Starship Krupa

I went and did it again.

Every so often, not often enough it seems, for me to remember how to get myself out of it, I create a MIDI Black Hole. A spot in the Piano Roll from which no sound can ever emanate.

There's a note on the grid in the correct place, I can right click on it to get its properties and there's nothing about it that indicates anything weird. I can delete it and re-enter it and still, no sound. I delete the previous note to make sure it's not the note-off screwing things up. If I nudge the note a little late it will happily sound, but then it will sound too late.

It's a cursed spot on the Piano Roll, a place of no velocity, no note value, no sound, just silence. It sucks sound in and none comes out.

But aha! This time I think to look in the Event List, and yes! It shows that in addition to the note I have entered, there is also a Zero Zero at that same start time, appearing right before it in the list. Apparently in the MIDI spec, in the event of such a collision, it's like a 4-way stop, the first note there wins.

So I zoom and I zoom and sure enough, eventually there's a little speck visible at the leading edge of my non-playing note. I delete this and all is normal and no more MIDI Black Hole on my Piano Roll.

I post the above for the amusement and education of anyone who has suffered from the same phenomenon or may in the future.

Also: combing zero-length (and/or zero velocity) notes out of a project seems like a useful task for a CAL script. Does anyone know of such a script or where I might look for one?

Or maybe there's already an easier way to ferret them out than by poring over the Event List, then zooming in and zapping them?

Okay, sorry, it happened again, I misunderstood. I fully agree that using lanes that way is logical when we're talking multi-timbral instruments or the same instrument playing different parts. What I was referring to was an audio track with multiple takes.

That's why I asked "MIDI or audio."

The way I do it is with a single instrument track with multiple MIDI tracks feeding it, but I haven't gotten as far as trying crossfades with that method.

Where I trip up when discussing Lanes with people is that they work differently, but more importantly, as in your case, the goals can be different, when the medium is MIDI rather than audio.

When you said "record," I assumed audio, but of course one records MIDI as well.

How does the Trackman Marble play with the ZX81?🤣

I have a ZX81 down in the basement, my first computer, built from a kit.

Here's my review of The Fantastic Music Machine for InfoWorld, December 19, 1983.

Guess I go back 36 years with computer music software. Hadn't thought of it that way.

On 3/3/2019 at 1:37 AM, Johnbee58 said:

"Amish rake fight".  I like that!🤣

It's a vivid image, isn't it? Hats falling off, white shirts getting muddied....

A couple of people from a tightly-knit supportive nonviolent community coming to blows over a common task. I think it describes forum flareups pretty well.

"Jebediah and Ezekiel are at it again out by the silo! Someone take the scriptures out there and talk some sense into them!"

Regarding Bark of Dog, you can still download Bark of Dog I from Boz' site, and the installer will install the ProChannel module.

Mark, was this streaming from a rust drive?

12 hours ago, mettelus said:

FWIW, Jim built Noel a machine a few years back

That is worth a great deal, as it means that the actual code that makes up Cakewalk was probably written or at least tested and debugged on that system.

Those of us who roll our own tend to be people who are okay with the possibility of spending hours on getting all the components optimized and working together correctly. To me, it's actually part of the fun, believe it or not. All of my computers are ones that my former Silicon Valley cronies have given me for free as hand-me-downs. They were being tossed out or sold for peanuts at work because some bigwig wanted the latest impressive thing or they stopped booting properly and were deemed to old to bother with fixing. So hey, free i7 system for me! Free i5 notebook, free Core 2 Quad as secondary shop system. Others I give away.

I've put faster processors in them, Firewire cards where need be, upgraded them to Windows 10, SSD's, etc. Sometimes I've spent entire days reinstalling the OS, one OS upgrade kinda hosed my Cakewalk setup, but fixing all this taught me a lot more about Windows 10 and Cakewalk.

In the PC world, there's a reason people are willing to pay a premium to buy prepackaged systems from Apple, Dell, HP, Acer, whomever. It's because the integration of all the components has already been taken care of. They ensure that everything works together.

Jim and others like him do the same thing, but aimed toward a specialized use.

