Larry Jones

On 4/4/2019 at 7:54 PM, Kevin Keough said:

I had read somewhere that some features were lost, perhaps something to do with pro channel.

I realize having a supported version like CbB is preferred over a non supported version.

Trying to decide if CbB is going to live up to Sonar Platinum and eventually surpass it, or if it's time to go with another daw. 

I know CbB is free dollar wise, but not time and effort wise. I see bandlab as a song sharing platform, not a software development platform. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks for the input.

All the features you currently own will be accessible in CbB. None are lost, including Pro Channel stuff.

In my opinion, CbB has already surpassed SONAR Platinum, due to a year of bug fixes and refinements done mostly by the same guys who were developing SONAR. If you're familiar with SONAR Platinum there will be no learning curve for CbB. The only time you will lose is an hour downloading the program and installing it. It will read your existing preferences, so the transition should be easy, although you might have to tell the new program where all your plugins are located.

You're right Bandlab and Cakewalk are two completely different things. You can use them both, or you can just continue using Cakewalk by Bandlab as you've been using SONAR: As a full-featured DAW, easily competitive with anything else currently on the market. If you're interested in other DAWs, by all means check 'em out. But as of now I see no urgent reason to switch.

Welcome! Maybe you could say what steps you took to get to "no sound." Are you playing back audio? MIDI? Or are you not hearing audio during recording? What are your PC specs? What kind of sound card or audio interface are you using? The more info the better chance someone will be able to help you.

Something like this happened to me the other day. I did a project-wide tempo change and after that I could not mix down the project. Cakewalk would simply crash to the desktop. I narrowed down the culprit to just one of the audio tracks -- it couldn't be bounced or duplicated, and as long as it was in the project I couldn't mix down at all. My workaround was to send it to an aux track and record it there in real time. After that I deleted the original track and all was good. Hope this helps.

7 minutes ago, synkrotron said:

So, Samplitude does the "D" thing to duplicate too? I was thinking it was Studio One, which does the same

I've used them both and I might have gotten mixed up about the "D" command. Either way I think it's not as good as Groove Clips.

If you're ready to mix you might want to increase the buffer settings for your audio interface, which should smooth things out for you. If you're still tracking and you need super low latency, press "E" on your keyboard. That will disable all effects. If this lets you hear the project you probably have a plugin -- most likely a comp/limiter -- that is "looking ahead" on your timeline and so is causing the whole project to stutter. You'll need to use trial and error to find which one(s), and don't use it while tracking.

Just now, synkrotron said:

...and turn on "Groove-Clip Looping" this will at least let you drag out a clip over the required number of bars, or whatever.

Right, I know you said it first, Andy. Just wanted to stress the advantages of this looping function over Samplitude's "D" command, which really is kind of clunky.

In CbB, "D" opens and closes the Multidock, but I'm guessing you already know that. If I recall you're asking about Addictive Drum clips. Really, the Cakewalk method is easier and more flexible. Select any clip (just click on it once), press Ctrl+L to convert it to a "Groove Clip," and drag the right end of the clip as far as you want. The clip will repeat on the timeline, with the added benefit that it stops wherever you stop dragging. For example, if you have a 4-bar clip and your musical section is ten measures you won't find yourself with 12 measures of Addictive Drums and have to cut one of them in half to fit your space. Just stop dragging at ten measures. If you are concerned about having to "move" or "nudge" your clip to position it correctly, just set the snap-to-grid value to what you want: quarter notes, whole notes, whole measures, etc., and your clips will follow that setting. Easy peasey!

5 hours ago, panup said:

I did some maintenance work for Duckbar to make it CbB compatible. I just leave this here...

I didn't get on board with Duckbar the first time around -- too busy just learning the many "official" controls.? But thank you for this! I'm looking forward to the release.

2 hours ago, Mike Ve said:

well... from the perpective of someone who doesn't write a lot on the staff and when he does he writes rhythm notation... and in the context of comparing to "no staff editor at all"... I bet it's going to exceed my expectations.  Can't you use sibellius as a plugin anyway?

