Starship Krupa

Thank you, Mal and Larry. This is what I meant. I didn't want folks to think it was a matter of just flipping a switch. You guys both researched it, one of you came to the conclusion that it wasn't even worth the hassle. 👍 Larry, that procedure looks like the one I followed, too. A lot of command line typing from an elevated prompt? Some people will weigh the cost:benefit ratio and come to the conclusion that Larry and I did: why not enable this feature that gives me more control over my Windows 10 system? Some people will not want to bother or believe it to be a risk. I'm a hobbyist with 3 computers that all run Cakewalk. If I hose one of them, no biggie. I unplug one of the Firepods and plug it into the notebook. But I know there are people on here who depend on their DAW systems for more than just personal enjoyment. Who knows, Microsoft will probably disable our access to GPSEC in a future update anyway. For now, my hard drives sure are a lot quieter without Windows Defender constantly sifting through everything on them to make sure my synth presets aren't infected with viruses. And I can still run Defender as an ad hoc scanner. Feels good to use my computer the way I like to.

If you go this route, you can even do it via the site that gives Cakewalk by BandLab its name, as export/upload of stems and mixes directly to your BandLab account is now built in to Cakewalk. I haven't tried that workflow out in production yet, only testing. Still doing it like Steve suggests, using Google. I know that the export and upload part goes pretty smoothly (from one of my systems, at least), but I haven't yet had my long-distance collaborator try to pull stems down from BandLab's site to work with them. Once we get it working, I'm hoping that it will make for a more controlled system than how we do it now. We've had the occasional issue with version control, where we lost track (ha ha) of which revision he had sent me. I take care about file naming, him, not so much.

Apologies for apparently coming off as arrogant or secretive. I "bothered" to let people know that it was possible, and suggested they check out how to do it via a common search technique. I didn't think it would be responsible to post a link to a specific recipe as it involves doing things that are deliberately obscured by Microsoft because people can mess up their systems using Group Policy Editor. If you Google how to do it, you'll find a variety of techniques and may decide for yourself which one you feel comfortable with or even whether you want to fiddle with it at all. I mean, if you think I'm lying or something, check it out: Evidence!

Two things: 1. you don't need to be running Windows 10 Pro to be able to turn things on and off with Group Policy Editor. I learned this just recently. Group Policy Editor, along with other old admin tools friends of mine, comes with every installation of Windows 10. It's hidden, you just need to know the recipe to gain access to it. Kinda like the PX-64 and VX-64 in CbB. I shall leave the rest to the Googling pleasure of those who are interested. 2. Whistlekiller, Chris, anyone else who is planning it for the eventuality of running CbB 2020 Build 30 on Windows 8.1 on their trusty Dell Inspiron after global warming has caused sea levels to drown BandLab's server farm....I'll share this trick I used when I was still an IT pro and we were prepping our infrastructure for Y2K. Anyone remember Y2K? Supposed to be a computer holocaust. Right. Anyway, it's called Setting Your System's Real-Time Clock To The Wrong Date. Yes! To CbB running on a computer that never sees the internet, it can always be Groundhog Day! Or any other day that CbB thinks is within its valid licensing period. Sleep well tonight, your ground uncertain no more.

I thank the BandLab people, and I also thank the people who bought licenses in the commercial software days when it was called Sonar, 'cause their licensing fees funded the development all those years. My first thoughts when I heard about the Gibson announcement were "what a shame, what a drag for the user base," and I don't think it could have worked out better for everyone, the user base has gotten some tight code in the past year in the upgrades, an expanded user base, a future for the platform, a company who seem to respect the brands they acquire. CbB came along just when I was ready to "graduate" to a top-of-the-line DAW with more features than the alternative one I had been using. So I, like the OP, feel charmed. It's been almost a year and there are whole areas of the program that I haven't even touched yet because it's so deep and feature-rich.

And it's not only the first time I launch Plug-In Manager, when I do operations like enabling or disabling plug-ins and it rebuilds the list of disabled or enabled plug-ins, it's now instantaneous where it used to take a while.

