Starship Krupa

Background:

There is a situation I find myself in on just about every project I do: when recording in Loop Mode, more than one guitar or vocal takes are keepers, and can be used for doubling, or in the case of vocals, sometimes the singer decides to have some fun and starts singing harmony lines, or whatever.

Also, sometimes when comping and editing I want to "park" alternate takes for possible use later, and the most resource-friendly way to do that is to move them to another track and Archive the track. This is because Cakewalk streams all audio files associated with any clips in the project, even if they are muted. The only way to stop that is to put them in a track and archive the track.

Feature Request:

Similar to how we already have "Send to Folder" for Tracks, it would be great to have "Send to Track" for Lanes. This would allow me to select the takes I want and Send to Track, with the option to send to an existing track or create a new track. Then I can comp them into a backing vocal or archive them or whatever. The lanes would be deleted from the source track. This would be a  very nice shortcut to the drag and drop way I do it now.

First, a sample rate of 192000 is high for a novice recordist. Even 88.2K or 96K are considered by most to be for use in special circumstances.

A system with a Ryzen 3700x is likely to include other components that make it so you will be able to track with low latency.

You don't say anything about the complexity of your project, how many plug-ins, etc., but I'll presume that since you mention "playing guitar" that you're trying to record audio, not MIDI with a virtual instrument.

So the "delay" you describe occurs between when you sing or play a note and when you hear it in your monitors (or, likely, headphones).

Okay, the thing to do is to set Cakewalk up to use ASIO Driver Mode in the Playback and Recording preferences.

In the control panel for the Focusrite, set your recording sample rate to 44,100KHz/24 and 4mS. That should be plenty low enough latency at the interface level.

Then try the following steps without adding any plug-in effects:

Set up a small test project and first make sure you can play back audio in Cakewalk. Just drag an audio file from somewhere on your computer onto the Track View, and see if it plays back okay.

If that works, plug in a mic, or plug your guitar in to the interface, and set up an audio track, and set the audio track to have that channel of the interface as its input. Click on the Monitor button on the track and see if you can hear the signal coming from the interface. At this point, if everything is working okay, you should be hearing your voice or guitar nice and crisp, with imperceptible or barely perceptible delay.

If you can't hear yourself, something went wrong. Your system is powerful enough to run one track at 4mS. Make sure you're setting the correct input channel, phantom power is turned on, etc.

If you're hearing enough delay to call it "delay," then make sure you don't have your interface plugged into an external hub or something.

Whatever else you do, ASIO Driver Mode is the preferred setting for most efficient operation, so configure your system that way if possible.

If your 'revision" consisted of mix moves and edits, yeah, lesson learned, and now turn on autosave and versioning.

If what you lost was recorded audio, all audio that Cakewalk records is immediately saved to disk no matter what else happens, whether it shows up as clips in the project or not, so you may be able to find your raw audio files if you look in your project's Audio folder.

On 7/19/2020 at 9:47 PM, sixash said:

the 32bit plugins I installed onto a 64bit machine disapeared

Excellent. You're halfway home.

Now install 64-bit versions of them and your system will be good to go.

9 hours ago, kc23 said:

I thought it was only my agenda, but thanks for chiming and collaborating

You make a persuasive pitch. I'll help advocate for a worthy feature or bug fix even if it isn't that big a deal for me personally. I agree that Cakewalk should have a way to route to single I/O ports.

If I have a dog in the fight, it would be my continuing bemusement regarding Cakewalk's delusion that, for instance, Input 2 on my interface is actually "Firepod 1 ASIO Input 1L/R." A designation you may notice doesn't actually carry the actual name of the input in it. I'm going to take a guess that "Right Analogue 5" is actually Input 6 of your Audient.

This may seem like a trivial thing to some, but so far the confusing nomenclature has contributed to 3 instances of my failing to capture a track during drum tracking sessions (practice sessions all, so I wasn't being fully diligent, and it wasn't a critical performance), and then another embarrassing episode where I spent 5 very. long. minutes. tapping on a mic stand, clapping my hands, having the talent speak into a mic, cranking up the gain on the interface unable to figure out why the hell my mic sounded so thin and distant before realizing that it was the guitar amp mic on Input 2 (according to the paint on the front panel) not the vocal mic on Input 1 (according to the paint on the front panel) that I had assigned to the track's input and armed.

