Olaf

On 3/15/2022 at 12:54 AM, Noel Borthwick said:

Great. That error message is primarily for diagnostics in cases where some tracks are inadvertently set to output silence.
You can disable it by setting the "WarnSilentBuses" flag to 1 in the Initialization File section in preferences.

Thanks for the tip.

It's strange that that "none" option existed in the sends - there's no such bus in the project, to be routed to no hardware output. And all buses are routed to the Master. Maybe the send to "none" option should not be available in the send menu - as it doesn't seem to do anything. If you want to keep a send, but disabled, you can just turn it off. If you don't need it at all you can delete it. So it seems all possibilities are already covered.

On 3/14/2022 at 11:33 PM, msmcleod said:

The tempo track shares the same envelope editor as the automation lanes.  When using jumps in automation, the dotted lines literally mean no automation at all.  This means if you started a project in the middle of a dotted area, no automation would be sent out until it reached a node.

Obviously you can't have an area in the project with no tempo, so for tempos, there's pretty much no difference between a jump and a straight line.  It's really down to how you want to work.

Multiple nodes at the same position should in most cases end up being merged into one node.  If in doubt, refer to the Tempo Inspector to see if the list of tempos makes sense - and of course, there's nothing wrong with deleting nodes / changing them to jumps if you want to.  Obviously, if the rare case when you start seeing strange envelopes being drawn with nodes / lines in the wrong place, this is a bug - the easiest way around this is to simply delete the offending nodes.

Thanks, man, great explanation!

I hope the bugs get fixed over the next releases.

3 hours ago, David Baay said:

I actually reported as a defect a long time ago that automation editing should not create two nodes on the same timestamp. For consistency and ease of editing, it seems to me that an 'instantaneous' change should always be represented as a jump segment.

To be honest I don't understand myself what the difference is between a two node linear change - which is my normal way of working with envelopes, so didn't think twice about it - and one node jump changes. At first I thought jump changes were a defect 😆, and the node missing was due to a bug. It looks a little confusing.

2 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Check if the track has sends that have been assigned to "none". That can also cause this issue. If you can't find out why send the cwp file and we can take a look.

That's exactly what it was. I removed it last night, and now the problem's gone away.

2 hours ago, David Baay said:

It's a bit hard to follow exactly what is happening, but the tool shown is for moving the split point not the slip-editing tool for moving a single clip boundary. Moving the split point will replace the waveform on the left side with the waveform on the right.

I know, that's what it's supposed to do, but it doesn't do it. If you notice in the video, it inserts an entirely different wave clip - I don't know how it chooses the particular one - in the slip space.

So, instead of having a boundary between two clips, you now have three.

2 hours ago, David Baay said:

While the behavior you captured does seem a bit buggy, I would say the root of the problem is that you have two tempo nodes on the same time to begin with rather than having a single node with a 'jump' transition from the previous tempo. Moving the single node at a jump point will behave as expected.

It's just normal envelope editing, same as with gain envelopes, pan, or anything else. It's a linear tempo change, according to the instructions: https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Tempo.07.html#1999891 and https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Tempo.04.html. You can see there're two nodes on a number of tempo changes, in the tutorial images, too. I don't believe it processes the two nodes as being exactly at the same timestamp, though, I think that's just the graphic representation, that would be the logical assumption. That how it should be, at least - adjacent, distanced by the smallest timeline resolution. In any case, it shouldn't create a third node.

2 hours ago, msmcleod said:

There's nothing wrong with having the tempo nodes organised like that, and no need to make it into a jump point.

Thanks for confirming.

2 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Something else is preventing the slip edit.

I've moved the clip on a different lane, exactly to show that there is no clip underneath it, or to either side - usually invisible clip fragments would prevent the edit, but it's not the case here. The weird thing is that if you leave it alone, and do some other operations, you come back to it, and the slip works again.

