Starship Krupa

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.

Sorry, wrong thread.....

Thanks, M. I have recently spent a bit of time on the old forum recommending to people who are staying with Sonar that they get busy and start their own forum using one of the free (ad supported) hosting services that allow people to have their own forums. Also that anyone who wants to participate and give and get help with just using the program (rather than tech help with keeping it running) post here and not mention that they are using Sonar. After all, the programs are still similar enough functionally that it's not going to be any different. I will be transparent here and say that a large part of my impatience with 64-bit holdouts is that the reasons I saw given for doing so on the old forum were either distrust or resentment toward the current manufacturers of Cakewalk, people whom I happen to respect, and am also grateful to for not charging a license fee for this wonderful software. People either didn't trust them not to embed spyware in the software, to keep their promise to keep the licensing free, to maintain their company's financial viability, etc., etc., or they resented them for releasing Cakewalk with a freeware license, or both. Neither of those reasons are going to elicit much respect in me. The opposite, even. It's funny that you should mention Windows 7, because I was a Windows 7 holdout until a few days ago. Noel and Jon suggested that BandLab, along with Microsoft, are losing interest in Windows 7 and that the best performance and stability for Cakewalk would come from running it on a Windows 10 system. Is this what I get for trusting BandLab? 🤣

At the second update of CbB I noticed a big jump in speed of starting the program and loading projects between it and the first version that shipped (which was the most SPlat-like). However, at some point, the start and load times did seem to get longer. Haven't had a chance to benchmark due to not keeping old versions of CbB.

Thanks, everyone, this is all very helpful. A few things: It is an upgrade, the free upgrade, and I don't have licenses for anything else, can't really afford licenses for a fresh copy. Is there a way to make a fresh install disk once I have an upgrade installation? My interfaces are Presonus Firepods, rather old, but I could track 4 channels with them with software monitoring down to 4mS with no trouble under Windows 7. I researched whether the drivers worked under Windows 10, and according to several forum posts, they do, so I went for it. Latency is still fine with ASIO. I tried switching to WASAPI modes and it still had the 3 second start lag and barfs at the end of each loop. My installation of Windows 7 was tuned to within an inch of its life, and my AUD.INI was tuned to utilize it. I have the onboard audio interface disabled in the BIOS and Windows has always respected that 😊. I checked and it continues to.

What it says in the title. A few days ago, since the most important program I use on my Windows systems is Cakewalk, and the scuttlebutt is that Windows 10 is where the focus is, that especially Windows 7 is fading further into the distance, I decided to upgrade my main DAW system to Windows 10. The upgrade itself went smoothly enough. My programs and hardware all worked fine afterward, with the exception that I still can't get both graphics cards to work at the same time, but that's not that big a deal. Either my Quadro FX580 or the onboard HD4000 are quite capable of servicing Cakewalk or Vegas Pro. However, since the OS upgrade, the performance of Cakewalk has been, frankly, wretched. You can see from my sig that my system, while not a rocket sled, is respectable, and well within the specs for running Cakewalk. The only spec that's not listed is my project drive and OS drive are both 7200 RPM. The configuration was fine for running Cakewalk before Windows 10 came along. So before anyone tries telling me I really need 32G of RAM or an SSD or some such, it worked perfectly with this configuration before the "upgrade." So of course, right over the holiday, my friend and his son, both recording enthusiasts, come to stay for a few nights and I'm all psyched to show them this great program I've been using for the past 9 months, my friend even wants to track some drums. I get him going with it in loop mode, and he's so in the groove that he tracks the rest of the instruments and winds up with a total of 12 tracks of drums, bass, guitar and vocals. However, by the time he's finished with tracking, I come over to see how it's going and hit the spacebar to start the transport and it takes about 3 full seconds to start playback. Then once it gets going, it gets to the end of the loop and the playback engine drops out. I hit the spacebar again, and again 3 full seconds. Then at the end of the loop, down we go again. Every time. He has to mix the song restarting playback at the end of every loop. I try fiddling with the AUD.INI to set the dropout time longer, and no go, it's the same no matter what I try. I try loading some of my older projects and they are taking way longer to load, and same deal with the transport taking 3 seconds to get rolling. I defrag the project folder, nope, no help. So I post this both as a caution for anyone in the middle of mission-critical projects and throwing it out there as a request for ideas as to how I might regain my system's perkiness. It's odd because Windows 10 and Cakewalk seem to be good buddies on my older Core 2 Quad system. It's just gone sideways on the main one. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually, I'm a good system tuner, but so far it's frankly shite. Embarrassingly so.

