Starship Krupa

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.

Sorry, wrong thread.....

9 hours ago, mdiemer said:

After thinking about this for awhile, I realize that Starship Krupa has a valid point. Furthermore, I think it highlights the fact that people are in transition here. Not only from Sonar to Cakewalk, but from one forum to another. On the old forum, we were discussing both softwares. That is continuing to some extent on the new one. At some point, it's logical to assume the admins will step in and say, "Please, no more questions about Sonar, it's dead software. This is a CbB forum." Perfectly understandable, but it will leave Sonar users with no good place to turn to for help. Gearslutz? They have a Sonar forum, maybe folks will get some help there. Or maybe they can be directed back to the old forum to search it for answers. But most Sonar users will probably realize at some point that they need to move on. Same with Windows 7. If the only way forward is Windows 10, people like me who still use W7 (and there are quite a few no doubt) will be forced to move on, or be trapped with limited functionality on old software. Like I said, this whole thing is a transition process. Hopefully we will all get there eventually, and the journey will be pleasant.

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.

On 12/28/2018 at 10:31 AM, mdiemer said:

If someone wants to continue using Sonar and is willing to do what is necessary to make it work, that is their right. Same with using Windows 7. It may be frutrating and even irritating for them to be constantly told that they need to upgrade. We all have our reasons, and we need to respect each other's choices.

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.

6 hours ago, bitflipper said:

I, too, was a charter subscriber to Polyphony. I kept my collection for many years but in an uncharacteristic fit of tidiness I threw them out, along with a stack of Nibble magazines and Dr. Dobbs' Journal.

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.

12 minutes ago, msmcleod said:

Another one is this, for a similar price: https://www.editorskeys.com/products/cakewalk-sonar-keyboard-backlit

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.

On 12/25/2018 at 4:16 AM, PopStarWannabe said:

Actually, only Boost 11 is included with Cakewalk by Bandlab.

The others you must have had from a previous Sonar installation.

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.

On 12/27/2018 at 2:31 AM, Kuusniemi said:

But both DAWs have their merits and strong points. Just as Cubase is different and has it's strong point. And just like Reaper, Studio One, Logic, Ableton, ProTools, Samplitude, Tracktion, FL Studio...

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. 😖

On 12/22/2018 at 2:29 AM, Chregg said:

a nice new forum, wont be long before the trolls appear

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.