After installing Update 1, I've had the following problem. An audio track that is routed to the Master is detected as assigned to an unused hardware output, on project load. Of course the track is not silent, and it plays alright, because it's not routed to any hardware output, but that's how it's recognized.

And I've started having audio dropouts - I believe the code is 19.

@Noel Borthwick New finds, while working on the project. So it's all these things. I hope all these details are telling , so maybe I won't need to add different ones - they're all in the vein of the main phenomena described here.

These are the latest.

Resizing a clip inserts a portion of a different clip in the resize space, and moving a tempo envelope segment always creates new nodes where the initial node was.

The node values are displayed inverted in the tempo envelope.

Clip resizing becomes unresponsive, for some reason. It's happened several times in the past.

On 3/7/2022 at 7:03 AM, Craig Anderton said:

There are other projects on my YouTube channel, but I think those would interest you the most, and maybe give you some ideas

Let me know if you have any other questions, I'd be happy to help.

Thanks a lot, I'll check them all out.

On 3/7/2022 at 7:03 AM, Craig Anderton said:

Perhaps some of the effects that you add to every track would be more effective if used while mastering?

Weirdly enough, even though I have a ton of plugins in the project (about 90, including the sends and the synths), all of them almost exclusively serve one purpose, that of mirroring recording in a real room, through consoles, to tape. That's it. So I have room/studio reverbs, consoles, summers, transformers, tapes, etc. Plus the amps.

It's true to that you have to pay special attention to keep the levels constant when going into bus saturation, clipping and/or compression, so I try to do that. If not, a lot of the mud will come from exactly the master bus, and I found that out the hard way, several times. The misleading part is that what you think helps you, on a certain day, cause it thins out the honk, for instance, you realize adds a lot of bloatware lower down, that you weren't focusing on, when you listen to it the next day, with fresh ears. But I keep them on the mix bus, because I feel that without them, things don't have the necessary depth, roundness, glue and rich texture, and since they're gonna be there at the end, I think it's better to make all the EQ/compression/saturation moves through them.

On 3/7/2022 at 12:18 PM, pwalpwal said:

it did get a digital remaster in the 90s, could that be having an influence? like, you're piling on the analog emulators, but the remaster was probably trying to cut out the analog-ness at least to some degree? just a thought

That's an interesting thought. I know there are some plugins out there that can do de-saturation, but I don't think they work on complex sources, and if the remaster was done in the 90s, they wouldn't have been available. My version is plenty analog, and it sounds great - except for the cymbals, which sound like they've been recorded separately - it just has that focused sound, with smooth, but more metallic transients - that I believe comes from clipping. I've tried that on the master bus, and that's exactly the effect it had.

And I was thinking about consoles, and how people drive them, and how much gain they can take, whereas plugins seem to have a very narrow sweet spot, usually within a few fractions of a db - certainly smaller than what consoles seem to have. And I was thinking about why that was, and about that sound consoles put out, where, when driven, they seem to get these exact characteristics - punch, smooth, brilliant attack, less dynamics, and a cleaning up of the low mids, instead of swelling them, like plugins do - that clipping generates. And it dawned on me that maybe the reason for which they can get away with so much saturation, and so much drive, and have a wider sweet spot, is exactly that - that they push the signal into clipping. So I figured I'd give it a try.

I've tried an experiment, if anybody's interested. Listening test, to see if you can spot the differences, or it's just my self-suggestion. I've exported the same song snippet in three versions, one with no clipping added, the 2nd with clipping on the master bus, and the 3rd with clipping on each track - except the piano.

Note that I've gone VERY easy on the clipping, so the differences are very subtle. I'm curious if you can hear the differences among them, and what those differences are.

On 3/7/2022 at 5:14 PM, David Baay said:

Otherwise the usual procedure when you don't want any part of the last take it is to just delete the last take lane and then heal the split in one of the remaining takes, either by sweeping through the whole clip, starting from outside it, or by selecting the two clips and Ctrl+clicking one of them with the Comp tool.

