Starship Krupa

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.

Winternals' ProcessExplorer is my go-to for "what part of 'end process' didn't you understand?" End the process, the process will be ended.

Thanks for the detailed workflow description, Grem. The existing modes and their variations might work without a hitch for me as well if my songs could be recorded entirely in bites that didn't run the entire length of the song. You're setting out with the idea that you are making a song that will be comped together, and planning and tracking accordingly. Where I run into problems is when I want to lay down drum or rhythm guitar tracks that go for the entire length of the song, and I want to play them like that and just do a minimal amount of comping. I might do 5 takes, but they're 5 takes of the whole song, not 5 takes of the bridge, 3 takes of the first verse, 6 takes of the second verse, etc. I sometimes actually nail a take and don't do any comping at all. It goes right from recording to mixing, just use the editing tools to cut the lip smacks and breath sucks out of the vocals, maybe nudge a kick or snare or bass note, no "comping" as such in the sense of assembling the track from various independently recorded parts. How I mostly do my tracking up is that I set Cakewalk up to record in Loop mode with Loop Markers that are 2 measures farther apart than the length of my song. Then (for instance) I sit down at the drums, hit "R," wait through the first bar, play through the song, let the cymbals ring through the empty measure, then repeat as many times as it takes for me to get a "keeper." This works a TREAT as long as I play through the full song each time and let it loop. I will end up with what I want, which is either a pile of takes with a full good one I can use, or multiple takes I can stitch together. Nice, full-length takes, each in their own lanes, pre-grouped, OH-L, OH-R, Snare, Kick. If, however, I drop a stick 2 measures in while tracking and decide that I don't want to sit through the entire song to wait for it to start over, that's when things get more difficult. If I stop the recording, top it, and start over, it will of course leave a stub clip. And then when I start recording again and Cakewalk comes to that point in the tracking, it will stop recording in the current clip in the current lane and start a new clip adjacent to the stub clip in the previous lane and continue the recording in that clip. Since my goal in all this is complete song-length clips, this messes me up. I don't like to play the game of "I think it would be pretty simple to" but it doesn't seem like we're that far from having a Take Lanes mode that would make people like me happy. I think if it could work just like Sound on Sound mode, but mute the previous takes, that's how I want to record. Or a checkbox for Restrict Take To Its Current Lane or whatever.

It kinda makes sense to me. I'm not entirely sure how USB hubs work, but back at TOP I suggested that if there were a way to add more hardware buffering at the computer end that would be a good thing to try. Since Ted has this rocket sled DAW and a steampunk MIDI interface, I had the idea that the rig was "tripping over its own feet," and float the theory that the USB 2.0 hub adds enough buffering so that the way-quick mobo isn't winding up starved.

Right away I can say that one of the most important things to get right in a rock mix is the relationship between the kick drum and the bass (whether guitar or synth). My mixing strategy (and BTW, if you don't follow a mixing strategy you should start trying to) is to first get a good standalone drum mix happening, then add the bass and get those elements working before I bring in guitar, keys vocals, etc. Next, I can say that the solo'd tone of any given instrument in a good sounding full mix will likely have little relation to what we would consider a good sounding tone in isolation. Take a great-sounding mix with acoustic and electric guitars and vocals and hit the "solo" button for one of the acoustic guitars and you will likely be surprised at how thin it sounds compared to how fat it sounds in the mix. I roll off a lot of lows and lower mids. They almost wind up sounding like unplugged solidbodies mic'd up. I'd bet that yes, you have a mix that sounds good to you and a bass track that sounds good to you, but the thing is, you can't just take a good mix and plop a full-sounding bass on it without drowning out a bunch of important stuff. So you need to whittle away a bunch of stuff from your bass with EQ to make it fit in the mix without stomping on other elements, and correspondingly, make space for the bass to be heard by applying EQ to the other elements of the mix. Neither of the two will sound as good by themselves anymore, but the bass will be filling in the missing freqs from the mix and vice versa.

