Sven

"Are those meters better than the M4?" - This was for Will_Kaydo. Also, thanks David for your reply. I'm tempted to order the M4. Looks like what I want.

Are those meters better than the M4?

Thanks for your reply Will_Kaydo. Your idea might be a bit overkill for my innocent setup. I'm always just using one mike or guitar input whilst recording by myself these days. Maybe one day in the future your solution will make sense. Thanks.

I'm looking for a new USB audio interface and I'd like one with LED input meters. My PreSonus AudioBox USB 96 sounds fine but I don't love the feel of it. It also has an annoying input volume 'feature' which makes the sound go up slowly then jump dramatically around 3 o'clock. I was considering getting the PreSonus Sudio 24c but would like to consider others first. If anyone has a recommendation I'd like to hear it before I purchase. https://www.presonus.com/products/Studio-24c The MOTU M4 looks nice. Anyone tried that?: https://motu.com/en-us/products/m-series/m4/ Thanks. PS: Some links with other choices: https://www.musicradar.com/news/the-best-audio-interfaces https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/best-usb-audio-interfaces/

Hello scook, Thanks for your helpful reply. Apparently my new motherboard only has one more slot available so I believe my best option is to remove the old non-SSD drive and put in two new SSD drives. If M.2 is not an advantage that will save some money. I'll put in a 4 TB for vst plugins (which constantly expand) and a 2 TB or 3 TB drive for my Cakewalk project folders. That should provide the best performance because the Cakewalk program, installed vst's, and Cakewalk project folders will all be on 3 new physical SSD drives. Does this make sense? Expanding the RAM is easy and I can do that later. I just want to make sure I get the hard drive part right. The CPU is the fastest I could find these days. Thanks.

I've finally got the new Win 10 machine set up and now I'm finally going to switch the D:\ and E:\ drive partitions to a new 4 terabyte SSD. A few questions: 1) I would normally partition the new drive as a D:\ drive (VST plugins) as 3 terabytes and an E:\ drive (Cakewalk project folders) being 1 terabyte. The old drive will become the F:\ drive for odds and ends. The actual Cakewalk installation is on a 1 TERA SSD drive. Does this configuration sound okay for best performance/speed? I use lots of Soft Synth Plugins and constantly have to Freeze or Archive tracks to keep the old machine from gasping. 2) I could get a SSD 2.5 SATA 4.TB (3Y) Samsung or a 4 TM SSDR M.2 PCIE 4.0 CORSAIR MP600 CORE for a bit more money. The guy at the store said the M.2 might be 5 times faster according to the specs. Anyone know if this is true and think I should spend more and get the M.2 drive? I don't know this stuff anymore but I haven't been fitted for a walker yet so I'm ahead of the game for now. Any suggestions on what would be best for the new drive are appreciated. There are other choices I'm sure. I hope to rely on this new drive for several years and will spend more now if it's worth it. 3) The new machine currently has 32 GB RAM. I'm honestly a little disappointed at the speed of the new beast with the faster CPU compared to the old Win 7 machine but I'm hoping performance will improve a lot with the new SSD drive. Would increasing the RAM to 64 GB or more also help a lot? I'm not sure where the bottlenecks are with Cakewalk and the VST plugins performance. Thanks.

Perfect Greg, Thanks!

(I meant Ctrl-Down arrow to resize to larger tracks)

On my old Win 7 machine when I insert a new synth track in Bandlab: It appears like this: On my new Win 10 machine with the Insert Soft Synth Options identical it only shows the track # and is too small to see the Mute, Clips, Read/Write, nor Volume below. I need to do a Ctrl-Up Arrow to make the new tracks bigger every time. I don't remember why my old machine inserts the synth track with the view I want and now I can't figure out how to make the new machine behave the same. Is there an option or method to do this? Thanks.

I was hoping for a response but I'd just like to know if anyone has migrated to a new machine and seen a similar problem. This is not a big problem but a slight nuisance. I can open my old projects and reinsert the original plugin, delete the old one that caused the error message but I won't know the last presets I had on that plugin. I can then guess or hopefully choose the correct saved settings from the export/import exercise mentioned above. I was hoping to reinstall everything on the new faster PC and have everything load like the old one. Any thoughts on this are appreciated.

Thanks Noel.