Don't I know it, no matter what I do, if I run a web browser on a computer, I will at some point find that the Adobe Updater Service has started up once again, along with its insidious buddies, the Apple Updater and all the iTunes and iPod/iPhone helpers. Kept disabling them in Services, CCleaner, Autoruns, whatever. I finally put on my pith helmet and made my way deep into the recesses of Task Scheduler, where I found the Adobe services, the Google Crash Handler, the Apple Updater, all those sniveling little creeps hanging out not only waiting to start in the wee hours of the morning, but I learned that at some point in the 16 or so years since my certification lapsed, Task Scheduler had gained much wider ability to launch tasks based on event monitoring, such as another process terminating, which is why I'd wind up playing Whack-A-Mole with them: iPod Service was set to launch upon shutdown of iTunes Handler, which was set to launch on shutdown of Apple Updater, which was.... So I sometimes use a utility called Process Lasso. Steev, if he knows about it, probably loathes the very fact of its existence, and will tell me that my occasional use of it is one of the reasons that Cakewalk (besides insufficient RAM, no SSD, not enough Waves plug-ins, and an overall lack of Focusrite) and my system in general wasn't running so hot when I first upgraded it to Windows 10. It's the antithesis of the "DUDE!!! don't touch anything!!! don't even point to it!!! Microsoft needs to tune your system via TELEMETRY!!!" school of thought. Process Lasso allows the user to do some nifty things like set Priority for certain processes and make that stick (for when you're running Process Lasso), as well as designate certain processes to be terminated on sight. So for instance, I can set cakewalk.exe to Above Normal and have it be that way whenever Process Lasso is running. You can set Priority in Task Manager of course, but that only persists until you terminate that session of the program. I have Process Lasso set to kill all of the Apple crap while I'm doing DAW work and one day I checked its log and witnessed the tale of what had been an epic battle between Process Lasso and Apple Updater. Apple Updater I guess had decided that this time it wasn't going to stay down, and every 20 milliseconds it would relaunch, and in the next millisecond, Process Lasso would send it back to computer heaven. I think it went on for minutes, which when we're talking milliseconds, is a good long battle. Of course, Process Lasso was not going to give up either, and finally Apple Updater ran out of triggers or whatever kept starting it back up. At the moment my system is practically snoozing since I turned off Windows Defender's realtime monitoring. I just looked at Task Manager's Performance display and all 3 disks showed 0% activity while I'm typing away in my browser. It's nice to have a computer that understands the meaning of "idle" again.

Matthew, this is such a great theme that it has caused me to, at least for now, abandon work on my own theme. Yours is like going to theme school. I need to stop and study it before I go any further.

Tracking at 24/44.1 these days. For a while I was recording at 88.2 and mixing to 44.1. I think I decided that it wasn't worth it for the type of music that I do at this point.

I will speak for the n00bz here and mention that while the online documentation is pretty good as documentation goes, there are some areas/pages that need work. I'm especially thinking of this one. Just compare the descriptions of Comping mode and Overwrite mode and you'll see what I mean. Choosing the wrong Recording Mode options can get you into trouble, especially if you choose Overwrite (aka The Mode That Must Not Be Named). IMO, there should also be a more in-depth explanation of why the user should choose one mode over the other and what results they will get. (BTW, if you all know of a Craig article or TOP post that explains the options better, please give me a link) For sure the old site is a treasure chest of information about how to use Cakewalk, and I use it all the time, being Google-savvy. I know there is a way that you can make a form with a site search, and such a thing would be a very handy thing to have stickied here. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about and one or more know how to roll one up, where there's a search bar you put in your terms and everything? We could make one for TOP. All it does is search with that syntax that David typed out, but instead of having to type it all out, you just put your search terms in the bar and hit Enter. (TOP="The Old Place")

This seemed like the most-requested, longest-awaited feature over at the old forum. The devs not only made an indicator, but a multipurpose button, which is a "wow."

I'm assuming you mean the deal where you have a folder on one or more systems that is automatically backed up to the cloud? Like Dropbox? I was into it for a while around the time Dropbox first came out with it, thought it was cool that my files were showing up on all my different systems, but these days I find myself turning off the local sync part of the services and just using them on an ad hoc basis, where I drag and drop files to the server, and then if I want them, I download them. Having a folder on all these different computers that stays in sync seems kind of meh. I like the Google Docs way of doing it where the app itself is browser based and if I want to work on it, I can do so from any computer that can access the site. This works well in situations like mine where I have multiple computers at home, for basic office suite type apps. I haven't messed with it much, but I guess BandLab's DAW is like this too. Where the cloud storage services shine for me these days is for collaboration. Throwing rough mixes or stems up on MEGA or Box or Google Drive for transfer is great. If BandLab wind up positioning themselves as the go-to site for musicians who want to collaborate, I think that would be a good place to be.