That was one of the things that I was seeing, and I thought I remembered Noel saying something about how that was how it was supposed to work in Comping mode, but on the subject of lanes, there is plenty of "not understanding" on my part, so I will cop to just about anything. 😊 Mea culpa. Maybe he said that that was how it was supposed to work with UNmuted take lanes and I misunderstood? In any case, if it's a bug, please fix it, if it's a feature, please give me a way to bypass it. When we have a preference that allows us to select Create New Lanes On Overlap, it seems odd to create the new lanes but then go ahead and put half of the new material in the old lanes, or it does put the material in the new lanes, but for whatever reason cuts it into clips whose boundaries reflect the start and stop points of the previous takes. Like Fantasy Island? "You said you wanted new Lanes, Mr. Krupa. You never said anything about putting your Takes in them." (Roarke smiles enigmatically).

Nice to see you here, Mr. Pete Brown, may the sun never set on the Microsoft/Cakewalk friendship. So the FLS checker VST itself has a similar limitation? Hmm. It counts how many slots you are using and subtracts that number from 128. If the result is <0 it returns "+-0". I'll guess the person who coded it didn't know how to ask the OS how many slots were available so they did the best they could (it's somewhere in <iostream>?). Or they just didn't want to bother. Nice that it handles the >128 condition gracefully. And, good sir, you: 1. Have access to 18, 312 plug-ins on your DAW computer. 2. Which can load 4000 of them and still run Visual Studio. I'd say it's good ta be da king!

Thanks, but it only ever contained my license for the CA-2A compressor VST so I don't know how it could help me with Bark of Dog as a PC module in Cakewalk. I never had a license for Sonar. I did write Boz a nice note asking him if he had any plans to make BoD ver. 1 available in the PC module version.

Bravo!

We have a winner! The text color that affected the labels on my Custom Module was Global > Alternative Text #2. It also affected Punch, Marker, Mix Recall, Selection, ACT, and Sync.

I actually found a VST that reports how many FLS slots are left. I loaded it into a project I have that doesn't have all that many plug-ins and it said that I had 79 slots left. Now I know I don't have 50 plug-ins in this project, so some of them must be using multiple .DLL's, Cakewalk itself must use several (I count 14 .DLL's in the Core folder, if that means anything). Very interesting, and I never heard of this limitation. It seems to be something that film composer types would run up against moreso than audio recorders like me. Nice that Microsoft are addressing it and announcing it right ahead of the NAMM Show.

I'm hoping that we will start to see some 3rd-party PC modules again. I have Boz' free Bark of Dog, but it doesn't appear as a ProChannel module. I've bought a few of his plug-ins; I wonder if I asked him nicely if he would shoot me a copy of BoD that had the ProChannel module enabled. When I first started using CbB last year, the PC was the single feature I was most impressed with. I could mix with Cakewalk's console all dang day long.

I believe that Noel has said that this is a feature, not a bug. Maybe the idea is that the next take is assumed to be one that you wish to comp with the last one, but that is seldom the case with me or the people I record. We record lots of complete (or aborted) takes, then audition them to find the good bits and comp from there. Having takes all mixed up with each other or cut up into clips makes that task needlessly complicated. From Preferences, I thought that Create New Lanes On Overlap was the answer. But the way it works is Create New Lanes On Overlap And Cut The Newly Recorded Takes Up Into Clips Based On The Length Of Previous Flubbed Takes. So it's almost the answer, but not quite.

