Left" and "right" for input "1". You can change the Preferences to show a "Friendly Name" as 1/2 if that helps, but functionally it's the same.

You just need to change the track filter:

Please try and capture a dump file for the crash and we can take a better look into what's going on. Details can be found here:

It appends what the name of the arrangement is after what you type for the file name. This is by design. That way if you export more than one arrangement at a time, you can tell them apart.

If clips select envelopes with clips is enabled, the normal drag/drop behavior should copy the clips and envelopes together correctly. Duplicate also works if the Edit Filter is set to Clips or you expand automation lanes. Both the clips and automation envelopes will be duplicated. In any case it should ultimately be duplicating the clips as well in that context, so it's a logged issue on our end.

The stack for the dump file is all within the plugin, you should try sending it to Sonivox. If there's anything on our end that needs to be tweaked, they can reach out and we'd be happy to look into it, but it seems like a plugin issue.

Plugin Layouts won't be affected by the update or rollback as they're user data. Those files are saved separately, and unfortunately if you saved over an existing layout, it's overwritten. You'll just want to be careful when naming your layout presets.

MIDI tracks can only have one output. You'd want to copy and paste the data onto another track for them to play the same parts.