I didn't know that, but I have all of my Windows systems set to log in with local accounts, not Microsoft accounts, and I turn off OneDrive, so it's probably not been happening. I either do it manually or have command line scripts that I run before DAW sessions that shut down all of my cloud storage services (along with crap like iPod Service and iTunes Helper and Adobe Updater and all that) before I start DAW sessions, so again, no Avid iCloud upload. I export his stems and put them in a folder on Google Drive and he imports them into Pro Tools. I guess to you his way of doing it is "stupid," but it gets the job done. Also, we use FLAC, not WAV, for faster file transfer.

Dudicle, duderino, dudecahedron, I said nothing about telemetry or conspiracies or any of that. I agree that Windows Offender acts like most other virus protection rackets except that without special knowledge, you're not allowed to turn it off. My tongue is somewhat in my cheek, but I consider a program that runs on my system without my permission that I can't disable and that slows everything down, nervously scanning my sample libraries while my DAW loads them to make sure that they don't contain viruses, to be malware. It impedes the usefulness of my computer while doing nothing useful whatsoever. Nothing useful for me, anyway. I'm sure that it was The Answer for people who can't handle downloading and configuring AVG Free and Malwarebytes. And there you have it right in a nutshell. They finally caved to the "average user's" inability not to click on every piece of crap that someone forwards to their inbox. My protection against viruses and trojans and hijacks and ransomware since I first started using computers has always revolved around "being smart about not running things that stand a chance of infecting my system." I don't click on random things that people send me via email, I scan things I download on an ad hoc basis, and I schedule system scans to run when I'm asleep. The last never finds anything wrong. I don't like being forced to run a program that inflicts needless loads on my CPU and disk access just because other people lack computer smarts. It's fine, there's still a way to turn it off if you know what to do.

Thank you, gentlemen! Come on baby, let's heal the splits.... Not sure what the logic is behind it, with my workflow it has resulted in automatically comped tracks containing my first take up to a string of flubs! That is until I sort everything out. I do think the documentation page could be clearer on what the user will get with the various options selected, and which ones should be selected for various workflow styles. Obviously, not everyone works and thinks in the same way. It might benefit me to work more like Grem and break my songs down into smaller pieces rather than try for full length takes. It's probably just that I started with cassette 4-tracks 30 years ago and am only now learning other ways. I think of a song as something that I play all the way through, and isn't it nice that we have so much better ways of chopping up different takes and stitching them together. It doesn't occur to me to record the verse part as many times as I need to until I get the take that does it for me, then the bridge 10 times until I nail it, then the chorus, etc. and comp all the best takes together. But there's no reason it shouldn't. After this long discussion and my own ongoing testing of different modes and options, I'm curious as to who uses Overwrite mode, and what their workflow is. My own experience with it was sort of like the ending to Avengers: Infinity Wars.

You can only become an EMT of recording once you've learned the lexicon. I'm also looking forward to the influx of new users with new issues that the wise oldtimers can help whoop.

No. I must admit to surprise that with access to the old forum and its many posts explaining it, there are still some who don't understand that Cakewalk is a standalone program, just as Sonar always was. Sonar had integration with various online platforms, Cakewalk by BandLab added integration with BandLab. You may use these features or not. The features for using it with BandLab are, not surprisingly, becoming richer. Just as with Sonar of old, there is a small app that downloads and activates the software. Since you already have a BandLab account, all you need to do is download and install the app from the BandLab site and it can download and install Cakewalk. It works great. Better than Sonar. Enjoy! BTW, mdiemer, you've mentioned before that you've set CbB up just like 8.5. Have you ever posted the recipe for doing that? If you were so inclined, that might be a great kindness for the people who really love their 8.5 and are apprehensive about upgrading.

With use of Resource Monitor, one can find out many things. I'm keeping it running all the time since the Windows 10 switch. Of course, when you disable or mute a plug-in, it doesn't completely remove it from the project, because in the mixing process, we want to be able to instantly turn an effect on and off to compare. The option in Cakewalk to always stream through plug-ins has an effect. As far as Windows Defender goes, it's no longer an issue. I hit it with the registry setting to turn off realtime protection racket, and it worked, and it did improve disk performance, not only with Cakewalk, but across the board with Windows 10. To quote Han Solo, "It was a boring conversation anyway." Just watching the disk activity graphs in Resource Monitor, the difference is stunning. Defender was hitting the system drive constantly. Now I get the thing about the SSD's. You need them to compensate for the realtime protection racket. There's a bunch of other random nonsense that seems to be going on disk-wise, but Defender was the biggest offender.

