Larry Jones

I feel your pain, brother. On the other hand, it's only fair that you 2nd and 3rd gen Focusrite users should feel mine (1st gen 6i6) Focusrite seems to have a problem with their concept of "routing." I checked, and nope.

The damnable Focusrite MixControl! I have never used the useless "zero latency" function, and it is not currently set up that way, at least as far as I can tell. But the 1st gen ASIO panel is as opaque as any piece of software I have ever used, so who knows? I might have something turned on without knowing it. I never use it because it strips away all character from the signal -- no personality on the guitars, no echo on the voices, etc. -- and I have actually gone in and tried to make sure it's turned off. Either I'm missing something obvious or the thing is malfunctioning. Thanks for the tip. It makes sense and I'll take another look.

RESOLUTION WAS IN WINDOWS SOUND SETTINGS. SEE MY LAST POST BELOW. When I plug an electric guitar into my interface (1st gen Scarlett 6i6), I can hear it through my monitors even when I have no inputs set to echo (monitor). I'm sure I have got some setting wrong somewhere, but I have not been able to find my mistake. This is new behavior, as I've been recording direct guitar since the Pro Audio days and haven't experienced this. I have recently migrated to a newish PC, though, so had to set things up again. Does anyone have any thoughts on where I should look to fix this? Thanks!

@Starship Krupa Thanks, Erik! I'm still bumbling through the setup of the "new" PC, but it is my wont to get my cart in front of the horse from time to time, and so I have embarked on two recording projects before I was entirely hardware-ready. As a result I am having to interrupt the creative flow occasionally to sort things out. It's been a pleasure working with the new box, but there are issues. Mostly there seem to be a few plugins that I used to use a lot and no longer have. I thought if I installed all my old versions of Cake/SONAR I would have all those plugins, but I don't. The best free guitar amp simulator I ever had was Guitar Rig 3, which must have come with some old version of SONAR. It came along for the ride to the new machine, but as a limited time demo version, wanting to be activated with a serial number. I have no idea. But free plugins are (not even) a dime a dozen, so I'll survive the losses. Right now I need to figure out why I can hear my electric guitar through the monitors when it is plugged in but not routed anywhere. And then when it is routed to a track I can hear it through the track and also through whatever phantom leak it's sneaking through. I know this because the two sounds are a noticeable number of milliseconds apart. I'll post a question about this in its own thread, so if you have any thoughts on it you can jump in there. Again, many thanks for your well-beyond-the-call-of-duty post above. You are a great and generous resource. PS: Since you asked, I don't remember what the problem was with my Scarlett interface, or if it even was the interface that was giving me a headache. I have a policy of not concerning myself with why something didn't work. I screw around until it does work, and then I forget about it.

Just saw this on Amazon. Sure, it's 34 bucks, but you'll be protected against those music accidents, and what would that be worth to you?

I have had to do this a few times. It can be done, but in my experience it's always a can of worms. Others on this forum are better at explaining the how-to, so I will just refer you to this bit of documentation, and hope my reply bumps your question enough to get you a better answer than mine.

@Dan Patterson Upper right corner of this page. Click on the down arrow next to your screen name and choose "Account Settings." Then on the left side of that page, select "Signature." These are instructions for those using a computer. If you're on your phone, you're on your own.😎

Got ya. Did it. Thanks again!

I had a marathon reinstallation party yesterday, and I tried not to install things I haven't used for ten years. I guess I left out something I actually wanted. I had been installing from old downloaded setup files on a backup drive, but I went to the Command Center today and reinstalled Platinum from there. To my surprise, this gave me no options regarding what I wanted to install and where, so I ended up with the entire package. Not what I wanted, but at least I now have that precious Adaptive Limiter. Do I need to reinstall CbB?

Adaptive Limiter! That's the one! I love that thing. Maybe I can get it by reinstalling SONAR Platinum (never liked calling it "Splat") Thank you, Tim! @scook I knew it wasn't the LP plugins, because I have those, and they're not what I remember. Thanks for the thought.

I'm rebuilding my DAW (new PC), and I'm trying to find the fancy mastering-type compressor that only came with SONAR and IIRC apparently is no longer downloadable or available at any price. I had it on my old system (which is now shut down) but I can't remember the name of the plugin. I recall vaguely what the GUI looked like, but if I had a name I might be able to spot it somewhere and add it to the new system. Sorry, I know this is a dumb question, but, anybody?

@JoeGBradford This is a great reminder - I still have access to the old machine, and now that you mention it, I'll need it!

@scook Thanks Steve. I haven't done anything since wrestling with the Focusrite today. What I'm wondering now is if I have all the license information for all those old versions of SONAR. I haven't even tried to find my Command Center account for some years. I guess I'll be on a search and rescue mission for that stuff next. BTW, I think I read somewhere that there is no such thing as a full installer for 8.5, just an update from version 8. Is that true? Thanks for your help with this and over the years!

Are you trying to achieve concert levels? Maybe you need a stronger power amp, or bigger amps in your powered speakers, or bigger speakers.