Except for 1-2, and 9-10, the S/PDIF, none of the inputs or outputs on my interface is labeled or treated as a pair, but Cakewalk is like The Handmaid's Tale or something where all the inputs and outputs are divided up into pairs, and the odd ones define the pair's identity, and the even ones lose their identities. "You are not Input 2, in Cakewalk, you are Input 1R."

So I'd settle for the darn things just being displayed correctly.?

2 minutes ago, chuckebaby said:

Cakewalk is hardly doing anything, its all within my Interface.

Grr, I have interface envy. Much as I like my Firepods, got a heck of a deal on the pair of them, the original mixer software was written for Windows XP and is long abandoned. The next generation of the device came with the fancy software that would allow things like this to go on outside the DAW.

So I must rely entirely on what the 'pods can do with their hardware, and getting low latency in the DAW, in order to monitor or use external gear. If PreSonus had ever made a program for it, or made the program backward compatible, it would be fine, but they didn't. At least the Windows 7 driver still works with Windows 10.

3 hours ago, kc23 said:

(with all the good intentions your suggestion comes)

I appreciate that. I really do dislike it when people do that with the unspoken idea that I should suck it up because their pet DAW can "already do that."

Yeah, if I stand on my head and tap dance with my elbows, sure. ?

People make feature requests because they like the program and they want it to be better, they go to the trouble of writing it out. If they're polite, I try to be polite as well. Sometimes the program does actually have the feature already.

BTW, my semi-hidden agenda here is to keep the dialog going so as to keep your topic up at the top. That's part of how feature requests get attention, is if they hang around for a while. The devs are busy devving, or if you please, the bakers are busy baking, so checking the forum is a secondary task.

As chuckebaby says, your best hope is that altering the existing plug-in is a simple task.

You mention "proper implementation." I'm not familiar with how it's done in other programs, I think I tried it out in Mixcraft and it wasn't done with a plug-in, it was similar to a hardware mixer insert. Is this what you mean?

With all the high-powered routing that I can otherwise do in Cakewalk, it does seem kinda weird that the only way to get a signal out and back to an external processor while mixing is via a plug-in that assumes I want to eat up a stereo pair.

It sounds like what chuckebaby says is true for pros who have interfaces with lots of I/O flexibility, but even my 8 input/8 output Firepods only have one pair that can be used for this purpose (I think). I know that there are plenty of home studio/bedroom producer people who are way into patching in funky old processors, even stompboxes for reamping and they may be using a 2 channel or 4 channel interface. Is this the issue with the people you know?

1 hour ago, Base 57 said:

Maybe would work but is a very inelegant workaround. Sort of defeats the purpose of having External inserts in the FX bin. Having external mono processing in front of the sends is what is desired.

I myself dislike when people offer clumsy workarounds when a feature request is in order, and I fully agree with the feature request. Apologies if I didn't make that clear in my reply.

My purpose with the workaround suggestion is to help anyone temporarily while the problem is addressed where we think it should be addressed, which is in Cakewalk.

Let me see if I understand it correctly, because I haven't tried patching in any external processors.

Let's assume I want to use it with my @Craig Anderton PAiA Hot Springs Reverb, which would actually be my most likely scenario, as the Hot Springs is a favorite external processor.

The Hot Springs is mono in, mono out, so I only need one output and one return from my 8-channel Firepod. The Firepod only actually has two channels that may be used in this way, if I recall, so they are "expensive."

You're saying that if I assign the first output to the plug-in, I can't do anything else with the other one? That it's grabbed by the plug-in and may only be used on that channel.

That does seem like a big waste of I/O, especially in situations like mine, where I only have two in the first place.

Now before I say this, I will mention that I dislike it when people offer clumsy workarounds when a feature request is in order (with the implication that your feature request is unnecessary), and I fully agree with your feature request. Assuming that all external processors are stereo in/stereo out is incorrect and should be remedied, especially now, when so many people are using interfaces that only have 2 channels to play with in the first place.

So. If the devs don't think this is worthy of their attention, or even if they do, it will take them time to implement it, I think I may have a workaround for people like us who don't like it: use Aux tracks.

You can make multiple Aux tracks with the inputs set to mono left and right.

Try creating 2 Aux tracks, putting the plug-in on Aux 1 and setting the inputs of the Aux tracks to Aux 1 left and Aux 1 right. Then use hard panned Sends from your tracks to Aux 1, depending on which processor you want to use. They should be returned to Aux 1 Left and Aux 1 Right, which can be routed anywhere you want.