The cutting edge fast systems from the biggies tend to be aimed at gamers. Their other ones are aimed at long term stability at the expense of speed and upgradeability and versatility. My Dell's BIOS won't let me overclock the CPU or drop in a faster chip. It was made to run Office really well and make Skype calls and watch Netflix and then be handed down to do homework on. The idea of rendering multimedia files never entered into it.

I put a faster graphics card in it, set the processor to never spin down, a Firewire card, all this stuff. If I don't bend the case cover a little, it'll rattle from the fans being on all the time and you'll hear it in my vocal takes. But it was free and it runs Cakewalk and Vegas like a bat out of hell. It's a little like a Millennium Falcon to me.

If you want a quiet, reliable, fast DAW computer, get one from Jim or another audio-oriented integrator. Jim is well-vetted by Cakewalk users.

Okay, I think I see. It looks like you've maybe sometimes been using Take Lanes to record different elements that you want to hear simultaneously.

If you're working with different musical elements that you want to have playing at the same time, that's not really what lanes are for. Lanes are where different takes (or versions) of the same thing go so that you can cut and stitch them all together to make one finished track.

For instance, I have a Snare track, and I could have 3 Take Lanes, all with clips of stuff I'm stitching together to make my eventual Snare track. Those clips in my case have the recorded audio of my own drum performances, and in the future if I start working with this stuff they could also be audio loops or samples. But I don't have things in there that aren't the snare track, I don't put in synth stuff or hi hat or whatever. Those belong in other Tracks of their own.

If you want to work with several different things that are playing at once, take your clips and drag them to their own new Tracks. That's the paradigm difference. Lanes are a workspace where you have the elements of whatever is going to make up a finished Track (in the form of Clips). Once that track (and the other tracks in the project) is assembled, you proceed to the mixing process.

Used as intended, there's rarely a time when you'd want to hear overlapping sounds in Take Lanes.* That's why the Comp Tool automatically mutes the other lanes. It's because in normal use, you'd not want to be hearing them. It's set up so that the clip that you're working with is the one that plays, and if you want to hear the stuff in the other lanes, it's probably time to give them their own tracks.

While tracking, you might record two takes of rhythm guitar or lead vocal that sound great and want to use both in the final track, but in order to do that, the practice is that once you've decided on it, to take one of the clips and move it to its own track. That way, everything can be panned, have its level adjusted, etc.

*As a mixing engineer, I sometimes,as a joke, will unmute all 12 take lanes of the lead vocal and then Solo the track so that it sounds like Satan's Barbershop Quartet, but then I'm kind of odd. Normal people don't act like that.

Whatever happened to the comedy genius that was @Steev?

Amidst all his SOUND AND FURY he had some good information, caused me to update my information on the price:performance ratio of AMD processors for audio and video work.

That's my one tidbit: yes, an 8th generation i7 processor will haul your donkey around, but don't neglect the AMD Ryzen stuff.

John and John, c'mon, no need to get into an Amish rakefight over how people answer some dude's questions about an old soundcard and old version of Sonar.

Viewed from the window of a space liner returning from a 3-year visit to Mars, does it seem significant whether some guy with a joke handle like "Starship Krupa" takes this guy's efforts seriously?

And what, pray tell, would someone stand to gain by pretending to have an issue with Sonar X3e on a computer that has an Audigy card? To go to all the trouble of registering a new Bandlab account and then coming up with a fake .INI file and all that?

I already tossed my best advice: lose both the antique shoot-em-up card and Ye Olde Sonare X3e.

One BIG thing: an old PCI card like that could possibly be affecting things on the bus, so when I said "pull it," I meant physically remove it from its slot and enable the onboard sound device. Don't just leave it in and then keep trying other things. If you're testing another interface, you don't need the card in there anyway, so simplify things as much as possible.

If you mean the Q&A subforum, no, it doesn't seem to be very active.

Please give some more context.

When you do this, have you recorded multiple audio takes, or multiple MIDI takes, or assembled an arrangement from loops, or what?

Do you have clips in groups?

My understanding of the way the Comping tool is supposed to work in this mode is that whatever you've selected with it becomes unmuted and everything else gets muted. So it should be a matter of deselecting whatever clip(s) you accidentally selected.

I just tried it a bit and the selections seem to respond to Ctrl+Z, so give that a try.