Hey Mike! I meant my comment as a joke, but I guess it was an "insider" joke for those of us who watched or took part in this thread (and others) on the old SONAR forum. It started on an angry note and continued for 40 pages. I don't write notation, so none of it ever mattered to me, but a lot of users were deeply immersed in it. They probably still are, which was kind of what my joke was about: Don't get those people riled up again!

Welcome back to Cakewalk, and best of luck to you!

13 minutes ago, Mike Ve said:

as I recall the staff editor is amazing too...

Please don't talk about the staff editor... ?

23 minutes ago, Cactus Music said:

Why would he want to replace the synth?

I'm guessing that would be one way to undo the "crossed" synths, by replacing the shaker with the organ and the organ with the shaker. Doesn't explain how this could have happened, but might be a workaround.

5 hours ago, Oscar Myer said:

Next I have to read the AD manual to see how to drag it into Cakewalk as an audio track.

The "Insert Synth" function mentioned by scook is your friend. Uncheck "Simple Instrument" in the dialog box and Cakewalk will give you an audio track and a MIDI track for Addictive Drums. Drag the loops into the MIDI track on the timeline, and Cakewalk will use the audio track to play them. If you are using loops it's far more flexible to use MIDI loops -- although Addictive Drums can generate audio loops too. For that, read the AD manual.?

I have had numerous "poofs!" with the latest version. The whole program just disappears with no warning or error message. This happened when I tried to export a mix or bounce the project down to a single stereo track. Otherwise everything worked as expected and I could work on the project. I just couldn't mix down.

After a couple hours of turning off or deleting plugins and exporting the entire project minus one track (at a time), deleting automation, changing buffer settings and stuff, I discovered that one audio track was causing the crashes. This track had been heavily edited - there may have been 40 cuts. At this point I discovered that I also could not bounce this track down to itself to get rid of all the cuts. When I tried to do this the program would crash with no warning or error message. I tried duplicating the track and the new track caused the same problem. Finally I set the output of this track to a new aux track and recorded it there in real time, then archived the offending track. This worked, with the added benefit that my automation on this track was baked into the newly recorded track. Problem solved, no more crashes.

I never found out what was wrong with that one evil track. It was just a guitar played through a TH3 amp sim.

When you're copying and pasting the Addictive Drums clip, make sure you are pasting it right on the beginning of a measure. Many of those clips end an eighth or a sixteenth before the visual end of the measure and if you butt them right up to each other your timing will be off. Cakewalk will help you -- set the "snap" value to whole notes before you start pasting.

1 hour ago, Toddskins said:

I got lost when you said to load them into Wave lab.

It's a .wav editor. You can use the free Audacity for the same functions. Or, since you're a Vegas user, maybe you also have Sound Forge. These are all the same type of application. Note you could also use CbB to do this, but the others are more focused on .wav file editing.

25 minutes ago, Millzy said:

I find it interesting there's no link to, or mention of, Cakewalk on the Bandlab site (unless I've missed something obvious.)  

Haven't spent much time on the Bandlab site so I didn't know this. The Bandlab experience and the Cakewalk experience are radically different, yet it seems obvious that they would want somehow to link the two. If I could upload multitrack projects to Bandlab and work on them there, and have others collaborate with me there, that would be something! But if you think 10msec of latency is annoying, try overdubbing on the internet.

The creation tools offered at Bandlab are so rudimentary that the user base has to be incompatible with CbB, and those who do everything at the Bandlab site are mostly just going to be doing very basic stuff. Maybe they expect some users to share projects on Bandlab only after creating them in CbB or Cubase or ...? So far I'm not seeing the synergy.

I have an LX61+. I got it before Bandlab took over Cakewalk. I downloaded the control surface file from Nektar, and the transport controls and a couple of others worked right away, and still do in CbB. But I never used it much as a control surface, so it wasn't until I saw this thread that I realized there is trouble in paradise. Check it out. A bunch of functions don't work, and some say you don't get much help from Nektar. They do have a step-by-step downloadable PDF with pictures that was pretty helpful to me when I was setting it up. And by the way you have to register your product at their website to get the specific files you need for your DAW and your device.

Apparently, however, if you are smarter than I am, you can use "MIDI learn" to get the various pots and faders and buttons to do pretty much whatever you want them to.

