Starship Krupa

Simple: I'd really like to be able to drag a synth from the Browser to a Track View folder (the header that is) with the resulting track(s) being inserted in the folder.

Drag and drop operations make the DAW seem slicker.

9 hours ago, David Baay said:

if it's needed to keep Sonar competitive with other DAWs, so be it

It's a long-requested, much-needed feature. The XSampler is maybe halfway to the goal. At this point, Sonar is the only DAW that aspires to be mainstream that lacks a phrase/pad sampler.

Freeware ones are, oddly enough in this time of abundant free plug-ins, still kinda uncommon, and of course they're such a joy to use when well-integrated with the DAW.

For me it's not all about a build-your-own drum machine (although I would use it for that) it is for my beloved dialog samples. Being able to just "play" phrases from the keyboard wherever I want them in the song, that is really the way to do it rather than dragging clips around on the timeline.

And dialog phrases can be fun to trigger with the step sequencer....

To this end I tried loading some dialog phrases into Session Drummer 3 and it dutifully played them back when clicking on the various pieces of the drum kit and from the keyboard. Sort of weird to see the kick drum wiggle as a 5 second spoken word phrase plays, but I could get used to it. It doesn't have the versatility of a full-featured sampler, you can't set the individual samples to loop or reverse or retrigger. You can do some fun echo-ey effects with it if you load a long sample.

31 minutes ago, murat k. said:

if you're not going to contribute to the topic, choose to remain silent

This applies especially to lecturing people on what constitutes contributing.

1 hour ago, David Baay said:

FWIW, if you have Session Drummer from purchasing a copy of SONAR at some point, you can use that as the sample host. You can drag-drop samples directly onto the pads.

Whoa, what?? I've been using Session Drummer and had no idea that I could drag and drop samples directly onto its pads. With the endless requests for samplers, why didn't the devs ever mention this?

I'm gonna have to try that out immediately.

I've been waiting for the pad sampler companion to XSampler to come along, but doesn't NuSonar already come with Session Drummer? I have a SONAR Platinum license, so I'm not 100% sure about that.

I even made a skin for Session Drummer 2 to update it to the NuSonar flat dark look. Link is in my sig.

This is material for the Tutorials forum.

On 11/8/2024 at 5:45 AM, Ted Raven said:

How great are chances that Cakewalk Sonar will support DAWproject import and export soon?

Not great at all. The developers have shown no interest in the format. As mentioned earlier, they've developed their own file format, which allows projects to be opened in and from the only other DAW that matters to them, Cakewalk Next.

On 10/26/2024 at 8:11 PM, David Baay said:

I just loaded the AD2 drum map and did not have any issues; just make sure to have the instrument loaded before instantiating the map in order for the output port to default correctly. The page where the map is shared also has project and track templates that will take care of the output assignments and speed the setup of multitrack outputs:

I just tried it again and this time it worked just like it's supposed to, with the usual exception that I had to open the Drum Map Manager and set all of the outputs to route to the Addictive Drums 2 instrument rather than my Saffire Pro's MIDI in port. I've always had to do that anyway, and it's a trivial procedure with a good success rate. That is, it's successful at getting the controller's notes mapped to the soft synth's sounds.

So I think what I'll do going forward is, rather than having my heart set on using the drum pane with Addictive Drums 2, I'll just try it once at the start of the project, and if it doesn't work, fall back to using the keyboard view with the AD2.INS definitions. Then if that doesn't work, I'll fall back to figuring out where the instruments are on the piano keyboard with a bit of educated trial and error. And however I end up editing my drum track is how I will edit my drum track.

The idea is that while using the drum pane is my first choice, it's not guaranteed that it will work on any given attempt. So rather than letting the failure blow the mood, I'll be ready with a backup plan and then a failsafe in case the backup plan doesn't work. So at least sometimes I'll be able to work in my preferred view. When I can't I can't, no sense getting my knickers in a wad over something that's out of my control.

My distress came from believing that I can get it to work reliably if I just follow the correct steps, but observed time after time that this belief was not true. If I just let go of that assumption, I'll be fine. After all, if the drink I like best at my favorite restaurant is iced tea, and I go there and they happen to be out of iced tea, I don't let it ruin the entire meal. Sometimes the drum grid fails to display correctly, and that's okay. If today's a day when it works, well, super. If not, I can still edit drums.

If the drum pane works, it usually keeps working, so that's not a worry.

On 10/29/2024 at 5:12 AM, Canopus said:

....this was my post number 1K.

Dawg, I got more plug-ins on my laptop than 1K.