I haven't tried it in practice, but it might help, or something similar might work using a Bus.

It can help to zoom in to the end of the clip you are trying to trim until you get a feel for it. And what Mark said about "hit zones." Drag the width of your track down a bit to make for a larger target, easier to hit.

Sometimes when editing, I like to switch to the Edit Tool rather than relying on the Smart Tool to obey my wishes. I'm editing, so why not use the Edit Tool? It can eliminate ambiguity. Those other tools are on there for a reason.

Really, Mark? What constructive purpose does it serve to say that so bluntly after the guy's been told where to find what he's looking for?

I put he chances that the bakers are going to read what he said and then try to convince their bosses that what Cakewalk really needs in order to take off is a bundling agreement with a piano and/or organ VSTi developer (those being highly personal choices in the first place) at somewhere less than the chances of the Lyrics View getting a major makeover.

He's not wrong, it would be a "great feature," to him. But I think that if he combs through the Freeware Instruments thread or even just tries the ones I suggested he'll end up an even happier Fred than if Cakewalk came with a piano or organ.

Maybe they can get Blondie to play "Rapture."

Have you heard the National Lampoon Radio Hour tribute where they recreate the bit using '70's band names with a rock promoter and a venue manager? Predictably, The Who are on first....

More than just views. Huh. I was going by the Ref. Guide, but it seems like there's more to know.

I just took another crack at Workspaces, with....undesired results.

What I wanted to create was a Workspace for mixing on my laptop, so a single screen paradigm where the Multidock dominates the lower half of the screen with just enough Track view to see where I am in the piece. Only Control Bar modules that matter to mixing. No synth rack, no help.

So I set all that up, saved the Workspace, exited, called up a template, applied the workspace, and blooey, it looked nothing like my screen did when I saved it, my Browser and Inspector were suddenly expanded, Track View dominated the screen, and the Console was scrunched down at the bottom. It had exactly the opposite effect I wanted, which is to say that when I called my template up, everything was orderly and ready to start work, but after I applied my custom workspace, I would have had to undo a bunch of clutter to get it to look like I wanted.

For a thing that's supposed to provide convenience, it frankly takes less trouble to just make everything look like I want and save it as a template. At the moment, it strikes me as programming a robotic arm to move my desk chair to the exact spot that I want as opposed to just grabbing the back of the chair and moving it myself.

Maybe my expectations are off-base, but if so, what is this feature for?

Sorry for the thread hijack, I should have tried experimenting with the Toolbar state while I was at it.

On 7/14/2020 at 3:14 PM, John Ward said:

The VSTs I've downloaded so far have been 32 bit. Should I have downloaded the 64s?

Yes, yes, 1000X yes. From this point forward, if I were you I would check to make sure that any plug-ins you acquire are in the 64-bit format. And don't start any projects using old 32-bit plug-ins.

BTW, re-reading this thread, I love the "Who's On First" bit that I play the Lou Costello role in with scook and others taking the Bud Abbott part.

On 7/15/2020 at 5:54 AM, Paul Bush said:

this should be simple

I agree wholeheartedly and am surprised that it's not. Also glad to be forewarned.

18 hours ago, chuckebaby said:

I think you can set up a workspace or a screenset to use a default smart tool.

Even the guy making the suggestion isn't 100% sure which one it is.?‍♂️

Maybe I'll change my handle to "Workspace Screenset" because those are the scariest two words in all of Cakewalkery. Like "Keyser Sose" in The Usual Suspects. Well, maybe not as scary as "Drum Map."

Seriously, I would really like to get better at Workspaces, because I know how useful they can potentially be for me. But I think the last time I tried it exposed a bug, which was later fixed, and I haven't goten back to them since.

I finally sorted out the difference between the two; screensets are just saving whatever state your views are in when you saved it in the various slots (right?). Although you can copy those between two open projects. So I guess if you had your Tool set to the Edit tool, that would be part of a Screenset. But it seems like using screensets across multiple projects is a hassle.

Workspaces are more heavy duty, they let you streamline the interface and environment, optimize it for single screen workflow vs. dual monitor, specific tasks such as tracking vs. mixing, etc. They work across whatever project you choose to use them with.

Sampletank 4 Free CS for an excellent piano and CollaB3 (and Martinic Model V and Model F) for organ(s) and you have it covered and then some.