I think the result would be the same, while recording in a loop, even with punch regions, cause you'd still go over the previous takes - because of the loop. I just wish it didn't split the previous takes automatically. On some projects it doesn't, but I haven't identified the setting. Do you know, by chance, how to set that up?

On 3/2/2022 at 6:02 PM, Craig Anderton said:

Bring the two-track mix into Cakewalk. Select the two-track mix, open AudioSnap, and select Clip Follows Project. The tempo track doesn't need to match the two-track master, because any tempo changes are relative, not absolute. Just move tempo markers around on the tempo track to change tempo.

Hey Craig, thanks a lot for the advice! I really appreciate your audio knowledge, and have read a lot of your articles. I am interested in workarounds, but where I also need to move the parts around, to various structure variants, and adjust the tempo accordingly, very frequently, I think the process of exporting everything and reopening it separately might be very cumbersome. I've adopted manually stretching every clip for now - it's still a lot more cumbersome than just readjusting the tempo and have the clips follow along, but at least it solves the alignment issue, and it seems the simplest, under the circumstances.

I'd like to pick your brain on one issue, though. I use a lot of warmers in my mix - console channels on every track, a console bus emulator on the two-bus, for the summing, plus a transformer and crossover emulator, tapes on everything, and the end result is warm, and thick, with a good stereo image, the harshness rounded off, all good and well, but then I listen to Berlin - Marillion, which I have as a reference track for this mix, and everything seems to be so focused in their mix, no flab, with a lot more net, yet not harsh, transients, whereas mine seem pasty and diffuse, bloated, and grainy - a smooth grain, but still - it has a "grey" sound.

Would clippers help on every track? - I've got a clipper on the maser bus, cause it does have that type of effect - netter - more of a metallic brilliance, but without harshness - transients, and it sucks in the gut. You do seem to have that kind of transients in your Youtube project, do you mix through a console? Nice songs, I detect a little bit of a Mike Oldfield guitar in there, Bryan Ferry vocals - who's singing? -  and a little Pink Floyd mood combined with a Brit sound. I like the guitar sound at 10:10. Real amp, right? Did you play everything? My favorites are "My butterfly" and "Goodbye to you".

On 2/28/2022 at 12:54 PM, Will_Kaydo said:

I think you have stretch on, thats why the information in side the clip is moving. It's trying to adjust to the tempo its stretched too.

Hey, Will! Normally, stretching the clip would proportionally stretch the wave content along with the edge you're stretching and in proportion to the clip length, not slide it inside inside the clip like that. And it would do it as you change the stretch value, not on trim. What's in the video it does even without stretch enabled, and with "follow project tempo" on.

If you want to check out the project, follow this link, I've aligned the clips via stretch for about half the project, around 3:55, it starts to be out of sync again, for the next two parts - I had those aligned, too, but slowed down the tempo again, by a bit. It's the same recordings, only I've bounced a few clips, after having them aligned, and it's a little less embarrassing 🙄. Same improvised vocals, recorded on the phone.

https://we.tl/t-d4aBu8cIEt

On 2/28/2022 at 2:36 PM, marled said:

Most of the time I can handle it by copying/moving the particular clips to a new working track (with only 1 take lane!) and then bouncing one of the clips before I do the crossfades. Sometimes a project close and reopen helps.

A lot of people say that CbB is much more bug-free than Sonar, maybe it's true for a lot of things (mixing, recording, MIDI). But in respect of clip editing I don't agree at all! There are so many bugs and hassles there.

Yeah, I agree with you. Ever since the new export dialog, I can't export a song in the same session I've been mixing - it only exports some of the audio tracks completely unprocessed, and ignores everything else. I need to reopen the project every time before export, and redo all the setting that it doesn't remember. Very frustrating. Every time I open a single take track - after comping, I like to keep everything on one lane - it arbitrarily creates a second lane and it automatically distributes the clips between them.  Another thing that bugs like hell is that when you record a new take it automatically splits all the takes in the parallel lanes, at the point where you stop recording. I have to manually remove the clips before it and resize them all, and if you're recording in a loop, the splits are very small and you have to zoom in, cause you can't grab them, and so on. Do it after every single take. It doesn't do it in all projects, and I have no idea what prompts this behavior. I've changed all the settings in the comping settings, no change. Very frustrating.