I know all of you can't wait to give me the solution to this little puzzle (thanks @Cactus Music), but before you beat down my door, I have to tell you that I figured it out! I don't know the terminology to explain this exactly, but what happened was that I had accidentally zoomed vertically way in on the MIDI rack in question (slip of the mouse on that little zooming slider at the left end of the track), and the MIDI notes were actually there, but not in the portion of the track that I could see (they were below the visible portion). Once I zoomed back out it was all good. And the reason I could see the MIDI notes when I dragged the clip to another track was that the other track was not zoomed in.

So I'm back in business, although I cannot explain why CbB gave me only one shot at dragging a clip to another track (see my OP for that riddle).

1 hour ago, Cactus Music said:

Does the track have the MIDI icon?  Or the instrument tack icon?  Sorry I'm at work and cant post screenshot, but you know what I mean.

It is the MIDI track. It has the MIDI icon, which I always thought looked kind of like a DIN jack. But whatever. It's definitely the MIDI track.

On a project that I have been working on off and on for a few months, this suddenly happened today: I have an instance of Session Drummer 3 in this project, inserted as a MIDI track and 12 individual audio tracks. There are no "real" drums in this project. I was getting ready to experiment with the drum track, that is, replace some of the loops with other loops, when I noticed there was no MIDI data showing in the SD MIDI track. The drums play fine, and if I open PRV I can see all the MIDI notes there, and the drums sound when I click on one, but back in the timeline it still looks like an empty track.

I dragged a clip from the SD MIDI track into an adjacent track (the audio track for the kick) and then I could see the MIDI data. When I dragged it back to where it belongs, the data went away and it looked like an empty track again (but the drums still play fine). Plus, after dragging the clip back to the MIDI track, not only does it appear blank, but I can't move it a second time. After one move, the Smart Tool won't change into the Move Tool on that clip only, and there is no way to grab the clip and move it. Selecting the Move Tool itself doesn't help. If I close the project and reopen it, the situation is the same: no data appears in the MIDI track, and I can move the track, but only one time. The clips in this track seem to have their original names, things like "120 Shuffle D Hats" or "Record 4."

The only thing I can think of that I've done to this track since I first created it -- and I'm not even sure it was this track that I did it to -- is I may have pulled the MIDI track out of the track folder and then put it back in. I know I did this the other day, but I might have done it to a different instrument, I can't remember.

Has anyone seen this behavior? Any ideas what I might have done to cause this, or what I can try to fix it?

8 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

My first choice is always my local mom & pop music store. They will match online prices and they give me services that big-box or Internet stores cannot.

You're a lucky guy. There is no such store within a hundred miles of my home. But since this thread is about Sweetwater, I'll chime in and say that they've done a good job for me on everything I've bought from them over the years. It is an excellent resource, and seems to be staffed with folks who know and love their industry.

4 minutes ago, dappa1 said:

I cannot save my projects in cakewalk and it is asking me to activate via bandlab assistant but I cannot locate it.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

You must have Bandlab Assistant, or you wouldn't have Cakewalk by Bandlab. You can search your computer for it and run it, or if you really can't find it you can download it again from here.

Wait -- It doesn't move automation? Can anyone confirm this? @Noel Borthwick?

No "stupid" questions, and no need to apologize.

The rear inputs on the 6i6 are line level, so chances are you'll be plugging something into them that has a volume control. I don't think the 6i6 gives you any other way to control levels. Sorry, I never use them and I don't want to steer you wrong. The Focusrite documentation is here (PDF), and you might benefit from reading this conversation on the old SONAR forum between a couple of SONAR users who both have the 6i6. The Focusrite Mix Control that came with the 1st generation 6i6 is confusing, but it's in there that you will be routing the signal from the back inputs (#3 &4). Good luck!

ETA: Might be a good idea to open a new thread with your 6i6 question, since this one is a somewhat different topic.

3 hours ago, Cactus Music said:

So let me know if you get it working as then there is hope!  

Got it working! Took me hours to do, but in reality, once I understood what I needed to do, the process only took about 15 minutes. This was using @Craig Anderton's method above. Thanks Craig.