Excellent. Thanks, lads. I shall give David's recipe a try and see if it works for me, and Larry's surely will if it doesn't. What I do is record hands-free until I mess up badly enough to abort the take, then I hit "W" and then "R" again. The rest of the time, I just let it roll.

OMG, Mark, I think you may have just solved it for me. Does this work in Loop mode? I've been trying to figure out how not to get CbB not to chop up subsequent takes into weird misplaced clips if I happen to abort a take, and if this is it, I'll be a much happier solo recordist.

For heaven's sake, it's a choice of which version of DAW software to use, not a choice of which religion to follow. I know that this is not what the OP was doing, but if someone shows up in the Cakewalk by BandLab forum saying that Sonar is constantly crashing on them and please Cakewalk users help me get it to work, sorry, no, I do not "need to respect their choice" to refuse to run an upgraded version of the software that has had a solid year of bug fixing and testing and vetting by other users. At this point they're just being needlessly stubborn. Such people are inviting frustration and irritation anyway. It's not my job to shield them from it.

Mmm, Dr. Dobbs' Journal. Keepin' it real. My friend Mike Swaine was editor and longtime columnist for the magazine, and an ex-girlfriend of mine was (I think) a reviewer for them in the late '80's.

Whoa, Mark, if I had the cake (so to speak), I would so get that. I use a cheap lighted keyboard (so cheap that my right shift keycap has broken in half) because I like to work in subdued lighting. One bit of weirdness, on the F key, which is "resize vertically," it shows a double-ended horizontal arrow.🤷‍♀️ BTW, what is with the emphasis on making it simple to fit the workspace vertically but not so much horizontally? I want to see the extent of my project across its length all the time without resizing the track heights, but there's no command to do that. I understand that I can work around it with screensets and return to previous zoom, but jeepers.

Reading Craig's Electronic Projects For Musicians in 1982 and getting stoked and educated by it was, more than any other single thing, what propelled me into what is my current career, musical electronics. That book has been a similar starting point for many, many hobbyists and professionals over the decades of its existence. I was also subscriber to Polyphony, the self-published predecessor to Electronic Musician. Basically a 'zine for musical electronics geeks. My career is I design and manufacture guitar effects and amplifiers. My products have been (positively!) reviewed in Guitar Player and Guitarist magazine and shown at Winter NAMM. I pay the day-to-day bills by doing tube amp repair in Alameda, California. http://www.eutronics.us I have a lot to thank Craig for and have told him so via PM. He helped keep electronics (with audio as a focus) as a hobby alive during a time when it had become less popular and more difficult to engage in. He's one of the people who's helped inspire me to do my part to nurture hobby electronics as well by sharing information and also by putting on events for musical electronics enthusiasts, which I have done every year for the past dozen years.

Check this out 🤣: Cakewalk SONAR keyboard Kinda outta your budget, but sort of "for the CbB user who has everything." For mousin' I used to use a Logitech Trackman Marble, but really wanted to have a scroll wheel, so I recently switched over to a standard Logitech wireless mouse. However, I just discovered a nice piece of freeware that will allow me to program one of the smaller buttons on the Marble to scroll with the ball, so I'm going to install that and try going back to it. I can really fly with the Trackman Marble. I just hope that the program will also simulate the left and right wheel action.

Never installed SONAR before CbB, so not possible. The way I noticed these was by opening up Plug-in Manager and looking to see which VST's were excluded. I enabled them and went "WHOA," Keanu style. I have the .DLL's and accompanying Resource directories backed up in case they, uh, get damaged or something. Right you are, they aren't officially there, if they were, I wouldn't have had to post this recipe for enabling them. It's a hidden, disabled feature. Use at your own risk.

