David Baay

Crackle-inducing plugins will often be those that use lookahead buffers and require delay compensation. In Sonar you can identify these by hovering over each plugin in an FX bin to see how much PDC it's inducing, if any. Mastering plugins from Izotope, linear phase EQs and Compressors and transient shapers are common offenders. 

Also if you've added any soft synths in the mean time, you might try freezing those. Synths that use physical modeling like those from AAS and Arturia, Izotope's Iris 2, Pianoteq, etc. can add a lot of processing load.

3 hours ago, Jonathan Sasor said:

you can also do it via set project from clip in AudioSnap

My beef with Set Project from Clip is that a regression occured between S8.5.3 and X1 whereby the tempo change it creates are not exactly on timeline beats now. They tend to be a little after the beat where the tempo is increasing, and a little before it where the tempo is decreasing. Aside from simply looking and "feeling" messy when you view the tempo list or zoom in the timeline, this can make arranging by copy/cut/paste  with tempo changes problematic when selecting with snap to measures misses a tempo change or includes one it shouldn't. I  tried for years to get traction on fixing this regression to no avail. I ultimately wrote off using the function because of this, but also because I found that the time it takes to massage the  beat markers into position for Set Project to work correctly was better spent spent on SM/BAN which is a lot more flexible anyway, allowing you set only as many points as necessary, not always evey beat or even every measure. Aand it works the same for freely recorded MIDI!

The keystroke you're looking for is Shift+M - Set Measure/Beat At Now - but it's not a real-time operation. You set the Now Marker at an absolute musical time, and use SM/BAN to tell Sonar what measure and beat that is. Sonar will insert the necessary tempo changes to make the specified timeline beat align with the muscal beat at each point. Depending on how variable the tempo is, you can start by setting downbeats every 8-16 bars, and then set additional points in between to tighten it up as needed. If the music doesn't start with a downbeat at 1:01:000, additional steps are needed to do it properly. If you Google "SM/BAN site:discuss.cakewalk.com", you'll find previous posts of mine on the subject with detailed procedures.

No doubt someone will suggest dragging the audio to the timeline to have Melodyne Essential create a tempo map for you, but I personally find the results are often marginal at best compared to SM/BAN.

It;s also possible to record a guide track of MIDI notes in real time, hitting a key on your keyboard at every beat (no more, no less)  and using Fit Improvisation against that guide track to create the tempo map, but you'll tend to get a rushing/dragging timleine from that as well.

2 hours ago, henkejs said:

installed the Line 6 ASIO driver for the POD Go, then connected the POD Go to a USB port. Windows recognizes the POD Go and plays the audio test jingle properly, but the POD Go does not show up in the device preferences in Sonar or CbB. 

Did you download the latest ASIO driver from Line6? I Googled and saw some posts saying the ASIO driver didn't load properly in Win11 until updated last March. My guess is Windows is using it as a WASAPI device so it doesn't matter that the ASIO driver is not loading. If all else fails, try changing CbB to WASAPI mode.

9 hours ago, Promidi said:

What he is asking for is a key modifier that prevents the mouse pointer attaching to a single controller event, but to go to a draw function instead.

Hmmm...  Ok. I generally find the opposite: that the Smart tool is biased towards drawing new controllers and that it takes very careful aim to grab a particular controller. If you want to draw, you only need to avoid hovering over the very top of a controller tail or its shadow.

4 hours ago, Woonyoung PArk said:

Then, one day, after Cakewalk BandLab, SmartTools began to cling to control data

You mean you release the left-click, and the controller continues to follow the pointer? For the benefit of the Bakers, what are exact steps and conditions to reproduce it?

Yes, this is still the place for all discussion of Cakewalk by Bandlab (not the web app unless the question is about intergration between CbB and the web app). And, to be clear,  you don't need to be a subscriber to post in the Sonar forum, but the subject should be about Sonar, including how it differs (or doesn't ) from CbB.

This is Digital Audio 101 and you will encounter the same issue with any DAW software.

