Starship Krupa

According to the documentation, the same techniques (swipe, select/Ctrl click) for healing unwanted splits are supposed to apply to MIDI clips as well as audio clips.

As it stands now, the only way (that I know of) to eliminate unwanted splits in MIDI clips is Bounce to Clip, which is not as intuitive (esp. if you're used to working with audio clips).

Moreover, if you're going by the manual, it's very frustrating for it to just fail to work.

IIRC, a longtime SONAR user told me that it worked as recently as SONAR X.

Can we get it back? If it's not possible, can the documentation reflect it?

While the BandLab Sounds are many (160,000?), varied in genre and useful for song construction, something that I would LOVE to see is a library of environmental sound effects. Water, wind, wildlife, transportation, city soundscapes, weather, etc.

I know that such sounds are available from free sources such as the BBC library, but it would be great if BandLab had just one SFX loop pack among the 160,000.

A pack of one hit "foley" sounds like handclaps, gunshots, crashes, splashes, laughs etc. would also be useful.

Of course, if sound effects are already in there somewhere, please tell me how to find them and then the FR will be about making the Search function easier to navigate.😄

P.S. For the well-meaning and helpful, this is not a request for sources of sound effects. I know where I can find them, I just think it would be cool for there to be a BandLab pack or two of them.

On 7/1/2025 at 11:20 AM, Jonathan Sasor said:

You can think of it more like a recommended minimum.

I know it's not your bailiwick, but it would be nice if that wording were on that page.

The reason I mention it is that I think that Sonar is a great option for people with older Windows systems and I wouldn't want them to be discouraged from using it.

The minimum system I would expect to be able to run Sonar on successfully would be an i5/7 four core system with 8G of RAM and an SSD system/program drive. Although I built a CbB system that only had 4G of RAM and it didn't suffer too badly. I think that even with a healthy track count, such a system would do okay as long as you didn't expect to never have to do any freezing.

AFAIK, Sonar itself doesn't require more horsepower than it did 10 years ago (I could be wrong). I think what's changed is our expectation of what's possible. Plug-ins use more resources and we use more of them. We expect everything to play back glitch free without having to freeze tracks.

But does the DAW itself eat more cycles and use more RAM than it did 10 years ago? I think we just expect to be able to run 6 instances of Chromaphone with Neutron and Neoverb on every track, and Ozone on the Master bus.😄

My laptop has a 2-core i7 in it and runs Sonar just fine. Most of my projects consist of half a dozen virtual instrument tracks.

I guess it's a good thing that my laptop can't read.

A thing that I don't understand is why, if Sonar is more efficient than SONAR, the recommended system spec is higher for Sonar than it was for SONAR. 5 years ago, CbB ran fine on my old laptop with a 4 core i7 and 8G of RAM. 7 years ago, it ran fine on a Core 2 Quad Q6600 system. A couple of years ago, I set up CbB on a friend's Core 2 Duo 4G laptop. For all he wanted to do with it, record singer/guitar sketches, it worked just fine.

Notably, the personal studio of Cakewalk developer Mark MacLeod is based around an i7 3770 system. 4 cores of Sandy Bridge goodness.

The plug-ins I use have increased in both number and complexity in the past 10 years, and that's what's driven the upgrades I've made to my systems.

11 hours ago, Glenn Stanton said:

maybe they'll add the stem separation to Sonar as it seems like a fairly separated piece of code and processing as it stands

As you say, the actual separation is done by an engine on BandLab's server. It's probably the same stem separation engine as the BandLab DAW's use.

Seems like Sonar could someday get whatever mechanism uploads the song and then downloads the separated stems.

I did a test of stem separation among various DAW's I have that include the feature and the Next/BandLab did the best job, IIRC. I use stem separation for learning songs, doing my own version, etc.

5 hours ago, Tubeydude said:

Does anyone know if the new version of Sonar will  support video?

It "supports" video to the extent that CbB does/did. Which is to say that you can play a video track that's sync'd to whatever audio track(s) you're working on. That's about it.

To add to what others have said, Sonar's video function is useful in cases where the video part is already mostly complete and you want to record or edit audio to go along with it. That sounds like what you're trying to do.