That's the thing. This is my viewpoint: "horses for courses," and everything else is really a matter of personal preference. Track in CbB, mix in Mixbus, master in Pro Tools, whatever. I'm told that REAPER rules for live work due to all the routing options, and I don't doubt that at all. I have a best buddy of 30 years and his son staying at my place for the holidays, and his kid (22 y.o. college student) is in the midst of composing/assembling a dubstep piece using Ableton (never call it "Live," 😊) his preferred platform. His dad, who used to own a studio in SF is a Pro Tools man through and through, his current rig is a Mac Pro tower with a couple of UAD cards in it. He considers anything else "hobby" grade, but has done some good work in my studio with Mixcraft and Cakewalk. I, of course, am a Mixcraft veteran who is now in the process of learning Cakewalk, which I consider a great-sounding DAW with great-sounding plug-ins and some quirks I'm getting used to. I like it better than the demos of other DAW's I tried a few years back. Dad is using my instruments to record a pop song, and jumped right in with Cakewalk, but would of course much rather be using PT. He was just going to record drum tracks, but the project snowballed, and he wound up staying up 'til dawn a couple of nights in a row and now has an almost finished mix with guitar, bass, and vocals. It sounds freaking killer and he took to CbB pretty easily. Unfortunately, I'm having troubles with my CbB installation because I upgraded from Win 7 to Win 10 a few days ago upon learning that BL were emphasizing 10 as the preferred platform. 😡 The playback engine keeps quitting, and it takes about 3 seconds to start when you hit the spacebar. Separate thread. Anyway, after looking over kid's shoulder and chatting with him, enjoying watching him work, watching his song come together, I am certain that each of us could do what the other does using our preferred DAW, but it would be clunkier and take longer. Trevor would probably flail using Ableton to record and comp 20 tracks of audio, including the simultaneous 4 tracks for the drum kit. I'm not sure Ableton can even do comping. Sample management and the handling of the built-in FX rack in PT and Cakewalk is nowhere near what it is in Ableton, and neither CbB nor PT have integrated phrase samplers, so Geoff and I would be like "eeble-beeble-beeble" first trying to learn how to use a 3rd-party phrase sampler (which I have already done due to Cakewalk not having its own). Trevor would have his dubstep piece circulating amongst the hot DJ's while Geoff was still trying to find a phrase sampler compatible with AAX, and it would probably cost a fortune. Even with the excellence of the FX that come with CbB and the ones I have acquired, I can't touch what Geoff has with his UAD cards and Ocean Way and Abbey Road whatevers and the way that he can freakin' fly over the keyboard doing comps due to his years using the Industry Standard DAW with its really slick management of lanes and takes. Neither of them can deny the fact that the cost-to-performance ratio of my home studio flattens EITHER of their setups. VST support is excellent and mature in CbB, and that gives me a cornucopia of other great inexpensive and freeware FX to choose from. PT is AAX only, which limits what PT users have access to. We've all seen LarryC's deals, it's like trying to drink from a firehose. The EDM synths I use, Hybrid 3 and Vacuum Pro, cost me $1 each, at the same time snagging free licenses for iZotope Neutron Elements and Ozone Elements. Okay, so those all have AAX versions, but still, there are plenty I use that don't due to Avid charging (WTF?) developers to distribute in that format. Mr. Pro Tools/UAD thinks that the ProChannel with its console and tape and compressor emulations is hot schnit, BTW. Our direct access to Noel and Jon and Meng is amazing given how Digidesign and now Avid (who are somewhat better) treat Pro Tools users, and given the magnitude of really nasty bugs that have persisted over so many major revisions of Pro Tools. Geoff related how there was one known bug where the PT transport would just refuse to go into playback! And even the support people at Digi knew about it. It persisted across at least two MAJOR product releases. I've watched the current dev team beat the snot out of bugs in CbB. The progress is tangible. As a veteran of a couple of prominent software companies, this really matters to me. If I were on a platform that was getting whiz-bang features while bugs like that persisted, it would bring me down. I'm also fascinated by BandLab's vision for integrating CbB with their collaborative platform. It's cool to be around for that. We all have our reasons for liking and using this DAW or that DAW. It's probably more to be celebrated that we have so much choice than to be argued over, but it's in our nature to argue over it. Fords suck and Chevys rule or vice versa, when they are both excellent American automobiles. Or Mercedes suck and Ferrari rule when they are both excellent European Formula One racing teams. A baseball pitcher is evil incarnate when he is playing for the Dodgers, but a hero after he is traded to the Giants. I only WISH CbB had Pro Tools slick handling of takes and lanes and Ableton's handling of phrase samples and FX rack. Oh, also the playback engine that doesn't fall down on my 'puter. 😖