- Digital recording into any device requires setting the sensitivity of the analog input to not clip the A/D convertor.

- The iPhone is likely automatically compressing the analog input to avoid clipping the convertor or just isn't as inherently sensitive as your PC mics.

- You need to lower the input sensitivity/level of you PC's mics under System > Sound in Windows.

- A dedicated audio interface will have front panel knobs to adjust input sensitivity.

Note that Gain level in the track only affects soft synths and recorded audio. The DAW has no way of controlling the sensitivity of analog circuitry in front of the A/D converter.

P.S. You can actually see that the iPhone recording is compressed (in the analog realm) as the quieter sections have a higher amplitude than the PC recording even though the loud sections are not clipped. The dynamic range between quiet and loud sections has been reduced. This is often desirable for various reasons, but in the digital audio world, you want to record without compression to get the greatest possible dynamic range in the raw recording and apply compression non-destructively as desired after the fact by digital signal processing.

DAW troubleshooting 101: "Does it happen in all projects, including a pure audio project with no plugins". I made the mistake of assuming from the original description that it was affecting a lot of existing projects that were running fine on the old machine.

Just run Utilities > Clean Audio Folder with the project open. Save As works but it's an unnecessary workaround for a simple function that already exists and doesn't require you to rename the project, copy all the audio to a new location and then manually delete the old project folder to recover the space.

That said, Save As might make sense if there are also a lot of alternate versions of the CWP file with different names in the same project folder that you saved along that way and want to discard as well or only keep as an archive.

On 2/16/2025 at 7:47 PM, Adam said:

It's not equipment related: I use multiple DAWs and Cakewalk is the only DAW that behaves like this.  I have an RME Madi FX PCIe interface which connects to three individual Orion32 interfaces via MADI.

I notice the transport module in your video is showing the record bit depth is 32...? A quick Google confirms the RME is  24-bit. Any particular reason you have it set to 32? Whatever the reason, I would suggest changing it to 24 to eliminate that as a possible cause.

By any chance do you have a large .zip file stored on your desktop or in any path that that Sonar might be touching? If so, try moving it to another folder or another drive entirely.

More generally, check disk activity in Windows Resource Monitor and see if any large file is being read.

If you had any paid version that included them you should still have them or can re-install...?

See the 'Hide Muted Clips' option I mentioned in your original thread.

3 hours ago, Salvatore Sorice said:

Still, it would be nice if there was a way to "hide" the notes from the other comp takes. Maybe I'll make it a Feature Request.

I have previously requested that muting lanes would hide notes in the PRV the same as muting clips (when 'Hide Muted Clips' is enabled in the PRV  View menu). But muting clips is pretty quick and easy.

Comping with multiple lanes really needs to be done in the Track View and, as recently discussed, is not well-suited to working with MIDI. Because MIDI is fully editable in ways that that audio is not (though Melodyne gets you pretty close), it's generally easier to make the necessary edits to one decent take (or maybe a compilation of several sequential takes) than to try to piece together a performance from many parallel takes.

On 2/11/2025 at 3:32 PM, Mauro Gaspa said:

Sorry, but I don't think so. First of all, for tracks, this feature has been around for quite some time, it would be enough to implement it for clips on tracks too.

Move to Folder is two clicks and doesn't include specifying whether to move or copy since the latter is not possible. To move/copy clips you'd either need a third click or two diffent menu options for Move to Track and Copy to Track. Then at some point you're probably going to want to be able to choose wether to move/copy clips in multiple tracks to one track or to multiple tracks with the same relationship. This option and more are already covered by the Paste Special dialog.

I suppose the value of saving a click or two and not having to touch the keyboard with a no-frills context menu option might depend on how often you use it. My workflow would not benefit meaningfully.

18 minutes ago, Astraios said:

Then I add the Spire VST3 to the synth rack and load it not as a simple instrument track, but with MIDI source (see photo) and... tadaah!!!  it works...?

I can't reproduce a crash adding Spire VST3 as an Instrument track to a project that already has a Spire VST2 Instrument track.

