Starship Krupa

Bravo!

12 hours ago, sjoens said:

See post #2. Should be one of those but not sure exactly which. All Module's coded text are affected by one text color.

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.

On 1/4/2019 at 6:08 PM, Misha said:

If it fixes the issue of placing newly recorded take lanes into previously muted lanes,  it will make Cakewalk near perfect for me.

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.😊

Dang, I've been delving deeply into Windows 10 settings. Buncha new stuff this time around.

Everyone know about Exploit Protection? A whole list of things it wraps each program in to prevent it from being able to launch malware attacks on the system.

Of course I added cakewalk.exe to the exception list and excluded every last one and no help.

Thank you ien and Noel for the suggestions. Didn't know about Controlled Folder Access, but it was already turned off. Noel, all of your items were already ticked as well.

I would like to note at this point that projects of similar complexity start right up and go in Mixcraft 8.

Noel, is that palette flash any clue for you as a developer? It's restricted to just the Cakewalk window, not the entire screen. It's brief, and it doesn't happen every time, but I've seen it. It's something I was trained to take notice of when I was a pro QA dude.

These old 4-tracks have a certain cult appeal, for the reason mentioned by Chuck E. (forces simplicity), and for sonic reasons as well.

After all, Our Favorite DAW has that PC module baked right in so that if we wanted to, we could make every track sound like it was recorded on tape.

BTW, JohnBee, in my experience, belts for '80's decks don't dry up, they disintegrate by turning into a sticky goop that is very difficult to remove (which must be done thoroughly). I tried doing a plain old stereo deck of mine and it would have gone just fine but for the goop all over everything.

The lag happens even if I click the button to turn off all FX, so it must not be a plug-in, right? And it is happening across multiple projects.

I have an MT2X that I haven't turned on in years. I'm afraid to.

What tends to go in old cassette decks is belts. They just turn to this black jelly.

Good news is that you can usually get belt kits on eBay. The only thing is that you need to either be able to install them yourself or find someone able to do so.

5 hours ago, BRainbow said:

One thing you don't appear to have tried or even addressed in any of your replies is the repeated advice from some of the CW heavyweights to do a clean install of Window 10.   You don't need anything but a Windows 10 install disk and you can download the *.iso install file from the Microsoft website and burn a CD .  Just use your Windows 7 product key to authorize or authorize by signing into your Microsoft account and linking your computer before you reinstall, per my earlier post on p. 1 of this topic.

If you have already tried that, here are a few more salvos into the dark:

Do you have any superfluous USB devices plugged in?

What firewire card are you using or is it on your MOBO?  TI chipset?  They are quite cheap if you need to get one.  This one works great for $24: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B002S53IG8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Same problems if you just use on-board audio or another interface and unplug the Firepod?

Have you tried moving your PCI cards to different slots?  Sometimes certain ones they share resources while others don't.

Have you checked all your BIOS settings and disabled unused devices and resources like on-board video, sound and serial port?

Are your RAM sticks in the correct slots, per your MONO manual?

Have you tested your RAM?

Good luck.  Bill

I am very much considering the scorched earth fresh Windows 10 install, and have addressed it by attaching my Microsoft ID to the system in question. I'm waiting for when the day comes I feel like de and re authorizing all of my PACE'd plug-ins, reinstalling everything else, etc.

As for the other (and, yes, those are all good things to check when a Windows system won't behave) things you list, it would be such a letdown to find out that Windows 7 was so blithely capable of handling a superfluous USB device, Nec Firewire card, Presonus FP-10, aftermarket RAM sticks or whatever, while new, improved Windows 10 makes Cakewalk pick its nose for 4 seconds before going into play mode with the exact same hardware configuration.

And yes, I have turned off everything on the MB that I don't use, and I'm down to using the onboard HD4000 GPU for simplicity. I had an NVidia Quadro but pulled it.

One thing I am noticing is that right before the transport starts moving, I sometimes get a really brief graphics palette flash, sometimes white, sometimes my desktop background image. I'm not that worried about it all for the moment. It still records. Once I find a solution I will report it.

Thanks, scottfa, those are such good ideas that I already tried them.

My "Firepods" were firmware upgraded to FP-10's within 24 hours of arriving home, and Mixcraft Pro Studio 8 is having no issues with starting and stopping the transport with projects of similar complexity.

I call them Firepods in my sig because I like the name and people recognize it better than FP-10.

Only "shooting in the dark" inasmuch as Microsoft hides the underpinnings of the OS with each new iteration.

I have 25 years professional experience tuning and troubleshooting Windows systems starting with 3.1; I earned a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification as soon as Microsoft started offering it. I concur that it's something in Windows 10. :-)

So far, one great success that took hours of Resource Monitor work and deep Googling was rolling back the Intel network interface driver to the previous version so that it wouldn`t be chewing up CPU like crazy. Nothing to do with Cakewalk, just a bad driver I found that was bogging everything down.

And yeah, I before I did this, I researched and found several forum threads like that one where FP-10 users had had success using their interfaces under Windows 10. I found none where someone had tried to get theirs to work and given up. That`s why I was and am confident that this problem can be solved.