4 hours ago, user6851820567124302 said:

If the sound card with Sonar worked OK 'til a few months, must be a solution.

The thing is, we can't look at just the two of them in isolation.

A computer system is so complex, and a DAW is one of the most demanding uses a personal computer can be put to, especially from a system integration standpoint.

You could have installed some software, or Microsoft could have pushed out an update or a new driver for some bit of hardware on your system that broke it.

Those of us who run trailing edge hardware (and I do it, my dear FP10's are 15 years old, they date back to the Windows XP days, will have the day come when the drivers for our stuff will just stop working.

At least try pulling the Audigy out just as a test. If things start working again, you've narrowed it down and can start working on getting your Audigy to cooperate.

2 hours ago, Johnbee58 said:

While I agree with the assessment, the attitude is uncalled for.

😐

Aw, John, no attitude meant other than "c'mon, man, it's time to dump that stuff so we can get you going." Leavened with a dollop of my usual silliness.

I've learned to live with the idea that some people want to stick with an older, unsupported program because they have it all set up and functioning in a working studio and they depend on it and don't want to mess with it. Maybe they use the extra load time to do mic checks.

The people who believe that freeware licensing is part of a conspiracy to rob us of our precious bodily fluids are dealt with in other ways.😉

I was once a professional support technician for a software company, and a good one (so I was told by my supervisors and by the people whose systems I rescued), and my bosses and leads were very good at what they did and taught me some very good lessons and practices that I have been able to apply to other disciplines as my career has continued its zig-zag path. One thing that most software support people will do to ease the way to the user's system becoming functional again is get them on the most recent build possible as soon as possible.

Keeping old installations and old revisions of software running is a systems administration no-no. The further away you get from current patch level, the likelier you are to have something go badly wrong, and the harder it will be to set it right when it does. Oh, these Pro Tools studios that are still on Pro Tools 9 and whatever version of MacOS you have to stay on to be able to run it. 🤦‍♀️ They'll get to the point where Apple won't give them an upgrade path for the OS, and if one component fails, that's it. Sitting on a pile of scrap.

This is why I am often one of the first (along with abacab and Chuck E., I notice, good on ya, lads) to pop into these "my Sonar X1 o nooo" threads to remind the participants that there is a supported version of the software available for free. They are attempting to get a piece of software to function that, new features and performance enhancements aside, is like 75 months behind Cakewalk on bug fixes. If that 2013 date is correct, there are people today with college degrees who were in middle school when Sonar X3e was on the shelves.

And no lie, I get better results with WASAPI or ASIO4ALL through a Realtek chip than I did with the last SB Live I ran. The drivers have been the Achilles heel for that product line since the beginning, over 20 years ago.

Oh man, heartbreak city on the Soundblaster. I'd rather pull the thing out and use ASIO4ALL with the Realtek chip. At least my audio wouldn't be needlessly resampled to 48K and back no matter what the settings.

The one thing I have the Soundblaster Live to thank for is that back around 2002 or so in their heyday I couldn't figure out why the DAT transfers I was doing with mine lacked something, so I scoured Usenet and found out about bit perfect digital audio. I went out and bought a $14 sound card that had the almighty CMedia CMi 8738 chip on it and a header for the S/PDIF

The first DAT transfer I did with the resulting kluge, the master tape of my girlfriend's album, literally brought me to tears due to the fact that she was away when I did it and when I played it back it sounded like she was in the room with me. When she came home I played it for her and she started crying because it took her back to the time of recording the album. I felt like we were in a mad scientist movie where the characters invent a device to transfer emotions from person to person.

So the messed up design of the SB Live turned me on to my own sensitivity to phase smearing or group delay or whatever it is that suffers when resampling algorithms turn sour.

I said it before: you have a nice, capable system. Running the antique version of the DAW through a Soundblaster Live (sorry "Audigy") gaming card, it's like you've got bald tires on your Porsche and are trying to find a way for it not to go out of control in the corners.

KeepFlailing=0

UninstallSonarX3e=1

DownloadBandLabAssistant=1

InstallCakewalk=1

InstallSonarVST64s=1

Compose6851820567124302Overture=1

Dump Sonar 3Xe for heaven's sake!