Ugh, how's this for nastiness. Windows 10 ships with what I consider to be malware. The thing I described earlier about using Resource Monitor to see what Cakewalk and other processes are up to? I tried it on Disk Activity with MsMpEng.exe during a Cakewalk project load, and Windows Defender's realtime protection racket was furiously scanning every plug-in and audio file and synth preset that Cakewalk was loading. You know, to make sure that my Hybrid 3 synth presets and WAV files haven't been infected with malware. Which seals the deal, Windows Defender's realtime protection racket is hereby disabled on all of my Windows 10 systems, 'cause that is BS. Microsoft does not get to decide that every file my DAW loads, including my synth presets, sample libraries, and recorded audio, has to run through their malware checking engine before the DAW can use it. Once again I find that a "virus protection solution" is worse for my computer than the thing it's supposed to be protecting me from. And it's one clever piece of malware, it actually ships as part of the OS itself and can't be disabled without getting into Group Policy Editor or RegEdit.

Wasn't that a hit for The (English) Beat back in the '80's? "Now that you've installed it you must deinstall it, then you do a clean install! Clean install, clean install, clean install!" Before that they had "Mirroring My Hard Drive?"

Thanks, Mark, this is fab. Is the ProChannel the greatest thing to happen to mixing since the invention of the pan pot or what? No, of course it isn't, but it's still pretty fab. 6 months ago I had a friend come over to track some demos, one of my first new projects started fresh in CbB. We were in a hurry and neglected to rig the proper pop screen and wound up with a few plosives on his vocal tracks. Big Godzilla stomps. Since I was so enamoured of the ProChannel and the QuadCurve, I rolled up my sleeves to see what I could come up with and found out just how many of its parameters could be automated, which was basically ALL of them, like if you decide you want to turn the "Gloss" off for one phrase, you can automate that. I wound up killing the plosives rather handily by automating the frequency of the HP to jump up right when they occurred. When I selected my "Erik's Mix View" lens to get my mix on and hit Play, I was delighted to notice the tiny curve display on the collapsed channel strip swoop up and down along with my automation. How cool. I've been thinking about challenging myself to mix a song using no effects but ProChannel modules, maybe even just the ones that ship with CbB (I have CA-2A from the 2016 giveaway and Bark of Dog I from Boz). There is a gate amongst the much-maligned Style Dials.

I've found that to be true, from what I recall, that if Create New Lanes on Overlap is selected, it will put the take in the new lane, however, it will also create a split in the new take just at the previous take's boundaries. And yes, you can delete your aborted takes, but you don't always want to, sometimes you were doing okay before you trainwrecked and want to keep that take for possible comping. I'm assuming I abort a take, but keep it for whatever reason. And I may abort at different (and arbitrary) places at several different points in the process, so each time, I wind up with these splits that are there for no reason. I'm sure there's an easy way to get rid of the splits in the clips that I just haven't learned yet, but I would like to turn off the action of putting in splits where I don't need them to begin with. I'm interested to see if there are other behaviors that will change along with Noel's good news.

Before anyone suggests a Waves plug-in, my favorite reverb is already Waves TrueVerb, so don't even go there.😊 Actually, based on my observations so far, I am inclined to agree with you on this. My test system has a 120G SSD as a system/boot drive, and while it's only a Core 2 Quad, the transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10 did not seem like the drop in performance it did on the main system and the notebook. I've been researching people's experiences with SSHD's as system drives on Windows 10 systems and the verdict is still out for me. What do you think? It looks like they have some kind of adaptive algorithm or some such.