On 12/27/2018 at 11:49 AM, msmcleod said:

Setting the record mode to "Sound on Sound",  enabling Auto Punch and then checking "Mute Previous Takes" pretty much gives me the layers functionality I used in Sonar 8.5.

Mark, I tried this last night and for whatever reason wasn`t seeing a waveform in the track as I was recording.

It recorded fine, and I wound up with tidy clips as you said, but I really missed the visual feedback. As talent and engineer, those waveforms are a comfort.

Also, when I tried it with a MIDI track, I couldn`t get it to record at all.

Something I want to ask about is Overwrite mode. At first when I read the Help page it seemed unsuitable because it sounded as if it would discard all previous takes, but digging deeper, it looks like it might work just like I want it to.

What`s the difference with Overwrite mode? It looks like it keeps your previous takes in their own separate lanes, but mutes them, which is what I want. I`m going to try it with a "check one two" project, but I`d like to hear what the collective wisdom says.

This is great, I've learned some new tuning tricks for Windows 10 that I had no idea existed, like the Game Mode one, which seems pretty huge.

Good call on the list of spurious services. There used to be this guy who maintained a master list of nonessential Windows services that could be disabled and why; I must search for him again.

Since this has taken a nice turn for tuning suggestions, I'll offer up a couple of favorite tools I've been using for over 20 years, Process Explorer and Autoruns.

Process Explorer is many things, including What Task Manager Wants To Be When It Grows Up, in that it shows all kinds of details about every process that is currently running. It's also what I fire up when I've tried all of the more polite methods of getting a process to quit and it still won't budge. It has a very "what part of 'End Process' didn't you understand?" way of dealing with them.

Autoruns shows you everything that runs when your computer starts up, from services to browser hijacks, and lets you disable, enable, remove, whatever. It's as no-nonsense about making your decisions stick as its sister program. If you've been using CCleaner or something like it just to deal with this, that's way overkill.

Both of them are free and may be found here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

I am going to now sally forth and get rid of all of the XBox crap to start with....

All I can throw at it is to answer your question about "if I can ping it, why can't I connect to it" with the fact that Ping and Https and whatever the BandLab Assistant uses use different ports.

They're different protocols.

Which is what I was getting at with the firewall thing. Some mechanism may be blocking those ports or protocols while happily letting Ping on through.

At this I have no more suggestions as to what that might be. The more I run Windows 10 the more I find out that it has aspects I don't like, such as malware protection I can never permanently disable. It's actually moved past OSX as far as bondage and discipline, which is sad.

Well, the thing is, as I said earlier in the thread, and it was probably tl;dr, I don't use Superior Drummer, I play the drums.

I don't use huge sample libraries, I don't do projects with dozens of tracks and big piles of plug-ins. I've learned enough about mixing that I don't need that many plug-ins to get a sound that I like.

The first project done on the upgraded Windows 10 system was all live instruments, no VSTi's or samples, and the eventual track count was 12.

I do rock songs, pop songs. Under 5 minutes long, guitar, drums, bass, vocals, mostly live audio.

The biggest load I ever put on my system instrument-wise is Sonivox Orchestral Companion, which is pretty lightweight as sampled instruments go.

I have been monitoring all along with Resource Monitor and have not been straining resources RAM-wise or disk-wise.

I don't want to get into a big debate about what constitutes the minimum requirements for a DAW in 2019, but I will say this:

As Lord Tim alludes to, the minimum requirements for one use case are entirely different for another. I would never tell someone who is only going to use soft synths to do phat beats to rap over that he needs 16G of RAM and a fast i7, because it would discourage someone who might not be able to afford that when I know he could get a lot done with way less hardware. Heck, he could do that on his phone at this point.

To assume that every user configuring a DAW is at some point going to load up huge sample libraries and a zillion effect plug-ins and soft synths is unrealistic. There are many people who never, ever use soft synths. Or sample libraries. At all. They only want to record audio and mix. This in fact describes most of the musicians of my acquaintance. I am unusual in that I sometimes dabble in a bit of synthy stuff and orchestration.

My poor old i5 Dell notebook ran CbB pretty well for my kind of projects with only 4G of RAM under Windows 7. What else can I say?

At this point, I would say stick with Windows 7 for the time being. I "upgraded," and I put that word in irony quotes for a reason, two of my systems from 7 to 10 simply because CbB is my biggest app and I was told that support for Windows 7 was being phased out, and things have not gone well so far.

My system is contemporary enough for Windows 10, but my audio interface and GPU are getting on in years, which I suspect may be the trouble.

The laptop used to run CbB lickety-split with only 4G of RAM, now it feels sluggish with 8G.

It may be an issue that I chose the migration option rather than the clean install, I don't know, but I haven't straightened things out yet. I may reinstall with the "clean" option. I don't relish the trouble of deauthorizing all of my plug-ins and then reauthorizing, all of that stuff, reinstalling all of my programs, that would be a big pain in the butt and a lot of work.