Absolutely agree with you.

On 2/25/2022 at 6:25 PM, John Vere said:

there’s a size limit on files posted directly here so no videos and best to put GIF on giffy

You'd be surprised to know - I know I was - that certain mp4 encodings take far less space than GIF files, so it's actually more space efficient to save them that way. These videos all add up to a few megs, so I'm well within the quota. When it's exceeded, I'll delete them. Fingers crossed these (huge) problems get solved by then.

On 2/25/2022 at 6:25 PM, John Vere said:

the only way I can change the tempo of a song is to first export all the audio as stems first.
Then I delete all audio tracks and drag the exported audio back to where they came from.

Thank you for the advice, I can't use it, though, since my problem is having different tempos on different parts - and not definite ones, at that - which I need to move around and tempo adjust to fit the new places in the song. So exporting everything as single take stems is exactly what I can't do. But I've settled on a definite structure - still think I may need to adjust the tempo on one part, though, but nothing major. Just hand stretch until it sounds as "right" as it can, and then rely on Melodyne for the final touches.

@Noel Borthwick continued

Select Tempo envelope node unavailable on hover over node + Draw click on node deletes different node

Moving Arranger section fails if a wave clip exceeds the section area, and moving Arranger clip doesn't move the Tempo nodes.

EDIT: added these two clips:

Comp trimming clips trims the start of the next clip.

Comp Trimming a clip moves the wave content inside the clip.

On 12/24/2021 at 5:21 AM, Jimbo 88 said:

What I think your are trying to do is create a scenario where CbB detects beats in all your audio clips and adjusts everything to match a new tempo...

No, it actually involves performing some simple math. It knows what the current tempo is, it knows what the new tempos is, just needs to recalculate the clip length by multiplying it by the ratio between the two.

That said, @Jimbo 88, @David Baay, thanks a lot for your input. I gave up trying to use "follow project tempo", and just used clip stretch instead. Tried to match the clip end to the normal grid line, and it worked relatively well. Not 100%, cause the stretch ratio only has 1 decimal, but close enough. And on that happy note, I've finally managed to decide on a song structure. Still have a little rearranging to do, for the new section order, but nothing spectacular.

@Noel Borthwick I have some new irregular behavior clips, working with the Arranger and the Tempo Track. "Arranger Exclude" is permanently unchecked in the Tempo Lane.

Tempo envelope nodes not copied with Arranger sections

Copying Arranger section doesn't copy Tempo change & doesn't observe track order. Pressing DEL with Arranger Section copied attempts to deletes Synth

Drawing node on Tempo envelope deletes different node

On 2/23/2022 at 5:47 PM, David Baay said:

I will not have time to look at the project for a while, but I can tell you from some of what you described that a key to getting this to work as expected in this use case is ensuring that the Follow Option is 'Auto strech' before you enable Follow Project. There may still be issues, but that will address a lot of them.

Thanks!

On 1/11/2022 at 1:48 AM, msmcleod said:

You can change both the online and offline algorithms for audio stretching in preferences:

Thanks, I have them both on Elastique Pro, and that's the behavior I get.

@Noel Borthwick Here is the project download link, as a .zip file, The project file is inside the folder. I couldn't export it as a bundle project, because it's got the clip stretching active on many of them.

https://we.tl/t-84601Ma8Vt

The vocal is a sketch recording on the phone, in gibberish, so pay no particular attention to it.

There are all sorts of weird clip behaviors, as well, related to trimming, resizing, once "follow project tempo" is activated. You can find the gifs I've made here:

https://we.tl/t-bk0LP7aW8q

If you can't make sense of something, or have questions, shoot me a message.