I have said multiple times in this thread that Mixcraft 8.5 has no trouble at with my FP-10's under Windows 10. Transport starts, stops, pauses, records, no hesitation, with projects of similar complexity. I would never, ever have switched to Windows 10 if I had seen any forum mentions anywhere in my extensive Googling that indicated that it wouldn't be able to deal with my FP-10's. Everything I saw indicated that at worst, someone had to install the driver by Run As Administrator before getting theirs to work splendidly. Actually, in my experience with the Windows 10 system that I upgraded the same way months ago, it's been kind of weird to see that older hardware like my Canon scanner and my ancient Radio Shack scale that I could barely get to work in Windows 7 have no problems with Windows 10. Really plug 'n' play. Of course, I have yet to see a single instance of "would you like Windows to search for a driver" to yield a driver, that perfect record has been maintained through Windows 10. Don't anyone fret about the state of my computer's OS installation. I'll get it to work, it will haul arse, and when it does, I'll know how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the trailing edge hardware that I usually have around, and what to steer clear of. I've been taming and tuning Windows boxes for 25 years. Having Cakewalk's transport sit there and pick its nose for a few seconds when I tap the "R" key just means that I don't need to do a boring metronome count-in before I sprint across the carpet to my drum throne to start doing takes. Anyone who's needed to restart between running REAPER or Mixbus and Cakewalk, try this for fun (since I have yet to see anyone but me mention Resource Monitor): before you exit REAPER or Mixbus, go down to Search and type in "Resource Monitor" and run it, and click on the CPU tab. Then under Processes, find mixbus.exe or reaper.exe or whatever, and tick the checkbox next to it. Find as many processes associated with the DAW as you can and check their boxes. Then go down to where it says Associated Modules and click the down arrow to open the list and you can see all the .DLL's that each executable is calling. All your plug-ins, all that stuff. Other processes too. Then when you exit the program, check out how long it takes for all that stuff to disappear from the list. Interesting, eh? Try it with Cakewalk. You can do it with the Disk tab, too, and watch the VST loader suck up all your plug-ins on start-up, then watch as Cakewalk streams your tracks and sample libraries from your disks. If you keep doing this, you will never have to record another note of music as long as you live! Try it! 😂

Yes, I could have gone into Settings at any point over the last 2 weeks and run Fresh Start; that was the first idea anyone (you) replied with (I am one of the few on the Internet who still possess and wield the mystical power of Reading The Preceding Thread). It's also much faster and easier to put on a YouTube video of someone playing Joy Division's "Shadowplay" on drums and turn it up really loud than it is to spend two weeks trying to figure out how to do it myself when both will accomplish the same task of annoying my neighbors. Seriously, if I had a critical path project I would long since have gone down that road. I've just been fiddling with it here and there as I've had time and felt like it. Part of the DAW hobby is messing about with the software and hardware I use. I used to be a professional Windows server engineer, so it's fun to see what they've been up to with this latest version of Windows. I have used the opportunity to familiarize myself with many Windows 10 settings and options. The aforementioned Fresh Start option, for one. Very interesting. My apologies if anyone was under the impression that I have been spending all my free time working on my DAW computer terribly frustrated struggling tearing my hair out or something. My original post was intended primarily as a warning. I just figured I would chime in. My system went sluggo, and now I'm having to sort it out. I was also interested in any Windows 10 tuning tips specific to DAWs in general or Cakewalk in particular. I was not interested in having everyone or even anyone try to remote troubleshoot my specific Windows/Cakewalk installation. Never asked for that. I guess some people just assumed. Now I suppose, some people are assuming that because I haven't said "Hey guess what? I did X and now everything's great!" that my system was still "broken." Well, the thing is, it was never "broken." Read the thread title. Performance suffered. My system was running like crap. It needed tuning. I've been tuning it. There's never been a great "huzzah" moment, probably because that's often how tuning goes. You fire up your tools, see what unnecessary processes are running, find the bad drivers, etc. Resource Monitor! It is the Windows system tuner/troubleshooter's friend. From my viewpoint, this is a general thread about Windows 10, not about one guy needing help with a specific computer problem. I've been reading about things here and there and posting about it as it interested me, NOT saying "oh man, I tried this and my system's STILL broken!" Sorry for any confusion. 🤣 Most of the things I've been messing about with haven't had much effect, but, sorry, that's how it goes with tuning, and it continues to be more so, as it seems that Microsoft and Apple either don't leave much performance on the table or don't give us access any more. My evaluation of my upgraded-not-fresh started system at the 2 week mark is: while Mixcraft seemed to handle it with equanimity, Cakewalk's performance degraded to the point where I had to add buffering in a couple of places in its Preferences. Pulling out my nVidia Quadro Fx 330 and going with the onboard Intel HD4000 graphics seemed to help with the general Windows stuff (not specific to Cakewalk). One of the first things I noticed after the upgrade completed was that while I could plug monitors into both GPU's under Windows 7, Windows 10 couldn't handle having them both enabled. Despite the fact that they are both Dell-approved hardware, I suspect the drivers got too stale for the nVidia. BTW, steev, in my case at least, it was only 10 days. Microsoft only allowed me 10 days before the door slammed shut on the return to Windows 7. I got my upgrade through the "Assistive Technologies" clause, the one where if you use anything that falls under the banner of Assistive Technologies, you're still entitled to a free upgrade. So I've closed the door on Windows 7.