On 11/2/2024 at 6:39 AM, Zo said:

Kinda redundant with vintage Dry nope ?

I wouldn't think so. "Dry" suggests that the recording room was deadened, "dead" makes me think that the drums themselves were tuned for minimum sustain and/or had muffling applied.

4 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

I will do some testing in Wasapi at some point and see if anything can be improved

Those of us who take our laptops out to coffee houses and don't wish to lug around our Studio 2|4 or Scarlett 2i2 thank you in advance. 😍

That said, I see improvements on my 2017 Dell Latitude with a 2-core i7 using WASAPI Exclusive.

If any performance tuning has been done by a user within CbB, checking that AUD.INI is important. Thread Scheduling Model is key here.

Long requested feature, and one I would love to see.

Since plug-ins are initially slotted into whatever category they report, and the display name of the plug-in is usually at least shortened, it can be a pain to see if a new one was successfully installed for Cakewalk. I usually switch my layout to "Sort by Manufacturer" to make it easier to track them down and edit their display names and/or put them into my preferred categories.

Even a "New" category or indicator that only appears the first time a plug-in is scanned by Cakewalk would be so handy.

6 hours ago, David Baay said:

This could actually be related to problems you're having with drum maps in some cases.

Nah, once I get the drum pane set up, it tends to keep going okay.

The problem isn't getting sound to come out, it's getting a drum grid with note names on the left. And I don't use the note remapping feature for any synth that's not a drum machine.

You're thinking in terms of "he's having trouble with drum maps." The "map" part of the feature is the part that actually works for me. Remapping controllers to different MIDI note numbers. Nice feature. A bit clunky, but it works solidly.

The feature that tends to fail miserably is displaying the drum pane with the names of the notes on the left.

They are two different aspects of "drum maps." Note mapping and drum grid editing. One works fairly well, the other one is frankly such a mess that even veteran, savvy Cakewalk users have given up on it. How many people chime in to say that the drum grid works just fine for them vs. how many say that they use Instrument Definitions or just memorize the note locations on their MIDI controller? I myself have a strip of board tape on my keyboard controller with the GM note numbers written on it.

Which I submit is a less common goal than wanting to edit drums on a nice compact grid with note names on the left.

One good thing is that XLN just issued a free upgrade to Addictive Drums 2 that makes accessing its own internal MIDI mapping more inviting, so I may be able to just use an extended GM mapping with AD2. Or, since they've made their own drum editing grid more inviting, I may get more into editing patterns with that.

For AD2 users: this upgrade is a must, it has so many new features and such an extensive UI update that it could have been called Addictive Drums 3 and been a paid upgrade. It functions as a great preview of things to come when AD3 ships.

1 hour ago, Xoo said:

Never used Excel??!?!?

Not in decades. LibreOffice or Google Sheets here.

What does Excel use Scroll Lock for?

On 10/26/2024 at 5:56 PM, Base 57 said:

Be back in studio next week. I will try to help more then. 

Meanwhile, some kind of voodoo dance may be more effective....

I'll give credit where it's due and say that it's been quite a long time since I've had to sacrifice a chicken to Cakewalk's MIDI routing.

You know the scenario, where a MIDI track and a synth track are happily joined and cooperating, but then....something changes and the synth stops producing sound. You check everything, all the inputs and outputs are set correctly, nothing solo'd, nothing muted, lights on the MIDI track indicate that data is flowing, yet somehow no sound is being produced.

Then you start Trying Things, and eventually some combination of saving/deleting/exiting/reloading/reinserting the project/track/computer makes it start producing sound again.

The sound comes back as mysteriously as it went away. There was a time in the past where you would try to retrace the steps that led to the dysfunction, in the hope of avoiding the situation in the future, but it is now as impossible to break as it was to fix.

All you can do is Save As and thank the spirits that control such things for allowing you to continue.

Anyway, I'm holding you to your earlier pledge to help more when you were back in the studio, assuming you are now back in the studio.

How do I get my spiffy diamond drum editing grid without having to piddle around with forcing it to use Channel 10 or some such?

On 10/27/2024 at 2:24 PM, Colin Nicholls said:

Windows User Interface Guidelines has entered the chat

As a pro QA engineer for multiple companies, and a beta tester later, the reaction I usually get from software engineers when I refer to those is along the lines of "yeah, yeah, nobody likes a smartass." 😄

I'm not sure why this is so, perhaps by the time it's brought up they are so far into the design process that an outsider saying "no need to reinvent the wheel" is....unwelcome.

