David Baay

I'm not saying it's a solution. I'm confirming it's got issues, but that it can work in the situation I described, which is why I didn't immediately see a problem with it after switching my zoom options.

Note the first reference said 'center in the tracks pane'. So, for example, if the timeline is showing measures 1 through 16 to start,  start zooming somewhere right of bar 9.

I found that I can reproduce that if I start by zooming with the cursor left of center in the tracks pane. Start by zooming on something right of center, and zooming anywhere will work as expected after that.

EDIT: Also, of you zoom out to point that 1:01:000 becomes visible, the cycle starts over, and you have to again start zooming right of center.

Following on my previous post, here's what a tempo map for a rubato performance looks like. The recording was real time without a click, and the tempo map was made by setting every eighth triplet using Set Measure/Beat At Now. Note how that tempos increase and decrease in a periodic way (what goes up must come down). The flat line is where the piece moves into a steady tempo, and I could just set a fixed tempo for those several measures until it changes again to follow a quickie rubato ending I threw in. You can hear it here: 

Based on your description,  I'm guessing the intro needs to be played with rubato - varying tempo significantly both from bar to bar, and within bars. You're not likely to get the desired effect just by randomizing note timings against a fixed tempo grid, and it's very difficult to 'program' natural-feeling rubato.  Ideally you should find someone who plays keys to record it as MIDI, but if you want to try 'programming' it, I suggest you start by drawing tempo changes in the Tempo view.

29 minutes ago, Chris Jones said:

...you put your curser on it to zoom out...

Make sure Mouse Wheel Zoom in the Track View Options menu is set to zoom At Cursor rather than At Now time. Personally, I prefer to set the Now time where I want to zoom, and then zoom on the Now time.

He's talking about the Virtual Controller that you select as an input to a MIDI or Instrument track.  As such, there would be no way for it to animate according to the output of the track on playback. But position sensitive velocity output should be possible to implement.

What audio interface? Possibly the output section of your interface or amp/monitoring system is  having issue.  If meter activity on the Master bus is uninterrupted, it's probably something in the analog output path. 

What audio interface? And are you monitoring the audio output of DeepMind through Cakewalk with input echo enabled on the audio track or direct monitoring through the interface?

If using onboard sound that does not have native ASIO drivers, it's best to set WASAPI Exclusive  driver mode in audio preferences. Then make sure the Source in the Soundcard's mixer app is Line In, rather than What U Hear or Stereo Mix. 

If you monitor through Cakewalk, what you hear will be what's recorded.  If you get audio engine dropouts, either while recording or on playback, you  will need to increase the buffer setting in audio preferences.

2 hours ago, MitchNC said:

When I create an instrument and MIDI track, I get no MIDI input activity on the meters. 

For future reference, MIDI meters are always output meters, even when the MIDI track is armed to record.  My first guess would have been that input echo was not enabled so there would be no output from live input and thus no meter activity.

Yes, I can confirm grayed out and non-responsive Mix Recall controls in 19.01.

I may change my user name back to brundlefly here at some point, but figured people would recognize the avatar. 

Nice one, Daryl.  Thoroughly enjoyed it. A great lyric combined with charmingly whacky musical elements and flawless performances and production quality that made for effortless listening all the way through.

While I continue to be happy to answer any and all questions, including those that that have been answered many times before, I would encourage new users to Google keywords against site:forum.cakewalk.com to find archived discussions and answers. There's a lot to be learned there.  Add the user name of a frequent flyer like scook, anderton or (dare I suggest) brundlefly to get targeted answers.

Examples:

missing dropped skipped midi notes site:forum.cakewalk.com

metronome not working site:forum.cakewalk.com

pan panning problem scook site:forum.cakewalk.com

pops crackles distorted playback site:forum.cakewalk.com

Survey says: Tasty Tones, Tunes and Technique 👍

13 hours ago, Chris Jones said:

But lately I've been using the daw the sample a keyboard and after editing and bouncing the samples and cleaning the audio file folder of unneeded files so that I just have my cleaned samples.

I've had to deal with that in the past where I wanted multi-samples named with the note number and velocity used to drive a hardware synth. I didn't bother searching at the time, but I'm guessing there are freeware file-naming apps that could help automate the renaming.

Yes, that's still true; the OP just wants more control over the naming of that file.

My favorite genre for listening is jazz, but I don't have the training or chops to play real jazz. I also love fusion, and a lot of what I do could be classified as such, though typically with less virtuosic performances, and less adventurous changes. I don't really listen to ambient, chill-out, trance, lounge or what used to be called  new age, but much of what I create leans in one of those directions.  Like most around here, I grew up listening to - and still listen to - a lot of guitar-based pop and rock, both soft and hard, but I'm not a guitarist, and I don't sing or write lyrics, so I'm influenced by that listening, but it's not what I do.