After I get the audio track together I export it from Sonar and import it to my video editor (Vegas Pro) for final rendering. Sonar can export video and audio together, but really, your NLE is going to give you more options for that. If you're making videos, you should have a video NLE with tools specific to that task.

Horses for courses as they say, and there are a number of free (or nearly so, just wait for a MAGIX video production Humble Bundle and you can pick up 3 of them for about $30) video NLE's that are purpose built for the task. Some NLE's (like Vegas) are not bad at handling multi-track audio either.

As for your issue with not being able to launch Video view although you can see thumbnails, that is indeed weird. I just tried it on my system and it worked fine. Video can be tricky because your system needs to have CODEC's capable of displaying whatever format you're trying to display. "MP4" is just a container format, there's a wide variety of video formats that can be within an MP4.

On 6/26/2025 at 8:31 AM, kitekrazy1 said:

So what is ARM?  Is this referring to tablets?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AArch64

AFAIK the architecture is (so far) mostly found in mobile systems.

On 7/9/2025 at 11:58 AM, Anthony Smith said:

Can we get a clear explanation if those areas being behind the paywall was planned

It was planned. Not indicating it in the chart was an oversight.

13 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

I don't presently have anything that supports sidechaining (not sure if my ancient SONAR itself even does), at least not that works in that ancient SONAR.

SONAR started supporting sidechaining a long time ago. According to Google AI, SONAR 7 was the version that introduced support for it. What version are you using? Surely not earlier than 7.

It's dead simple to set up. You put the plug-in you want to control on the track that you want to duck, then create a send from the track that you want to do the controlling. I've never even had to tweak the send level for sidechaining.

And of course if there's anything about it you have trouble with, those of us on the forum will have it covered pronto.

13 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

I'd prefer not to have to do it manually.    While it's technically interesting to learn the process, it's tedious and wastes time I could be doing other things with.

Same.

While I do think that learning to do it "manually" is of value to understand the principle behind EQ carving, there's no reason to struggle with doing it that way if better tools are available. Unless Trackspacer (and the other automagic tools like Neutron and MSpectralDynamics) suddenly vanishes, I think we're safe becoming dependent on it/them.

As for the spectrum analyzer, like everything else Trackspacer, the display is very specific to what the plug-in does. It gives you a realtime visual of what the process is doing, and that's all.

For general spectrum analysis, my needs are covered with MAnalyzer and SPAN, both free to use. MAnalyzer even shows you the exact frequencies of the peaks. Most parametric EQ plug-ins these days have pretty good spectrum analyzers.

4 hours ago, P-Rizzy said:

ive just been looking for anyone with something positive to reassure me that bandlab won't pull the free versions like with cakewalk by bandlab, so im not left with a bunch of project files i can't open at some point, because even free is too expensive if that's the future. i guess no one feels confident about that, so im better off paying for something better?

I think to the developers, Sonar is Cakewalk by BandLab with an updated GUI and a change to the licensing model. It's the same codebase they've been maintaining for a very long time, so to them, CbB is just the last version of the DAW that used the bitmap GUI.

Yes, they have announced that Cakewalk by BandLab will soon not be able to validate, but they have provided a free-to-use successor that works exactly like CbB and can freely open any Cakewalk project files.

I understand the FUD, but if you step back a bit, BandLab has provided a free subscription DAW starting in early 2018 and continuing through today, uninterrupted. Their communication and the wording of the announcements could....use some improvement, but they're software engineers, not marketing people and they put it plainly: nothing is guaranteed. BandLab runs the Cakewalk group pretty lean, so that's how it is.

But if you look at the behavior of the company, they have kept it free and continue to do so. They've always been free to pull the plug, it's just that recently they've been saying so more out loud. It's a free subscription. As such they are not able to promise that it will always be free, because BandLab is a big company and management could change. They could go out of business. The Cakewalk IP could once again be sold in liquidation. The future's not ours to see.

My take on it is that if you have been comfortable for the past 7 years with using Cakewalk by BandLab under a free subscription, there's so far no reason to feel any less comfortable with using NuSonar via free subscription. Yes, OMG, BandLab could decide at any time to discontinue free access, but it was that way with CbB too.