15 hours ago, Fred JEAN-THEODORE said:

Free SI-Piano / Si-Organ vsti

In the meantime, there are many 3rd-party freeware instruments of that type available. I just posted a link to CollaB3, a Hammond B3 clone that is free with submission of a valid email address,

I'm really pleased to be able to bump the thread with that rarest of creatures, a freeware Hammond B3 emulation that comes in 64-bit form. It's specially issued by Sampleson and other sponsors to be of help to musicians who are shut in due to the big health crisis:

https://sampleson.com/collab3-free-tonewheel-organ.html

I also somehow stumbled across a company called Fanan Team Pro who make some virtual instruments including Stringya,  a string machine, and Clarinetica, an "ethnic clarinet instrument" that have UI's that must be seen to be believed. Not since Terry West have I seen such apparent attempts to emulate the slot machines at an off-the-Strip Las Vegas casino. Check them out if you're into unintentionally weird virtual instruments. The string machine has a 3-band "Trance Gate" as one of its built in effects. So if you've ever yearned for a trance gate in your string machine, they have you covered.

It sounds like the OP is starting with a download of CbB?

The thrust of Maxim's post is kinda odd, as if the only plug-ins there are are ones that either currently ship with Cakewalk or once shipped with SONAR. TTS-1 has very little in common with Square I, TTS-1 is a GM ROMpler and Square I is a subtractive synth. Maxim doesn't want to use the ROMpler, so the next best thing is Square I?

My standard recommendation for people who are tired of TTS-1 is first to try the secondary sounds in it, then plunk down $14.99 for a 2-seat license for Xpand!2, which is, as of now, the  best deal in software arrangers, IMO. If only there were still software engineers around at SONiVAIR to give it a scalable UI....

Y'know, I know of this cool guy who collects once proud, now dead in the water MI brands.?If he could get Jordan on loan from Fishman....

17 minutes ago, StudioNSFW said:

Intonating on the third fret makes sense to me. There ain't no money past the 5th fret anyway.

As long as I'm fretting (pun intended) about this stuff myself, there probably ain't no money on or below it either.?

(which is fine by me)

Yes, those are actually cleaning rods for gas welding nozzles. I've gone through 2 sets of them. That's why I work from the underside now. ?

I think I have at least 4 part-o-casters and 3 part-o-basses in various states of completion at the moment. Also a neck that I refretted that I botched and need to re-refret because I used a 9.5" radius fretting caul and didn't realize the fretboard radius was actually 12". I seated them with cyanoacrylate, so I have to heat them up to get them out. The neck is from a Behringer Strat-alike, which are actually one of my favorite cheapocasters. I have 3 of them, one of which has a built-in USB interface. ?I haven't tried it with CbB yet.

Wow, Tezza, you are my brotha from anotha motha when it comes to setup advice.

Yes, I am a fiend for low nut slots. Not sure why the zero fret never really took off, it pretty much takes care of it. Old Hofners had them.

It's not just intonation for me, I have the Tony Iommi handicap of two damaged fingertips (not as bad as Tony), one of which is my pinky, so if I am to play 1st fret chords, I have to have the lowest possible action down there. I usually just pop the nut out and file the bottom of it rather than file individual slots. Nut slot files are, for some reason, pretty pricey.

I first set intonation at the 12th fret and then fine tune it at the 17th fret. As you say, in a noisy rock band, it didn't make so much difference, but go direct, and start working in the Piano Roll, and it grates after a while. While composing/mixing with the DAW, I will loop the piece hundreds of times, and if it's not in tune, it will bother me.

So this video is really "how to compensate for a high factory nut?" Not surprising. I think people still don't realize that guitars come from the factory with a conservatively high "no buzz EVER" setup, because people won't buy an axe that buzzes, and people often try out guitars unplugged in noisy stores.

I've made plenty of friends' Squiers and ?casters play and sound so much better just by raising the pickups and dropping the action a little. Pickup height makes a BIG difference in tone and power output. Get that Strat bridge pickup closer to the strings and it will start to roar and drive the front end of your amp better. Keep it 1/8"-1/16" away to avoid the dreaded string pull.

Yeah, watched the video with good ol' Jason there, I only wish that whatever crisis befell the company, that he could have stayed around long enough to finish a manual for Vocalizer Pro. And no, I have no personal knowledge, but I've worked at companies like that. As soon as all the code was in a state where it wasn't crashing, they canned everyone and sold the brand.

