Weekend Astronaut

Something extremely weird happened that I've never seen before when updating a DAW.

I opened Sonar then got the prompt to update to 2021.01 (I had been putting it off recently), so I clicked to update.

It shut sonar down, quickly flashed a progress bar and literally 3 seconds later Sonar was open again back to where I was.

I can't tell if something went wrong or you guys just raised the bar on DAW updates. Never in my life have I seen anything like this, not even with previous updates of CbB. I'm on all SSD and have a beast PC but that hasn't changed anytime recently. Whatever you guys did this time around, well done!

Awesome, thank you for the advice and time spent clarifying!

Understood. I was seeing consistency in the error message for samples not found but I guess it's just using the Windows UI for that. Red herring on my part.

Good point about the per-project audio. I'll have to correct on that, in that it should be storing a copy in the project folder and thus remove any sample directory changes from the equation.

Well I guess this whole request is shot down. If I resort to building a sample reorganization app that generates hardlinks from the old location, send help.

Understood. So the DAW is just getting a message from the plugin during initialization that a multisample wasn't found and sends it the path it was expecting and the DAW displays it, which we see when we start a project under that condition.

I guess it was just hopeful thinking to wonder about whether there was control about file paths that the host could hook into.

Could work with samples dropped directly in the DAW though, right?

But how does Cakewalk know when Session Drummer is missing samples then, for example?

To be clear, I'm referring to things within Cakewalk's scope, not necessarily random 3rd party plugins and expecting Sonar to know, for instance, that you've imported a sample as a waveform in Serum.

Often times when samples used in a project get moved, the project and instruments are unable to find them without manually pointing them to the new location.

I understand that there are complexities with regard to how an instrument might store and access sample locations discretely. I'm unsure of whether Cakewalk has any access to that interaction so this is a request for possibility.

Anyway, if it's possible I think there could be value in a config value specifying the root of a main sample/file directory with which to perform a recursive search for the file. If the DAW has an abstraction between importing of assets to instruments, perhaps a file checksum could be calculated at time of import and stored locally, then when searching recursively through the root location, first the search is done on filename and/or other properties for performance reasons. Once the file properties are located, a checksum is calculated on the file and compared to the stored checksum that was generated on import. If it matches, a confirmation is issued in the UI and if confirmed, that file is used and whatever file descriptor used for that instance is updated. For any files which have no match in either properties or checksum revert to the original method of manual location.

Again, I don't know Cakewalk's code and how it interacts with plugins/instruments but I'm sure at least outside of an instrument context this could probably be implemented, leaving instruments to the old method. Although I think there's a use case for this in an instrument context if an interface/API for the file location is shared between the instrument and the DAW.

As for the performance of a recursive search for file names given variability of environment, would an internal index of files under the config'd root be space-prohibitive?

Looking forward to any insight.

Thanks!

1) Can you do a bigger screenshot? Either my eyes are tiny or that picture is. The magnifying glass was a lie. Try using Imgur or something? Snip tool?

2) Not if you don't want to lose things that are licensed to Sonar and not Bandlab. Which can be numerous depending on what version of Sonar you last had. Personally I leave my Sonar Platinum installed because it gives me access to all the stuff that comes with Platinum, in Bandlab's Cakewalk. It would not be the case otherwise. You can try and see for yourself but as far as licensing goes don't expect a lot of the rights you got with Sonar to have transfered over to CbBL. BL didn't purchase Sonar plus all the third party stuff you got when Sonar was Sonar.

2 minutes ago, Gregh1957 said:

thanks - I have used that method before and it can get close to the final result just much slower ie workflow is not as good. I think I will put in a feature request if that is possible

Yea if Bandlab adds that I will literally marry them one by one.

As long as the levels in your VST instrument's internal meters and in the associated audio track's output meters are not clipping then you should be fine if you don't care to go into a discussion about intersample peaking. If you're not clipping at the audio output track (and anywhere down the chain from there) then you're fine. It's no different than just balancing levels with normal audio files. If they're not already clipped, you just manage the gain along the chain.

If you mix your VST instruments so they sound right then all you need to do is make sure their output levels aren't clipping anywhere just like anything else. That's just you mixing.

The VST caveat regarding gain-staging is more for effects which take an audio input. Different VST effects behave differently and many digital effects can sound bad if you overload their input going in (or cumulatively through a series), but I'm not sure that's related to your question.

You can't dynamically adjust the shape of envelopes, but you can get the same effect in a less-elegant way.

Example

You have to create nodes by clicking on the envelope and right-clicking between the nodes to change the shape of the curve, but you're not limited to the curve shape in the sense that you can place unlimited nodes. It's not as simple to achieve in the same way something like drawing a curve in Serum works, but if you don't want to go insane trying to manually draw a curve in Cakewalk then your next best bet is to node your curve changes using a combination of shapes.

It's important to remember that while it's really easy to get caught up in how it "looks", the more important part is listening how the curve actually affects the audio you're applying it to. This is critical in Cakewalk because the shape, requiring such lego-type construction, is not going to be intuitively similar to what you hear. But as with all things audio, your ears should be your eyes before your eyes anyway, so really the pain point with Cakewalk is the lack of elegance you have to overcome to achieve what you're going for. Which is possible, just not intuitively so.