Attracting people by offering a free DAW and then yanking their access to it would be the dewshiest of dewsh moves, and so far, BandLab hasn't pulled too many of those. Yes, a lot of people, me included, were very disappointed when NuSonar was released to the payware world as a membership only product, but they still let people use CbB for free, and continued to do that until the arrival of a free-to-use version of NuSonar.

Speaking of free tier Sonar, they've put some resources and effort into coming up with a way to have a free version and then implementing it.

In the event that this should ever happen, I feel confident that users would get plenty of time to save their stuff off as audio stems and MIDI files or feed it to the converter program or however they would want to migrate to a different DAW.

It'd be a pain in the asterisk, but no more so than moving to another DAW for any other reason. The only difference is when you do it. If you do it now, you're guaranteed the PITA right now. If you wait and see, the PITA might be years off, it might never even come.

No matter what DAW is your main, I think it's good to have another DAW around and at least keep rudimentary skills up on it.

15 minutes ago, Amberwolf said:

I'm still slowly learning how to make holes for things to interact without stomping all over each other with just a static EQ, and have barely begun the process of learning how to automate the EQs to do this throughout a "song" to make holes for whatever the prominent part is

Impressive, I've never gotten as far as using automation to do this, my tools were/are static EQ and sidechained compression. I still do manual EQ carving and sidechaining, but they're no longer my main tools for trying to surgically create space.

I've also used the EQ spectrum matching features of MAutoDynamicEQ (now on deep discount as part of MEssentialsFXBundle) and EQuivocate. Those allow you to take a static snapshot of a track's spectrum, then invert it to set the EQ's bands MAutoDynamicEQ is a dynamic equalizer, but it only has 8 bands (I believe). Neutron 4 has a similar mode built into it, and being iZotope, it requires less user intervention than those two. It works more like Trackspacer. MSpectralDynamics has a sidechain ducking feature, but it lacks the straightforward display.

Trackspacer doesn't take a static snapshot, it continuously follows the sidechain input and ducks accordingly. It has 3 knobs. One each for low cut and high cut, to let you restrict the action of the plug-in to a narrower spectrum, and one for Amount, for how much ducking you're going to apply. The higher you crank the knob, the more space you give the sidechaining track, but the more you can hear the hole that it's making. It usually doesn't take that much to increase audibility. The ideal, really, you don't "hear" it until you switch it off. It also has a spectrum analyzer display front and center to let you see what it's doing.

If you're getting into reducing frequency collisions and carving space, Trackspacer bypasses a lot of struggling and drudgery, IME.

If it's piqued your interest, why not download it and demo it while it's on sale. It runs in a noise burst demo mode until you feed it a valid serial.

On 7/5/2025 at 12:12 PM, SuperFreq said:

Imagine you're the left fielder on a baseball team that wins the world series. Then MLB picks you, and you alone, to accept the ring, give a speech and get your name, and your name alone, engraved on the wall.

Imagine you were a utility infielder for 2 different teams throughout the 70's. In the 2020's, the Baseball Hall of Fame picks you, and you alone from the teams you played for to be inducted.

Well, yeah, that's how the Baseball Hall of Fame works. It recognizes the achievements of individual players.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame does too, except it expands on this to also allow for people to be inducted in small groups when their achievements were known by the name of the group.

Ms. Kaye is being recognized for her individual achievements, something she's never had trouble with promoting in interviews. I have seen other session players of the era point out that Carol Kaye wasn't the only session bassist in Los Angeles in the 60's (of course they all seem to accuse each other of claiming gigs they didn't actually play on).

What would she propose? How should the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recognize the achievements of deliberately anonymous session musicians? It's not the Hall of Skilled Performances That Contributed to Others' Success in a Variety of Musical Genres.

Carol Kaye is as well-known as she is partly because she has actively built her own brand over the years. More power to her, she's a role model for female musicians and a symbol for the contributions of session players. She's sold a few method books too. But....quick, without the help of Google, name a single person other than actual band members who played bass on a Beach Boys recording. I'm a pretty big Beach Boys fan and I can't think of one name. Glen Campbell went out on the road with them on bass, but I don't recall if he also played bass on any of the records.