I also just don't care for the sharp corners on the windows in Windows 10. It's a design basic that humans like things to be rounded off. Subconsciously, we think that sharp things can injure us.

5 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

The specs of my long-suffering audio laptop is in my sig below. This is running Windows 10 and doing some pretty big productions.

Absolutely agree with Jim in that 8gb is much too small for a DAW in 2019, but I've found Win10 to be at least as snappy as Win7, even on this ancient hardware.

8G is much too small, yet you're doing some "pretty big productions." With an M620 yet. How can it be much too small?

My system ran like a bat out of Hades with 8G of RAM in it, for heaven's sake.

With all good humor, do you remember my sig on the old board, where I said that if someone told me that I needed more RAM, or an SSD or a Waves plug-in, I would troll them pitilessly? That was because after hanging out there for a while, I noticed that if any technical discussion went on long enough without a solution, someone would tell the OP that they needed at least one of those things.😊

9 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

8GB RAM is a bit lean to run Win10.

Get that up to 16GB (or 32GB - especially if using virtual-instruments)... and you won't risk hitting the VM swap-file (in lieu of enough physical RAM)... which kills performance.

So a computer that ran CbB and everything else just fine when I was running Windows 7 should now have its RAM doubled or quadrupled because I installed Windows 10.

Had I known this ahead of time, I would surely have stuck with Windows 7. I had been under the impression from my research on the web that Windows 10 was no more resource-hungry than Windows 7.

Until a few weeks ago, my i5 notebook was running CbB on Windows 7 with 4G RAM like a champ. I doubled its RAM to 8G in anticipation of the Windows 10 "upgrade," did the "upgrade," and now it's actually less responsive with Windows 10 and 8G of RAM than it was with Windows 7 and 4G of RAM.

Throughout this, I have been monitoring things with Resource Monitor, and there haven't been problems with excessive page faults that I can see. That's the mystifying part. Resource Monitor shows, of course, a lot of disk read activity from the project disk, which is a 7200RPM SATA in AHCI mode, but that's about it. The project in question is an audio-only affair, no samples, no VSTi's. Same with the other projects I have called up to test it with.

Resource Monitor shows the CPU busy, but not straining itself, disk reads normal under the circumstances, memory of course a lot of it in use, but not all of it, not to the point of excessive page faults. I once had a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer cert, I know where to look, but this is eluding me. I don't see a smoking gun.

So far, my advice to anyone contemplating going from Windows 7 or 8 to 10: try dual boot before you commit.

I'm going to try swapping video cards next, because I'm thinking there's a bottleneck, and I've had DAW's not play nice with graphics cards/drivers before.

The only thing that I can think of is that either your browser or Windows Firewall has somehow flagged bandlab.com as a suspect domain and is blocking the http protocol.

You could try using a different browser or disabling Windows Firewall and see what happens. If it works, then you can work on getting the rule out of there that`s blocking bandlab.com

20 minutes ago, Craig Anderton said:

Is the project recent, or from a long time ago? I recall reading something about known issues with projects created using older templates.

Couldn't be much more recent. It's the one I talked about in the DAW fanboy thread, started by my houseguest the day after Xmas.

I've now done the thing with adding my Microsoft account to all of my Windows 10 systems. I had forgotten about that, thanks.

The way my friend recorded, and this is SOP for us, is as follows:

1. I imported a "guide track" of him playing and singing the song, just acoustic guitar and voice. He recorded this on his iPhone with a fancy Shure mic.

2. I set him up to record drum tracks, recording 4 simultaneous tracks with a "Recorderman/Glyn Johns" pair, snare, and kick. I set it up in Loop record mode, with 10 seconds of leading and trailing silence so that he could stretch a bit between takes.

3. He recorded about a dozen takes of drums in this fashion

4. We chose one take as a "working" take, muting the other ones, and saving them for later comping

5. He then recorded various overdubs of vocals, guitar, and bass

6. Which he made a pretty killer mix of, that I hope to put up here in a couple of days when he's done mastering it on his Pro Tools system back home

Beginning around step 5, I wasn't around much, because I was buried in getting financial records together. He was just having too much fun with CbB to stop. When I looked in on him during the mixing process, though, the project was getting hard to work on because there was about a 2 second lag between when you'd hit the spacebar and when playback would start, and every other time it would hit the end of the playback loop, the audio engine would die.

I defragged the project folder, which helped a tiny bit, but not much.

Which brings us to current circumstances.

What finally did help with the playback stopping was increasing ExtraPlugInBufs to 5 and Playback I/O Buffer Size to 1024. This was after spending hours combing the AUD.INI Alphabetical Manual, which should give some indication as to what level of system tuning I'm okay with.

What is weirdest is that lag between when I hit the spacebar and when playback starts! It keeps getting worse. It's now up to almost 4 whole seconds, I kid you not. Something is definitely messed up here. It seems to be related to the number of tracks in a project; it doesn't happen with all projects.

What I'm thinking at this point is that something is bottlenecking my system. Noel suggested my interface drivers, but Mixcraft is happy with a project of the same complexity.