He seems like a nice enough bloke, and sharp, and I'm sure he hit the ground running.

Hmm, curiosity got the best of me, looks like he did. Wow, worked at SONIVOX for 11 years before their Death Star blew up, that's an eternity in the software or MI world:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonrjordan

And I was right, looks like he left right around the time that Vocalizer Pro shipped. He says that he worked on Tony Colman Drums and that's one of the last new ones I remember coming out of SONIVOX.

I guess there's a cluster of music software companies around Boston due to the Berklee/MIT convergence?

7 minutes ago, Matthew Carr said:

Intriguing... what did you do?

I faced directly into the windstorm of "common wisdom" and peed into it by turning Intel SpeedStep on in my BIOS. Every compendium of tuning tips says over and over again "TurboBoost good, SpeedStep bad." And if you look at the description of what SpeedStep is supposed to be doing, yes it looks like something that's there to throttle your CPU cores. But apparently in practice, at least in Dell's implementation, it ain't that way as long as you have power plans like mine that tell the system to leave the CPU at 100% all the time.

So my Optiplex went from idling at 3.4GHz to 3.7GHz, and the cores don't budge, according to HWINFO64.

Even with the Latitude E6410, whose core speeds bounce around no matter what power plan I try to enforce on it, when I enabled SpeedStep, at least they started bouncing higher than the baseline processor speed, according to HWINFO64. And when I do something demanding, they rally like good soldiers and ramp up. I'm planning on rewarding the E6410 with a processor upgrade to a quad-core i7, which should be a nice upgrade from the dual-core i5 she has now. Thing is, it's scooting along so nice now, there's really no need at the moment, other than my impulse to hot rod.

6 hours ago, Timothy Connelly said:

i7 3770 still seems to have a couple of years of life left in it.

I sure hope mine does!

Now that you've decided to cruise for a while longer with your aging, but still viable workhorse, you're in my territory, so pull up a chair. I have a few tricks for you to try for your next session, that if you're not aware of them, might make it so that you don't have to tiptoe once you get into double-digit tracks. If you are aware of them, maybe someone else will benefit.

I notice that you said your audio drive is a spinner? I would remedy that, unless it's something really quick like a WD Blue with a lot of its own cache. First trick: set the project up so that it records to your SSD system drive and see if you notice a difference. Cakewalk does a lot of disk I/O, as it streams every non-archived piece of audio in a project, even muted take lanes and entire tracks. My guess is that by the time your track count is up in the teens, your disk I/O is getting heavy. Do you do all your tracking, then edit and comp? That's the way I do it, and if you do, you wind up with a large number of audio files streaming away, especially with multi-mic'd instruments like drum kits. Multiple takes on a drum kit that has 6 mics on it? Yikes.

Next trick, go into your Windows 10 Security settings and tell Defender to exclude certain folders from realtime scanning. The most important is your Cakewalk Projects folder, which is where your projects' audio is written to and streams from, but I also include the Cakewalk program directory, my plug-ins folders (including VST3), samples folders, anything to do with Cakewalk. With all that disk reading, it's no good to have Defender scanning our recorded audio files for malware every time we hit Play or Record.

Since your system was pre-configured, and you probably know how anyway, you know to set your power plan for 100% max/100% min, but with the advent of Windows 10, it's weird, but I've found that my customizing settings can get mysteriously set back to the default after a few updates. I make the rounds and check to make sure that one or more of these hasn't been set to the default.

Finally, and this may be controversial, but you read what I said about my Optiplex. I turned SpeedStep on in the BIOS and squeezed a little more speed from the processor. Go through your BIOS and see if there is anything that may not be optimized, or may have once been but got switched.

(Caveat: Dells are....different. They deliberately lock them down so that you can't overclock them in the traditional sense, many OEM drivers will kick you out of their installer and tell you to get the Dell driver, etc. (there is a workaround for that). I understand why they do that, it's to prevent "clever" office drones from screwing up their computers, and Dell has a well-earned reputation for supplying solid, reliable office machines. They don't want to tarnish that reputation because some dolt tried to overclock his work Optiplex and melted it down and then lied and blamed it on the computer.

They wind up in the hands of people like me when some middle manager gets computer envy and wants the latest thing because their friend at another company just got a brand new desktop. And we're tasked with trying to squeeze performance out of something that was designed to thwart people like us.)