Cakewalk was around long before Windows, so it mostly gets a pass on keystroke standardization. It's still the only program I've ever seen make use of Scroll Lock (and a damn good use it is), so deserves an award for avoiding a missed opportunity. Many programs could benefit from stopping scrolling, there's a dedicated key right there for it, so why is it so seldom implemented?

As most people do, I use multiple programs, and every time I want to Deselect All I'm reminded of how miserable it is not to have a standard keystroke for such things. Interestingly, Google's AI Overview for "keystroke select none" currently show, in order, Adobe Lightroom, Cakewalk, Google Docs, and Microsoft Excel as its examples to demonstrate "The keyboard shortcut for "select none" varies depending on the application."

I would chalk Cakewalk being in the #2 slot as due to how often I search Google for Cakewalk, except for the fact that I don't remember ever Googling Adobe Lightroom or Microsoft Excel.

At this point I'd say a brute force workaround is your best bet.

What would you do if you had old projects on tape, with EQ settings written down by hand, and the hardware EQ now no longer functions properly? Probably duplicate the EQ settings as much as you can on your newer piece of gear.

If the EQ settings are that critical to your old projects, either bounce the tracks with the EQ baked in or take some screen caps of the EQs' UI to transfer to a currently-supported EQ. My favorite is Soundly Shape It.

For projects that I want to be more able to handle future twiddling, I try to avoid DAW-locked FX.

You're fortunate in that you have an older version of the DAW to use to prepare the projects for your current DAW.

I've wanted to be able to do this from about day one with using the software.

I do like this new look for AD2. I didn't like plug-in GUI's made to look like 3-D brushed aluminum when they were new and they look even worse now. When AD2 first came out, even a real life drum machine that looked like that would have looked cheap and dated. And I don't think that was what they were aiming for.

Don't get me started on simulated simulated woodgrain.

At one point it was neato for something on a computer screen to resemble a real life object, but we are long past that point. For emulations of things that actually exist, like the faceplates of vintage compressors, it's still okay because it contributes to the sensory illusion of using the old piece of gear itself, but it's not so great for processors that are trying to be a whole new thing.

My only complaints about NuSonar's look are that text is smaller in several places and I can no longer set grid lines to higher contrasting colors. Other than those things, it looks great.

I did a facelift on Cakewalk Session Drummer to help it fit the new look, a link to the files is in my sig.

1 hour ago, Amberwolf said:

If you have any software that was installed for your keyboard, it may have macros or functionality in it that are doing this.

Most likely this. What a nightmare for someone doing keypad math.

The software for my Logitech mouse has the (default) ability to throw a similar pop-up every time I switch on Caps Lock. Not so great in FP games where Caps Lock is used for "always run."

Just want to update this topic with a shout to the folks at Plugin Alliance.

I didn't realize that the bundle of PA plug-ins that comes with the upgrade was identical to the one that came with 5.5 before I went and blew my registration number at the PA site. I wanted to pass it along to a friend and they kindly responded to my ticket their next business day with a replacement number, no further questions asked.

Not a big deal, but they didn't have to do that and could have told me that the bundle wasn't intended to be split up anyway and I would have been fine with that, but they reversed my blunder and my friend was pleased and surprised.

Regardless of how often I use the main iZotope components, a hundy well spent for an extra pair of licenses for the Expo 'verbs and some NI FX to mess around with (I think NI's FX are kind of underrated due to being in the shadow of their excellent instrument products).

As an upgrade from versions even earlier than 5, it's a fine deal.

Burned CD-ROM's Zip drives, Jaz drives, 320K floppies, 1.44M floppies....

On 10/13/2024 at 9:51 PM, Max Arwood said:

I might be the only one here with full hard drives. Lol.

You are not. Anyone who DAW's on a laptop knows the woes of bumping up against drive space and having no easy way to remedy it.

Suggestion: rename this topic "favorite Windows utilities?"

LatencyMon and others that Cakewalk users find particularly useful.

33 minutes ago, Jerry Gerber said:

It's connected via MIDI over LAN, with the DAW sending MIDI data to the 2nd computer which plays back the samples and sends the audio over ADAT back to the DAW.

That's how I read it. So you're almost definitely looking for an issue with VSOC on the dedicated computer. I hope there's a way to pre-load the samples.

I've been a longtime fan of Logitech pointing devices, going back 30 years when I was working at a company that shared a parking lot with Logitech. At the time they had a factory store for open box/refurb and I availed myself.