1 hour ago, Starise said:

Most composers are always thinking of new parts to add. I am finding when using BL that I need to back off some. I think I over did the bass part. It can be difficult to think like this, but we need to leave holes. It's actually less work because it isn't up to you to do it all. If I get a fairly busy part  adding counter point might not really be beneficial. I think you kind of need to feel it out to see where things can fit and be thinking minimalist in most cases. 

I agree. Since I spent so many years playing solo piano before I got into recording, my stuff tends to have 'built-in' bass and melody lines, making it difficult to add/replace those parts with other instruments. And just removing the 'offending' lines (by the magic of MIDI) doesn't often yield a coherent keyboard part. Playing as a member of a band, even just a duo, requires a totally different approach.

CbB is still highly stable for me, as ever. If the application itself had become less stable due to an update, there would be a rash of reports on the forum from other users. Odds are that any recently encountered instability is due to a particular plugin you've started using or a change in hardware/drivers/OS config..

What action are you typically taking when it crashes, and is it a white-screen freeze, crash to desktop (i.e. CbB disappears), blue-screen, or...?

Bounce to track with automation means to render the automation destructively into the audio file. Obviously, a mono clip/file can't contain stereo panning information. You'll have to change the Channel Format in the bounce dialog to Stereo.

I don't see how you'd end up with anything radically different or simpler that was still workable. You'd still need a suffix system to distinguish different takes and bounces in each track and across tracks. Also, I neglected to mention a few key features of the current scheme that any new scheme would need to preserve:

- Tracks and clips do not need to by uniquely named, and you can rename them at any time.

- Clips can be copied as many times as needed, and reference the same original audio file until a destructive edit is rendered by bouncing.

- Multiple versions of a project can exist in the same folder referencing the same or different audio files, and deleting a clip from one project does not affect the availability of the same audio file for another project.

- A project can reference an audio file in another project's audio folder or any location from which audio is imported without having to create a new copy of that audio unless destructive edits are rendered.

You think the current system is ugly? You should have seen it in pre-SONAR days when file names were essentially random  strings of numbers and letters like WJX4DMIJ2SVD7R.WAV - That was ugly.

Clips are not files, they're just graphical representations of a file or a part of a file, and altering the clip name doesn't affect the name of the referenced file which is what the OP is concerned about. CbB adds suffixes to files to differentiate them from earlier versions or recording takes. Nothing gets deleted unless all references to a file are deleted from the project during the same session in which the file was created without ever saving.  And once saved, a file will never be deleted unless you use Clean Audio Folder or CWAF Tool to  purge orphaned files, or save a copy of the project to a new folder, which will copy only referenced files.

Once you've finished a project and cleaned all orphaned files from the project folder, you could conceivably rename all the clips, and then tell CbB which file is which when missing files are reported when the project is re-opened, but it would be labor-intensive and prone to errors in a big project. It's best just to let CbB do it's thing, and not pay too much attention to how the sausage is made under the hood (I love a good mixed metaphor).

18 hours ago, yapweiliang said:

Despite what the BandLab Help Center says - I could not find the supposed "Unpublish" button.  What worked was deleting, then restoring - when restoring it became Private.  I think to subsequently publish it, one has to open Mix Editor and then press Publish from there.

So far my impressions of the technical process of exporting haven't been good. 

I've uploaded a few short, simple things just to get a feel for it  - http://bandlab.com/brundlefly .  The first few projects posted using the Export to Bandlab function in CbB had to be explicitly published after the fact, but the last couple have been published automatically, and I have not yet found and 'unpublish' option.

I would be interested in a simple collab to get a feel for the process. My forte is improvising chord progressions, rhythmic hooks and 'grooves' on keys. I can write a good melody, but I'm not an accomplished solo/lead player, so I would mostly be looking for collaborators to add solos/harmonies/vocals/bass/percussion/etc. to established instrumental song structures. I don't spend a lot of time on mixing and mastering, either, so anyone who's really into that part of the process would be welcome as well.

Regarding what happens when you make things forkable, my first impression is that there's too big a gap in control between collaborating with known, invited people in a 'band'  with a fixed endpoint, and just letting anybody do anything forever into the future.  I might try it at some point, but it would have to be something that I consider a 'throwaway' piece. One thought I had about the problem of people throwing obnoxious lyrics on things would be for Bandlab to add  a 'No Lyrics' option with some analytical capability to recognize when uploaded content includes language elements. My stuff is all instrumental, and I would most often want to keep it that way.

Another data point: I have a MOTU MIDI Express XT interface that's so old (early '90s) I had to physically swap out a chip to convert it from Apple to Windows USB standard (1.0 at that time). It still runs fine on a USB 2.0 port on a relatively new PC that was delivered with Win10 installed. So any issues are probably due to interoperability with the particular USB hardware and port drivers on a given PC.