Rest assured, there are trollslayers standing by.

So is there no way to record in the way I describe? I want to be in Loop mode, but be able to abort a take due to trainwreckage, restart my tracking, but not have my subsequent takes chopped up into clips that match up with the aborted takes. If not, my choices are to either abort and then delete the resulting clips, or wait out the loop, maybe practice while the song's playing, and let the song start over? It seems that there are others who are having workflow issues with Loop mode recording in Comping mode. I guess I do that, too, sometimes I want to stop the transport to take a break, have a drink of water when singing or something and wind up with a clip that doesn't fill up the entire loop and then subsequent takes get the choppy treatment. I thought there must be a way to turn it off or configure it so that this didn't happen, but that's a feature request waiting to happen.

Can you bump mine up? My posts, while fewer, were high in quality, so I think my post count should reflect that. In the interest of fairness (a term that I think was mentioned once or twice when the licensing model was changed) I think there should be a formula, because people who were there longer have an unfair advantage toward getting a higher post count. So how about there be a formula where we average it over a number of years? Or take the entire number of posts from the old forum and divide them equally among the people who had accounts over there, because it really was collective wisdom. I'd be in favor of giving LarryC more, because that guy was great about finding all those deals on plug-ins and I want to encourage him.

I have a problem that happens all the time, and I'm sure it's preventable with the right configuration settings. I tend to record a lot of my stuff as a solo performer, recording in Loop mode, doing 3 or 4 takes and then selecting the best take or comping. I have my Project/Record settings set to Comping, with Store Takes in a Single Track, Create New Lanes On Overlap, and New Takes on Top. Now as we all do, I sometimes abort takes shortly after the start due to early flubs, or not feelin' it, or whatever. This leaves a stub clip in the take lane(s) of whatever track(s) I'm recording. That's fine until I hit W to top it and R to start recording again, at which point I'll get a new take lane and a clip, but for some reason having that other stub sitting there is a sign to Cakewalk telling it that I want it to split my new takes right at the edge of that clip. I can't describe exactly what it does because the logic of it is impenetrable to me, all I know is that if I abort a take, I better get any stub clips the heck out of there before doing any more recording or Cakewalk will think that I want the new ones split into clips to match. And heaven forbid one of the takes should continue past the loop point and then past the stub clip, it gets even weirder if I do that. So: what I want Cakewalk to do is when I am tracking, and it's recording and making a new clip in a new take lane, I want it to ignore the fact that there is a clip in the lane next to it. I want it to forget about past mistakes and just move on. Even though Bob Ross tells us that everyone needs a friend, the leftover clip from my earlier botched take does not need a friend, it just needs to be deleted when I am done drumming or singing or whatever and sit down at the computer. There are other situations where I've been recording audio and then stopped and the resulting clips seemed like they were arbitrarily split and flung across multiple take lanes. I'm sure this feature makes sense somehow, in some context, but I would rather just turn it off or configure things correctly if that's possible for now. I've checked the documentation and can't quite figure it out. There is this one part that confuses me: "If you have the Expand/collapse Take Lanes button on a track enabled, and you record one clip so that it overlaps another clip, the clips appear in different Take lanes when this option is enabled." Does that mean that even if I already have Create New Lane On Overlap selected in Preferences, I also have to have the buttons pushed that show the Take Lanes on each channel I'm tracking or it won't work? And is doing that even the answer to my troubles?