Every minute you spend farting around trying to get it to work now that you can use Cakewalk by Bandlab for free is wasted time unless you're on one of those TV shows where you live in primitive conditions in order to win a prize.

"So, user6851820567124302, how is your project to attempt to use the technology of the early '10's to create orchestral music on a computer coming along?"

You have Miroslav 2 and a 3.5GH i7 with 24GB of RAM to run your DAW on, why are you insulting them by using a DAW from 6 years ago?

If your system were working fine and you didn't want to touch it, I'd get it, or if it cost a lot to upgrade to Cakewalk, I'd get it, but your system is hosed and you're trying to get the obsolete version of the program to work?

Don't do that, that's a waste of time and computer resources! Throw Cakewalk on there and you can even get help from Bandlab staff. And it's a better program.

There is the table on this page, if you scroll down to the bottom.

It's more descriptive than the names at least.

For instance:

"MIDI Tracks 1, 11, 21...Background: Background color of all MIDI tracks that end in the number “1” (1, 11, 21, etc.)"

2 hours ago, Tiger The Frog said:

Is there an update to Big Bang?

Not that I know of, I only have the three Orchestral Companions. They are all updated to v1.4.

@Tiger The Frog, I'm with you here. I was being conservative and just assumed that these other libraries with their full-featured players could do anything that the Orchestral Companions could do. I'm happy to stand corrected.

Anyone who uses orchestral samples should drop the $15. Tiger is correct about the almost total lack of support, but I will say that they did issue an update and after that they became

And thanks for all the tips and links to making better use of these.

abacab is right, the decision is whether or not you already have Garritan or some other orchestral library. If you do, pass on them. If you don't, jump on them like a trampoline, because you'd spend $15 at a burger joint and the samples are really good.

I think I paid $10 for the strings and $20 each for the other 2 and it was money well spent. The downside is indeed the player, complete with missing mod wheel swell function. Why do they still advertise it after so many of us have pointed out that it's not implemented?

2 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

somebody famous used one (Linda Ronstadt, maybe) and after that everybody had to have one

Yes! Although I was just in high school, I remember exactly the moment they went viral, it was a very widely read feature in Rolling Stone, and she talked about how she and Asher put it all over her latest record. Don't remember which one that was. Would have been in the heyday of Yacht Rock. Given the times, those potted modules inside probably contained Peruvian marching powder.🤣

The other vocalist I remember talking them up was, of all people, Wayne County, who mentioned it in Creem, not surprisingly, and s/he actually described the effects in more detail. Said that it created a "sonic hologram" of the lead vocal and that you couldn't own one, you could only rent one.

This was all like reading about some wonderful far-off world where wizard people got to work with amazing devices and create magical sound sculptures. Who knew that when I knocked on the door the Mighty Oz would show me the hand, but that 30 years later it would be sitting right in my dining room.🤘

As a MeldaMoonie, it's hard to admit that track duty has lately shifted from MEqualizer and MModernCompressor to the QuadcurveEQ and the ProChannel compressors, but still, MAutoAlign is in every project on the drum overheads. When I hit that "analyze" button and sit back and hear my drum mix double or triple in depth, it's always a happy moment.

Awful.

Good to get more information, though. But it sounds like the problem is perhaps more project-specific.

The next things to check out for troubleshooting purposes are:

Do other projects open successfully? If you switch the audio driver to WASAPI or WDM does it behave any differently? If you open the project in Safe Mode (hold the Shift key) what happens?

It is possible that you are using a plug-in that is not playing nice. By this I mean that it's been fine up to this time, but as you've been fine-tuning your mix, you maybe turned a knob to the point where the plug-in crashes and takes Cakewalk with it. It's just one possibility. There are hundreds more.

Try these things are report back.

9 hours ago, klbailey3 said:

I have the same issue..sucks! someone please help!

Have you tried doing the same things the OP did? Checking the motherboard bios and video card and chipset drivers?

It may seem weird sometimes, especially when it worked one day and not the next, but this DAW work that we do is just about the most demanding work that you can put computer hardware to, and it will reveal any little issue, so check everything hardware and driver related first. At the worst, you'll wind up with the latest drivers for everything.