Given the depth of the feature set of Cakewalk and all, even though I've been using it since April I still consider myself a "newbie." I pick feature by feature to really delve into as my needs demand. Currently it's Lanes. I've read people complaining about the Lanes workflow and all and I had been thinking "well, I probably don't have so much to worry about, my comping needs are probably not that sophisticated; at most, I just record half a dozen takes in Loop mode, do a little cuttin' and pastin', and that's it." Here are my findings. First, I started out in Comping Mode, 'cause, like, I wanted to do some comping later on, and the documentation said it would "create Take lanes and overwrite any pre-existing sound in the part of the track you are recording into." Which was a little scary with the "overwrite" part, but I figured that it's an NLE, nothing actually gets overwritten, they mean the previous takes or clips will get muted when I make subsequent takes. Right? And I said Store Takes In A Single Track, because hey, otherwise I'm not getting Lanes, I'm getting a whole new track each take, which is not what I want, I want to comp from lanes. And yes, that's what happened, I got a bunch of lanes with takes in them, except that if I messed up anywhere and made a take that wasn't exactly the same length as the one(s) that came before it, subsequent takes would get split up into clips and could wind up seemingly anywhere. They'd get put over into the previous take lane, the next one, I thought at one point one wound up underneath other clips, it was like a serial killer had come through with a chainsaw and sliced up my takes and reassembled them with other aborted takes. So I ticked the box for Create New Lanes On Overlap and it stopped putting my clips in the wrong lanes, but it still kept chopping them at the boundaries of the previous takes. Then I tried a recipe from a forum member for Sound on Sound mode where I also selected Auto Punch and Mute Previous Takes, but that resulted in no waveforms being drawn on the screen, no metering during recording, basically, no visual feedback whatsoever that recording was taking place other than the playhead moving. And as I later discovered, MIDI would not record in this mode. It resulted in nice, non-chopped up takes, though. All of the monitoring and waveforms worked if I took it out of Auto Punch, but then I lost the muting of the previous takes and it quickly turned into a cacophany, like Robert Fripp on Ex-Lax. Last was Overwrite Mode, which seemed promising at first, although when I asked about it on the forum, nobody replied. Then I discovered why nobody wanted to talk about it. The description was similar to Sound On Sound, "Choose this option to overwrite any pre-existing sound in the part of the track you are recording into." Same except missing "create Take Lanes," but I knew that it created Take Lanes, so why not give it a shot? The "overwrite" had to just refer to muting the previous takes, they couldn't mean actual destruction of audio data. Right? Set 'er up for a 2 measure loop, and just let it go while I practiced a guitar line. 19 takes and all is happy. I cut one short and start again to see how it handles a short take, see if we get the serial killer effect. Hit Record again, play some more guitar and then Stop. The results? Not serial killer, it's more like Left Behind! I now have Lanes 20-32, which all have the audio I just recorded, and 1-19 which are empty. For some reason, Cakewalk thinks I want all my previous lanes to be not just muted, but actually devoid of their contents. Not deleted, which would free up some screen space, but just sitting there with nothing displayed in them. I was able to Ctrl-Z and get it back, so the recording is still there in the file, but the lanes have been emptied. I haven't seen the movies, but it reminded me of the trailer for Left Behind where they're just left holding empty clothing. What I was not able to do in any mode was record multiple straight takes of audio in varying lengths without having the program chop it up into clips against my will, sometimes moving those clips to adjacent lanes. I accept that the chopping up thing in Comping Mode is a feature for a workflow other than what I'm doing, and that's fine, but can we be given the option to turn it off? Or a way to adapt one of the other modes to the workflow I describe? Sound on Sound would work great if I could mute previous takes, Overwrite would work great if I could disable Left Behind mode and have it not empty the audio from my previous lanes, so we're not that far off.

Dang, y'all on it! It's good to see that you veterans have to struggle with this stuff, too, that it's not just me who has to go spelunking around to figure out where the resources are hiding, and to learn, to my befuddlement, that what I thought was a color was an image, and what I thought was text was an image.... I caught the theme bug and am working on one of my own, called Black Turquoise. The concept is to have Tungsten's flat black look with as much of the orange (and text in general) replaced by 00FEFE (and variations on it) as I can manage without completely losing my mind. My Tools Module is to die for with its blue buttons. My inspiration is the blue fluoroscan displays like the one on my Pioneer cassette deck from back in 1981. It looked so cool in the dark. My experience of using tools for UI design is about zero except that I know how to switch colors and brushes in GIMP and the antique version of Photoshop I'm using. I don't wish to say how long it took me to figure out how to change the color of the track label backgrounds in the Console View. But I mention it because I want to let you know that I did figure it out. So you know that I Am Serious, and not just taking some of the buttons from Mercury and reverting them in Tungsten and calling it "Munstercry" or whatever. I'm tempted to cheat sometimes because Mercury has blue buttons I want, but they have shadowing, and I want FLAT. My question, if you want to help a brother out: I would really like the text on my Custom Module to have the 00FEFE glow. To quote David Byrne, "how do I work this?"

I'd be happy, for starters, if I could just put the transport into Record, Stop, and Rewind to Zero from a smartphone. For starters. The features could creep all they want to from there.😊