If only people who ask to have their post counts brought over will have it done, I'd like to politely suggest that the connotations of doing it may not be 100% positive. After all, why do you want everyone else to see how many messages you wrote on another forum? Do you want people to think that what you write carries more weight? Do you think you deserve more respect because of it? If it's not a status symbol, then why do you want it there? If it is a status symbol, are you prepared for the reactions of people who see it and know right away that you asked to have a status symbol put under your handle? If everyone were going to have their counts brought over, fine, but no way am I asking (mine was only in the hundreds anyway, but still).

Thanks! I think it's good to laugh about this stuff that people take so seriously. It's kind of odd the way people can be, but I guess it's a tendency we all have. These forums are communities, and what the community has formed around is this software that we enjoy using. Someone saying that it's not perfect can't help but seem like an attack to be defended against. Just look at me on the old forum with my baiting of people who wanted to stick with SONAR long after CbB was (in my eyes) thoroughly vetted. It applies to me. I'll cop to that. And with notation software, there might be snobbery about people not having music education but wanting to create notation.

Ah, Steev, a thing to know is that I am very frugal, especially when it comes to my music hobby. The Firepod is ancient technology. Studio One was but a glimmer in the eye of Presonus when my interfaces were new. I got the pair of mine a few years back on Craig's List. 16 inputs for $200! So I have no right to the copy of Studio One, at least as far as I know. And doesn't the starter edition omit support for VST's? Can't live without that. Anyway, Studio One was one of the ones I tried a few years back before I settled on Mixcraft, and for whatever reason rejected. It may have been the limitation on VST's or the UI, but I preferred starting with something that wasn't a hobbled version of a "real" DAW anyway. My main system is a Dell Optiplex that a neighbor gave me. He works down in Silicon Valley as a facilities manager, and one of the companies he works for was getting rid of some desktops that were no longer fancy enough for the executives. He brought some of them home, asked me if I had a use for this one. Um, yes, as a matter of fact. Its predecessor, which is still in use, and runs Cakewalk with aplomb, was a hand-me-down Gateway Core 2 Duo that had been my friend's daughter's high school computer. When she got a Macbook for graduation, I got the Gateway, which was having trouble booting up. I cured that by reseating the IC's, upgraded the processor to a Core 2 Quad, and with a hand-me-down 125G SSD for a boot drive, it's running great. The young lady who bequeathed it was almost done with college last time I heard. The Event 30/30's in my sig were obtained for free because one side had a blown chip amp, and the Monitor Ones were $30 at a swap meet. I don't like to part with cash unless I have to. I hope we hear from LarryC soon! 😊