People who care about fame start bands or solo acts. Session players make a living from playing music without the part where you have to ride around on buses without going home for weeks or months at a time, or answer the same 5 interview questions over and over, or get approached by fans and media when you'd prefer to just be going about your normal business, or have your personal life examined by a bunch of strangers.

"Screw you, Mattel!"

2 minutes ago, Xoo said:

How noticeable is the effect in the rhythm guitar part in the example you gave (I tried a demo of this or a similar product and didn't notice any beneficial effect on the mix, but that might have been me :-))?

It's really just to be used in situations where there are frequency collisions. If your tracks don't have that problem to begin with, it's not going to do much. Maybe the program material you tried it on wasn't especially collision-y in the first place?

It's also wonderfully transparent. One of the principles behind EQ carving is that you don't perceive the track being carved as missing anything because the presence of those frequencies in the other track's program material masks it. Trackspacer goes a step further and applies the cuts dynamically, so it's less noticeable. What you'd be listening for is only a perception that the vocal track is louder (even though it's not, it's just not being masked by another track). I sometimes have to pull the fader back a touch to bring things back into balance.

P.S. Some Italian university students came up with a freeware plug-in called "The Masker" that claims to perform a similar task:

https://audioplugins.lim.di.unimi.it/

I haven't compared them side by side on the same program material. I already have Trackspacer, and $29 (below my "party-size pizza" threshold) is cheap for what it does. One thing I noticed about The Masker's UI is that there are way more controls, which suggested to me that using it may require more dialing in. It also has a freeware "look" to it while Trackspacer's visual design is easier on the eyes. I'm glad The Masker wasn't around when I bought Trackspacer because my cheapskate ***** couldn't have resisted fiddling with it and I might not have gotten around to trying the processor I'm so happy with.

There are plug-ins that are "industry standards" that when I've tried them, I could see instantly why they were industry standards. XLN's RC-20 is another one. RC-20's purpose is to make sonic material that's too clean sound more lo-fi, using the usual methods of adding vinyl crackle, wow, flutter, other noise, bitcrushing, etc. It's really a multieffect, and it doesn't do a single thing that I couldn't do using other plug-ins. But it's so focused on the task it's designed for that it's worth the price of a party-size pizza. Just in the speed with which I was able to get the results I wanted and could then move on to the next thing.

4 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

aaannnd...what is it that it does so well for you? 

It does what it is designed to do and claims to do.

From Wavesfactory's product page:

"Trackspacer creates space in a mix by carving the frequencies that a track needs. It applies an inverse EQ curve after analysing the sidechain signal."

In one example, let's say you have a rhythm guitar track and a lead vocal track. The frequency space they take up overlaps and collides, leading to unpleasant build up and/or less intelligibility of the vocals.

Put Trackspacer on the rhythm guitar track, feed a send from the vocal track to its sidechain input, and it will carve out a sonic space in the rhythm guitar track. It does it dynamically, so that during the times when there is no vocal, the rhythm guitar track will be unaffected. It only carves out the space when the space needs to be carved.

The traditional tools for doing this sort of thing are EQ and sidechained compression, sometimes both. The advantage Trackspacer has over them is that unlike EQ carving (which I believe is what Mark is referring to), it's dynamic, and unlike simple sidechained compression, it only ducks the frequencies that need to be ducked, not the entire spectrum.

With static EQ carving, when (in our example) there's no vocal, the rhythm guitar track will still have the EQ cuts, which will then not be masked by the presence of the vocal. This can make the mix sound thinner.

In situations where you can't revisit the arrangement or sounds, perhaps because it's someone else's music or the genre calls for having those two specific instrument sounds, Trackspacer is especially useful.

https://www.pluginboutique.com/products/3259

One of the best plug-in purchases I've ever made. Def in the top 5, maybe #1. I've long held that given a DAW's stock plug-ins, MFreeFXBundle and Kilohearts Essentials, I'd feel comfortable mixing just about any project, therefore the rest of my collection of FX plug-ins is pure luxury (except for the weird ones like Glitchmachines and Unfiltered Audio). The only one I'd miss would be Trackspacer and I'd miss it bad. It's not even worth questioning whether it'll actually get used. If you're mixing 2 or more audio tracks, it will get used, probably on every project, and your projects will sound better for having used it.