Thanks for your reply Noel Borthwick. I've exported all the presets for each category to individual files. When I go to import those files on the new machine the import button is grayed out until you select any registered plugin. Then you can select your export file and import only for that single registered plugin. You can do this for each plugin but I was hoping that the import would have a batch mode similar to the export to retrieve all known presets for all know registered plugins at one time. Please tell me if I'm misunderstanding this. Thanks.

"out of curiosity does the import merge or overwrite the existing plugins? " This might have been a confusing question. I was hoping the import would let you select all registered plugins for any given category and get any saved settings those plugins knew about. Apparently, you have to go one by one on each plugin to see if there's anything available to import from your exported file. The export was fast. The import seems tedious. Am I wrong? Thanks.

Thanks for your comments. So if I just do my export/import plan I should have all vst plugins that use that convenient save/load method including Cakewalk plugins? But not ones that require a save/load within their specific app, right? Anyone know the answer to this?: "out of curiosity does the import merge or overwrite the existing plugins? " Thanks again.

Hi msmcleod, I reduced many, many vst install locations on the old Win 7 PC to only four on the new Win 10 machine. Am I in for a nightmare if I do your suggested copy idea or is it simple to re-categorize them later? Is the export/import a better option? I just want to make sure I do this right. Thanks.

I haven't seen the easy answer I would like to this question so please point me to that thread if it exists already. I've patiently setup Cakewalk on a new Win 10 machine and moved or installed all my vst plugins to the new machine. I have hundreds of plugin presets I would like to move to the new machine as easily as possible. I believe I need to export my old presets using the plugin manager and then import them to the new machine. Please let me know if this is the correct approach to export/import everything quickly: I see nine categories and all the registered plugins available when I highlight each category. It seems that if I choose a category like VST3 I can highlight all the registered plugins (728 found) and then export that list. I can call that "Plugin VST3 Export " or something and then import this later to the new machine. I can then choose DXi, VSTi, MFX, DMO, etc... and highlight all registered plugins and export those to the appropriately named file for later import. Is this the easiest and best way to do this? It's not too painful and I can export/import everything in a short amount of time. There's nothing important on the new machine but out of curiosity does the import merge or overwrite the existing plugins? If this is not the best method please tell me how I should do this or point me to another thread. Thanks!

Hi Rickddd, I agree that a 2nd SSD drive would make a big speed improvement. My idea is to use the 7200 rpm 4 TB of extra HD space to get things set up and then buy another SSD drive for the things that need to run fast later. For now, I want to make sure that my basic system runs fast and I have plenty of room for storage. I always seems to be running out of space and I don't want to think about that problem fora few years. Thanks.

This is Cakewalk by Bandlab.

I mentioned in a previous thread that I am finally moving Bandlab from an i5 chip with Win 7 to a new i7 gen 11 chip with Win 10. I've now got plenty of hard disk space and 32 gigs of RAM on the machine. The C drive is a 1 TB SSD and the D and E drives are partitioned on a 4 TB running at 7200 rpm (thanks for your advice on increasing the rpm speed). I'm going to start installing all my programs tomorrow on the new beast and I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions of what to do (or not do) for a well organized, professional installation. For various reason my vst's on my old machine are in too many folders and I'd like to reduce that to fewer folders with this installation. I'm most interested in any installation tips that can help Bandlab's performance later. I'm tired of Freezing my ***** off! Slightly kidding, of course, but that's been my reality with the big production numbers I've done over the last couple of years. If I don't freeze most of the soft synths the performance gets bad real fast including random, ugly crashes. Not a fun way to work! (This is minor complaint but I thought I'd mention it: When I go to save vst presets for any given music app (Arturia keys, Amplitude, Ample Guitar, Philharmonik 2, etc...) it seems to save all over the place depending on the particular app. I see some obscure Windows method storage areas I would never normally save stuff in (c:\users\public\...grrrrr...). Again, this is from previous Win 7 experiences. I'm not sure what to expect using Bandlab with Win 10. I can currently always see all my previous saved vst settings for any given plugin easily later but I sometimes wonder if there's a cleaner way to organize vst save/load folders. I blame myself for maybe not taking more time during the original installations to see where things were going. Maybe I shouldn't be too worried and they're just stored in each app's magical vst save storage area and that's fine because it seem to work. ) I'm not at all worried about making everything work. I can always make everything appear to work. I just thought I'd take this rare chance with a clean install to get anybody's thoughts on what methods they like and don't like for organizing Bandlab and other music apps on their machines. Please let me know if I'm forgetting other things you feel are important. Thanks! PS: I plan to buy a new monitor tomorrow when I pick up the machine. My current monitor is 27" and the table I use is 90 cm wide. The monitor sits in the very back of the table and I hover about in front of the table with a guitar , keyboard, beer or whatever needs to be played at that given creative moment. I thought of trying a 32" monitor but I was worried it might be too large for my small setup and my eyes would spend too much time darting about left and right. Right now the set up feels comfortable but I wouldn't mind a larger screen because my eyes aren't what they used to be. Any thoughts on this monitor size for my table set up? Thanks.