But your description of adding Spire with only the MIDI source would not create a Synth audio track to host the output of Spire VST3 in the rack. If you do that manually and then make the two tracks into an Instrument track after the fact, do you get a crash at any point?

14 hours ago, MIDInco said:

It's disappointing that even though VST3 has been around for over 10 years, Sonar still hasn't fully supported it.

Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Admittedly I don't normally do a lot of synth automation but I have a number of projects that do, and they are working fine and have been for years. As a sanity check, I also just added some filter and LFO automation to the Spire VST3 test that I created for my reponse to the OP in this thread and it's working fine as well. The Serum demo only installs the VST2 so I can't test that one. I see that CW Support is looking into your issue with Serum. Somehow I doubt the reponse will be "Sorry, we haven't been fully supporting VST3 for the last 10 years but we'll get right on it."

I kind of liked the results of my test so I'm attaching it for your listening pleasure.

13 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Sounds like a fresh bug report is in order?

Yes. You want to do the honors? Just tell them it worked in X3 and was already broken in Platinum 17.10.

Just now, Starship Krupa said:

I usually make my loop section a bit longer than it needs to be in order to help avoid this.

That doesn't really keep you from hitting a note early and having it end up truncated at the end of the previous loop pass, though. 

A quote from my "MIDI Comping Challenge" post back in 2013 on the old forum (from a super-secret members-only subforum [wink, wink, nod, nod]):

"Ultimately, though, I think the answer is that you just can't  (and don't need to) comp MIDI in the same way that you comp audio, and that the classic methods of editing MIDI - fixing bad pitches, velocities, start times and durations directly and selectively copy-pasting where needed - are likely to work better in most cases.
 
But since the tool exists, and I'm a MIDI guy, I thought I should give it a go. Maybe over time it can become smart enough to work as seamlessly and intuitively as audio comping."

4 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

My solution is to record the first, looped takes in Comping Mode. This way, previous takes are muted, and the notes are within nice, full-width clips. Then if I want to do a shorter take, I switch to Sound on Sound and mute the previous lanes

I do everything in sound-on-sound mode with manual lane-muting as needed. I also seldom use loop recording as it can also be unsuitable for MIDI recording because if you hit a note a hair early at the end of one take instead of the beginning of the next, it gets truncated. Another place where a little AI is needed.

2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

One of the questions that I've never gotten an answer to is "why is Sonar making these splits in the first place?"

I've answered this question in the past, but maybe not for you. The assumption when comp recording is that a new take is intended to replace some or all of the previous takes in that that were presumably inferior in that section, so it automatically makes splits in all the other clips and mutes them. If you subequently decide that one of the earlier takes is in fact superior in that section, one click promotes that other clip. If only one part of it is better than some previous clip, you can always swipe with the Comp tool to break up the section further and promote the appropriate clips for each. The automatic splits are just intended to facilitate the work of replacing not-so-good material with better material.

A long time ago, not too long after comping and comp-recording was implemented, I posted a "Take the MIDI Comping Challenge" demo project that had a set of raw takes with no comping and a comped set in another track showing the goal. That goal was achievable only by an excrutiatingly complicated series of comping moves, but was easy to obtain by manually editing MIDI the old-fashioned way. One of the Devs chimed in confirming my conclusion that the Comping workflow was not intended for MIDI and was generally not suited to it in many cases. 

As for swiping (or Ctrl-clicking selected clips) with the Comp tool to heal the splits, my recollection was that this would work for MIDI if you had Non-Destructive MIDI Editing enabled so that the clips are abutting. If NDME wasn't enabled, the empty space between notes would be cropped away so the clip boundaries were no longer abutting and couldn't be healed. That said, I just checked this and it already wasn't workng in Platinum 17.10 so either it never worked and my memory is faulty, or it got broken way back.

I wouldn't have noticed because I never try to Comp MIDI. 😜

EDIT: MIDI comp split healing worked in X3. IIRC, that's when comping was implemented.

Cool. Glad to help. FWIW Sonar now has a function to Backup/Restore Settings that basically includes all of Preferences.