I was most recently using Mixcraft before Gibson and then BandLab dropped their sad and then happy bombs. Mixcraft is kind of "the little DAW that could." 5 years ago I wanted to get back into home recording after more than 10 years away from it, so I shopped around and the best bang for the short-of-buck was, IMO, Mixcraft. I had tried REAPER before, and gave it another brave try, but it ended in bafflement and disappointment as it always has. One of my benchmarks for a DAW is "how long does it take me, from a cold start, without cracking a manual or help file, to be able to record 30 seconds of audio and then edit the middle 10 seconds out of it?" Many will concur that with REAPER, depending on the individual, this might be measured in hours or even days rather than minutes. And while, yes, REAPER does have a robust and active user forum, there is a whiff of that Linux-y "if you're having trouble using the software, you're a doofus" attitude, where it seemed like there was an uncomfortable priority placed on maintaining an image of REAPER as being just as beginner-friendly and easy-to-use as its competitors. So if a newbie posted that they were flummoxed by the weird-ass workflow, too much emphasis was on "defending" rather than just explaining. This may have improved now that the program is more secure in the market. If there are any REAPER fans here, before you get in my grill, I'll just say that I know REAPER is powerful. It is so, so powerful. Its power is too much for a mind as small as mine to comprehend, which is why I must never, ever be in the same room with it. It's likely that the reason that it took me over 2 hours to arm a track, record a clip, and chop 10 seconds out of it was that because in REAPER, a track can be anything you want it to be. It can be an audio track, a MIDI track, a bus, a video track, a score track, an automation lane, a patch bay, a quiet place to while away a few hours while the family is out of the house, the gum you stuck to the underside of your chair in 6th grade, the sensation of heat, or the concept of sensation itself. So I probably had created a "gum" track when I should have created an "audio" track, and when I clicked what I thought was "arm" probably meant "chew." Or I had chosen the wrong color of audio, which had to be selected ahead of time or else nothing would work. The company who makes Mixcraft on the other hand, Acoustica, their motto is "Software should be easy to use!" True to this, my test took 2.5 minutes to complete once the program had finished installing. Another trick for checking out DAW's is to read their user forum and see if people are shrieking like the souls of the damned about uncorrected bugs and missing or poorly implemented basic features that span major releases. Mixcraft is very good about staying current on the bug fixes. Their dev team is responsive. The price was hard to beat, under a hundy for something that had no restrictions as far as track count and would handle VST's. Also rudimentary video editing. You can put in fades and transitions and overlay text and stuff. I spent a few years with Mixcraft, really I learned my DAW chops with it. But I was starting to outgrow it, and happily, that coincided with BandLab's announcement. My biggest complaint with it vs. Cakewalk is the console. Mixcraft's console is so feature-challenged that almost all mixing I have to do in Mixcraft, I do in the Track View. I only set up cue mixes in the Console. And of course, Cakewalk's Console is un-freaking-REAL. Also Cakewalk's playback engine sounds better. I ran some tests with sine sweeps and there were artifacts (many digital audio programs have them, you might be surprised) whereas SONAR tested relatively clean, so that may be an explanation, but I could hear a difference right away. One feature where Mixcraft whips Cakewalks butt is in the robustness of that playback engine. I was/am on the Mixcraft beta team, and if their playback engine just stopped, and it kept stopping under the same conditions, be they heavy RAM or CPU load or whatever, you'd write that up as a bug report and they'd set about fixing whatever is wrong with the program that is causing it to do that. There's not a blue window that pops up saying how "unfortunate" it is that playback went casters-up in the middle of your mixing session. So that was, uh....different. I had gotten used to being able to do just about anything I wanted to with the playback running. Their way of handling submix buses by dragging and dropping, and how they can be nested as many times as you wish is really fab. Submixes act the same way that "track folders" do in Cakewalk, there's no distinction. You can collapse them and MSR all the tracks underneath and all of that. But weak mixer console, take lanes that you can't collapse, VST3 handling that's still kinda iffy, weak keyboard shortcuts, no support for theming, weaker MIDI routing. It's still a "starter DAW," albeit a very good one that can play with the big players in many situations. Despite the quality of the product, I suspect that they may fall to BandLab's pricing scheme on the current Cakewalk.

Oh holy mother, really? Still? When I was notation-shopping I settled on Finale Note Pad, which is freeware, like our CbB, so I guess I missed out on how prevalent this still is, but I've encountered it in other programs. It's like there was a Procrustes Bach (Procrustes was the serial killer/blacksmith in Greek paganism who had an iron bed; he would invite travelers in to stay the night and if they didn't fit the bed perfectly he would either chop off anything that stuck out, or stretch them until their limbs "fit.") who came up with this. You try to tidy things up a little bit, or decide that you want that note to sustain just a bit longer and BLEAHHH suddenly your measure and the one next to it are littered with little dots and rests and hemidemisemiquavers to make up for it. Which makes it worse, it looks like a caterpillar stepped in some ink and walked across scoring paper. Heaven help you if you play a chord and your finger slips, or if you decide you want to voice the chord a bit differently and then throw the timing off with the slip of a mouse. The results look worse than having "slide over to make room" turned on in CbB (sorry). Every time I tried to get "serious" about producing sheet music of my stuff for other musicians to use and tried one of these programs, it made me just drop the project entirely until I started working with Finale and then Mixcraft (which also seems more forgiving). I am very happy to hear that Cakewalk doesn't do this. It made me feel like I was in some horrible Dickensian math class, had made a mistake, and was being punished by a Snape-like instructor. Or like that movie I saw the trailer for that seemed to be about having The Great Santini for a drum teacher.