@Andy Great points, thanks! I was already aware of the USB2 vs USB3 thing. It was a hot topic for a while in the old SONAR forum, and at the time I think it was determined that USB2 was not only preferred by most interface manufacturers, it had more than adequate bandwidth for audio. Not sure about the Focusrite driver -- they seem to have a newish one for my old interface, and it worked well enough today, at least on YouTube Hot Chicks in Bikinis music, which is all I've had for testing so far (OK, I could have listened to Van Morrison...). Wish I could use the Gen 2/3 Focusrite Control, instead of the clunky Mix Control that comes with my driver. This box came with a 1TB SSD and I added a 2TB second drive. I don't know the terminology, but the 2TB drive looks like a stick of Wrigley's Doublemint. This is not as much storage as I had in the old machine, but I have taken a vow not to save everything in the future, and it's all backed up anyway, so I think I'll be OK. These are my first SSDs, and I'm thrilled with the speed -- and the silence. Thanks again for taking the time!

I have put this off for years, but this month I bought a used Dell computer and today I decommissioned the old PC and began setting up the "new" one. Anyone who's ever had to do this knows why I've put it off. The old computer was state of the art -- ten years ago -- but it was showing its age, acting weird, doing everything s l o w l y, and getting damned noisy. I kept it going as long as I felt safe to do so, but I have decided to move on. The new machine is an i7-7700, so I guess there will be no Win 11 upgrade, but I can live with that. I just fired it up, installed the Focusrite driver for my first gen Scarlett 6i6, and spent spent 2 hours trying to get sound out of it. I finally figured it out, but that made me realize I'm a bit -- shall we say? -- out of shape when it comes to working on computers and software. There is currently no other software installed, and before I dive in and make a bunch of stupid mistakes, I'm asking for any advice, tips and best practices any of you might be able to give me to reduce the speedbumps and make the most of this experience. Are there any definite "don'ts?" What about antivirus? Anything I should do in the BIOS to improve DAW performance? I have the installers for SONAR Producer 8.5, X2, X3 and Platinum and I'll put those in first to get all the extras that came with them, followed by CbB. Beyond that I don't know exactly what I'm going to do, or if there are big mistakes in my immediate future, so I'm open to any thoughts from all of you. Thanks!

@Oscar Martín Díez-Canseco This doesn't make sense. Why would Celemony disable this one function (tempo mapping) in the trial version when their website clearly states "...you can test the full range of functions of Melodyne for 30 days free of charge with no obligation. You can try out all the functions to your heart’s content without limitations, save everything and use it later – just as though you had already bought the program." The site doesn't have a lot to say about why this function might not work, except that your imported track might be too complex for Melodyne to extract the tempo, but this doesn't seem to apply to your situation, since you say you've imported only a click.

@Steve Howell Sorry I didn't see your reply until now. Your problem seems worse than mine, and I hope you work it out. I've been trying to upgrade my workstation for the past month, and the little toast popup not closing has been the least of my worries.

My Notifications settings look just like your screenshot, so it must be something else. It doesn't seem to effect the program's functioning, but it just started doing this recently, so of course I fear the worst will happen soon.🙃

Title states my issue. My questions are what causes this and how can I make it work correctly? I should note that I can manually click the toast message off and work on the project, but it never goes away on its own, which I assume it's supposed to because the rest of the message is "Please wait..." Just out of curiosity I have waited as long as 15 minutes. UPDATE: THIS ISSUE WENT AWAY ON ITS OWN. I DON'T KNOW WHAT CAUSED IT, OR WHAT "FIXED" IT.

Thank you as always, Steve.

Feeling kind of stupid here, but I have a variation on this question: I have six tracks containing a couple of handclaps each, nothing more. I want to mix them down to a single stereo track. When I Bounce to Tracks..., I get the export dialog. I select the six tracks on my timeline and "Tracks" as the source. The dialog has preselected the correct six tracks as well as the next empty track (singular!) in my project as the destination. This looks perfect, but when I render, it simply copies each of my original six tracks to six new tracks, beginning with the preselected destination track. It's not mixed -- I just have six duplicate tracks. For now I'll do it by soloing my six tracks and rendering "Entire Mix," but shouldn't this work the way I tried it? Am I missing something?

I can't figure out what you're doing. You draw a melody in the PRV, apply an arpeggiator to it, bounce it to a clip with the arpeggiator disabled, and edit the bounced clip in the PRV to sound like it did with the arpeggiator enabled? Not sure, but what I've noticed about using the arpeggiator in CbB is that it doesn't sound the same every time, probably because it depends on the exact beat or note it It starts on. If this method worked for you before, maybe it was just luck. Wish I could be more helpful.

If you drag your freely played audio track up to the timeline, a tempo map will be created and should display in the tempo view. Then the drums should follow the tempo changes. I believe you have to have Melodyne installed for this to work, but I think any version of Melodyne is acceptable, even the trial of Essential. Good luck!

You're right! My bad. Not reading carefully. Thanks for the correction.