Does what it does so well and with such little effort that it feels like cheating. Surely, something that gets this important task done so easily must have a drawback? Well, I have yet to hear anyone say anything negative about it. I've tried other products that claim to perform the same function and while I got similar results with one of them they all cost more and....I already have Trackspacer.

It goes on sale maybe once or twice a year at this price. I've never seen it for less.

The bundle lives up to its name. I could live without MTurboCompLE, but MTurboReverbLE, MAutoDynamicEQ, MTurboDelay, MAutoAlign, and MLimiterX are in tight rotation in my projects.

https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/81-Bundles/39-Effects-Bundles/5590-MEssentialsFXBundle

My impression right now is that when NuSonar was announced, along with the impending discontinuation of Cakewalk by BandLab and no mention of any free tier, the robust collection of CbB oriented YouTube channels either stopped producing anything or did one video about the announcement and stopped.

6 months after the announcement, I did a YouTube search and there was no new content at all.

After the announcement of Free Tier Sonar, new videos popped up very quickly. My most recent search, which wasn't really deep, turned up 8 about the announcement. I guess the YouTube creators were watching and waiting.

It occurs to me that Tony Burrows is the perfect artist for Adam's schtick. "Professor Rock" seems to have a special place in his heart for one hit wonders and Burrows generated 5 of them.

The video for "Pop Muzik" is so great. Looking at it today, was Robin Scott like Nostradamus or something?

As for Rick Beato, I think even he gets that people are getting tired of his hating on the hits of the current day. I've never cared for it myself. Wow, he listens to the top 10 most popular songs of the day and concludes that they mostly suck. To use his own question: how can he not know that about pop music? At any given moment in the history of there being such a thing as top 10 songs, most of them will be forgettable, saccharine tripe. "Forgettable" being the operative word. We don't remember how crappy pop music of the past was because the songs themselves are not memorable.

On 5/1/2022 at 6:08 PM, Bapu said:

What's next? Free Bapu Remover?

Uninstalled!

3 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

looks like it is now actually needed in this folder instead

Ah, that must have been where I copied them to before trying it.

On 7/4/2025 at 9:24 AM, Brian Walton said:

installed Splat to see what would happen - there was no option to import themes

Not sure what you mean by this.

You installed SONAR Platinum and were expecting it to give you an option to import custom themes?

AFAIK there's never been any dialog or mechanism to import themes, you just put the .STH files in your C:\Cakewalk Content\Cakewalk Themes folder (that path is hard-coded) and they show up as available in Preferences.

I only installed SPlat after years of using CbB and creating themes for it. Themes created in newer versions of Theme Editor seem to load fine into SPlat. I guess as with the DAW itself it just ignores the stuff associated with newer features, which is the way to do compatibility, IMO.

I don't think Cakewalk/SONAR/Sonar gets enough credit for how well it handles 2-way project file compatibility. Newer project files usually open okay in older versions. From the limited testing I've done, this goes for themes as well. My up-to-date CbB themes work in SPlat.

This is good news, because with my aging eyes, Sonar's new Squintlight™ interface makes comping more difficult.

On 6/30/2025 at 9:34 AM, Notes_Norton said:

what I learned in school and via the Berklee correspondence course

"It's my authority and by golly I'm gonna appeal to it!"

I do not recognize Berklee's definition (or maybe it's just your interpretation of their definition).

Here's some NOTmusic written by Claude Debussy:

On 6/30/2025 at 12:17 PM, Sergei Pilin said:

More contrast needed, look how immediately much more readable and easier on the eyes the whole thing becomes with just one simple slider move in Photoshop

Nice.

I've had this question in the back of my mind since Sonar came out: do the developers use monitors or monitor settings with greater contrast/vibrance than my poor old Dell and Samsung HD monitors'?

The other day I bought a 27" 4K monitor thinking that it might help with my Sonar legibility issues. Unfortunately it didn't.

10 hours ago, GIM Productions said:

Up until 5 years ago I considered Sonar the best Pro DAW on the market overall

What happened 5 years ago? CbB came out over 6 years ago. IMO, it improved a great deal over the years, up until the point that development on it stopped.

Do you mean that 5 years ago another DAW surpassed it?