TracingArcs, I understand what you mean about having content stored on a different drive than the program but doesn't the vst try to load everything into RAM if possible? If you have 32GB of RAM and the vst's content can be loaded there wouldn't that be the fastest way to work? Is the vst really doing read/writes to the content drive all the time? I don't know how these things are programmed but I would guess most programmers would want their content in RAM for maximum performance. If that were true then having the content on the SSD drive which loads quickly into RAM would seem to make more sense. I plead ignorance and I'm sure your right but I'm just curious how vst's do memory management these days. Again, it's no problem for me to load content on the D:\ or E:\ drive and the programs on the C:\ drive if that's what you advice. Thanks.

Hi TracingArcs, Thanks for your reply. I actually prefer to only have programs on the C:\ drive and everything else on my D:\ and E:\ drives. I thought Kontakt might run faster by accessing the C:\ SSD drive instead of slower D:\ drive. This is easy to fix, thanks. I'll also request a 7200rpm drive.

I going to order my new custom computer soon and below are the proposed specs. The 1 TB SSD drive will have Windows 10, program installations, vst snd dll files, and probably Kontakt library installations. The 4 TB non-SSD drive will have Bandlab projects, mixes, and anything else that doesn't require the faster SSD speed. I could have a SSD 4 TB installed but I believe it's about 4 times more expensive. I recall once testing loading time for a large Bandlab project using a SSD drive and a non-SSD drive and I don't think there was a big time difference. Again, I'm not a hardware whiz anymore so I would appreciate any thoughts on what I've listed below. It's very easy for me to change anything at this point if it will help improve Bandlab's performance. This machine will only be used for Bandlab. _________________________________________________________________________________ CPU COOLER TSUNAMI TSS-9100 RGB (BLACK) SSD M.2 PCIe 1.TB (5Y) WD Blue SN550 (WDS100T2B0C) PSU (80+ Bronze) 650w. Antec ATOM B650 RAM DDR4(2666) 32GB (16GBX2) KINGSTON HYPER-X FURY(HX426C16FB4K2/32) MAINBOARD (1200) GIGABYTE B460M DS3H V2 (REV.1.0) CPU CORE I7-11700K (Original) No Fan SATA-III (3Y) 4.TB WD Blue (256MB.,5400RPM,WD40EZAZ) ___________________________________________________________________________________ Thanks

By default when I add a new soft synth to my project it is place at the bottom of the synth rack. I often move the soft synths around in track view to place them where they belong in my overall mix. After moving the tracks (audio/midi) the synth rack still shows the soft synth at the bottom where it was originally inserted. I would like to know if I can slide it up the rack to see it in a corresponding position to the tracks in my mix? Moving the tracks is easy but I haven't found a way to highlight a synth in the rack and change it's position. Maybe you can't? Thanks.

I think I just figured out what David Baay is talking about. In Track View you can highlight the track number which will also highlight the track name. If you've done that then your paste should probably be where you want it in most cases. But you can also highlight a track number and then highlight a different track number's name. That is where the paste will indeed go. I don't recall having to worry about this behavior previously but it could have just been ignorance is bliss. At least now I can predictably paste to the track I intended by making sure the track name is highlighted and not just the track number.

Hi David Baay, Thanks for your reply. By "name field highlighted" you mean the user defined name for each track number? Like "Gtr Solo" or "Vox A"? The reason I'm asking is that when I click on a track number to focus that user defined name (Gtr Solo) is automatically highlighted as well. Even when I see both the track number and name highlighted my paste goes to a random track I never specified. That is unless I do Paste Special and change the destination starting track number every time. If I focus on track #36 and highlight the track number/name and then copy something, I may or may not have that clip pasted to track #36 unless I specify it in Paste Special. If I focus on track #36 and highlight the track number/name is there something else I'm supposed to do to insure that track #36 will get the paste later? Thanks.