Last time I was at my bank, I noticed the teller using an upright mouse. Instead of using the mouse with the palm facing down, you use the mouse with the palm facing inward at a 45 degree angle, the hand resting on its heel. Simple idea, but it blew my mind. The hand naturally wants to rest on its heel, with the palm facing inward. In order to use a standard mouse, you must rotate your forearm 90 degrees, so that the palm faces downward.

eBay yielded an open box Logitech Lift upright mouse in very good condition, probably from someone who tried it and didn't like it.

I, on the other hand like it enough to post about it here.

It has the two standard left and right click buttons and wheel where you'd expect to find them, plus two programmable thumb buttons and another programmable button on the palm surface just aft of the wheel. The wheel click is also programmable. A couple of features that it lacks compared to other mice I've used are mousewheel tilt and the wieghted smartshift wheel that unlocks to freewheel. I did like the smartshift wheel, but never used wheel tilt.

I keep the thumb buttons programmed to Ctrl and Alt, which allows for one-handed copy operations in Cakewalk.

It's taking a bit of getting used to, gravity is different when the hand is upright, but I'm sure it will become at least as natural as palm down mousing. Gaming is fun, the upright mouse has a joystick feel to it.

4 minutes ago, David Baay said:

the idea is that you're adding a new map to the project that can contain multiple maps - just like adding a "new" track, folder, bus, marker, etc. It has to be applied to the Output because it's actually a realtime "mapper" that can rewrite note event numbers, channels and velocities on the fly and send them to different outputs according to input pitch, not just re-labling pitch names in the PRV.

This was geeksplained to me years ago by the much missed @scook. Yes, I understand why it's "and 50/100" rather than just "and 50 cents."😄 Still baffling for the poor soul seeing it for the first time.

8 minutes ago, David Baay said:

I guess this boils down to a Feature Request to be able to add labels to the drum pane without invoking a drum map, but it may be that the mute/solo functions of the drum pane also depend on the map, and you might lose that; I don't know.

All I know is that the existing implementation has always worked for me when I needed it with a minimum fuss and mystery. Maybe the problem is better addressed by determining exactly how the basic process falls down for you in particular situations (e.g. default output assignment, blank drum pane) and having the Bakers find ways to cure those particular issues. And possibly they could put a menu option in the PRV to "Add Drum Map" that opens the pick list and applies the selection to the output of the current track under the covers. I think this would be a better approach than adding a "labeling-only" feature.

There is also a reason why I framed it as a rant of frustration rather than a well-considered feature request. I have submitted the latter multiple times, in details small and great, in moods frustrated and calm. From "here's exactly how I would like it to work" to "just a context menu pointing to the drum map options in the drum pane." The latter would have saved me hours, literally, when I was new to the program. As much as I detest the question, how hard could it be?

I've feature requested all I'm gonna request until I'm requested to have my request featured. This is venting.

TBF, I suspect that the devs know that it's messed up and needs a re-tooling. A big job to tackle that would take a chunk of time and resources to brainstorm how it should work and how to do it without breaking existing projects and workflows.

From the symptom, I'd say that the instrument is trying to use data that it doesn't have fast enough access to. After playing through the first time, it's been cached, so no problem. We trace it upstream to see what's going on.

@Jerry Gerber, when you say that the non-DAW system is dedicated to the Vienna Symphonic Orchestral Cube, what exactly to you mean by that?

Are you using the dedicated system as you would an external MIDI synth, where you send MIDI data to it and route the audio back to the DAW system? I assume that the cellos and basses are being played back by the VSOC system.

If so, that narrows it down to the issue being with that system, since the DAW is just telling it to play the note. Does this project use the VSOC for instruments that occur before the cellos and basses kick in (probably so).

You're loading samples from an SSD, so inherent disk transfer speed shouldn't be a bottleneck. Have you tried running your SSD diagnostics? The programs that you download from the drive's manufacturer, that is.

When the glitch happens, is it the first time in the project that those instruments (or specific articulations) are used in the project? If you turn on the system(s) and play a cello or bass note from your controller before loading the project, do you get the same glitch? If so, that might indicate an issue with loading those specific samples, but if not, it could be that it only happens when VSOC loads all of the other samples first. It may be out of room for pre-loading.

Finally, what does Vienna's support forum have to say about it?

On 10/24/2024 at 5:51 AM, Sal Sorice said:

it can run as a service and index in background or you can just run it as needed. The database updates really quick when you fire up the utility. Has lots of options for what to index, exclude etc.

What makes it superior to Windows' own indexing? My first guess is versatility, but what form does that take?

Another fave utility of mine is Auslogics Duplicate File Finder. Not hard to figure out what its purpose is from the name. It's great for sniffing out things like redundant installers, and instances where I somehow installed program or plug-in content in multiple locations.