There's also irregular behavior that I've noted before with Softube Tape, which then stopped after a few updates, and now happens with all kinds of plugins - namely various transport related commands (stop & play, or moving the playhead/cursor on the timeline during play) reset or move the parameters within the plugins around, It almost makes me reluctant to stop playing or move along the timeline.

These plugins are:

Embertone Sensual Saxophone (Kontakt 6.7) - resets the "*****" parameter = play velocity, reverb & distortion;

Waves H-EQ - EQ bands jump up randomly;

Sonimus SonEQ - resets the parameters to 0.

They're all documented in the Gif folder.

There's also the recurring problem of the Arranger Track not showing on project open, sometimes not even the Tempo Track, and having to be rechecked every time.

Variety of Sound NastyDLA Wet only setting is not remembered.

The Browser/Synth Rack/Help window sizes and order in the right side dock are not remembered.

Very rarely either of these settings will be remembered, but I couldn't tell you how and why.

If these were solved in the next releases, that would be a massive improvement.

Thanks!

On 12/16/2021 at 3:43 AM, Tim Smith said:

I didn't know this existed. Thanks for the FYI !

Three out of four times when I think this program doesn't have something, it turns out it does and I never knew how to get to it.

 

in many instances, they could be named and made to be accessed more intuitively.

yes, i agree that every setting or choice that you make for your project should be saved with it, no matter how small or in relation to what.

10 hours ago, Jimbo 88 said:

Ok forgive me, there is a lot to wade thru here, I might understand the issue, I might not.

I do a lot of audio design, vo recording, sound effects etc..to picture or absolute time, then score (compose) music to picture (or even just the audio).  I change tempos all the time.  Some audio i want to stay right where it's at and other elements i want to follow the new tempos (tempi?).

So the trick is choosing an element's time base.  Is it musical or absolute.  you can change that in the clip and track properties on the left.  So let's say I have placed a musical audio clip in the timeline as part of the composition, say a rhythm guitar.  It starts in measure "X", but now the tempo has got to change.  I "bounce to Clips" the guitar part making sure the clip is exactly at the start and end of a measure.  I can change the tempo any way I want, then time stretch the guitar part back to the end of the measure that it was at.  I have done this many times always successful.   If the time stretched audio is what I like.. I bounce it to clips again, cause i found that working with a lot of time stretched elements will cause  apps to crash...this is true in Protools, Cubase, etc.

What I think your are trying to do is create a scenario where CbB detects beats in all your audio clips and adjusts everything to match a new tempo...that might work if you convert all your audio to a groove clip.  that seems to be fraught with issues.  I have seen this work, but never always successful ...in many other Daws.

I hope I helped and did not waste your time.

Best! Good Luck.

Thanks, I was thinking of something along the same lines, but couldn't figure it out. I'll take a closer look at what you said, later, and try it step by step - and get back to you.

14 hours ago, bdickens said:

You could work everything out with virtual instruments and then replace them after everything is sorted.

that's a good idea, but i've got guitar solos in there, and vocals, and those are hard to emulate.

i've grabbed the bull by the balls, and went old style: assessed a tempo for each part, on the fly, hoped it'd work, took a deep breath and re-recorded everything, except for the bass, which i'll have to redo later. if i later decide they don't work, it's back to the drawing board. but i might simplify my life for the clean guitar arpeggios.

11 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Our team is out for the holidays but we'll follow up when we're back in Jan. The most important thing would be to supply a link to a project file (with audio) that exhibits the problem so that we can look into it.

Thanks, I'll render a project file with the audio embedded, and send it to you. Happy holidays!

2 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Ultimately, CbB may *not* be the tool for how you like to work at the end of the day - it's not out of the question to do one process in one DAW and then move to another for something else. In this case, you could sketch out your tempo/meter map elsewhere, once you're ready to track properly you would export a MIDI file with the tempo info in it, open in CbB and do your tracking in a fast and familiar environment. You wouldn't run into any of these issues because the timing changes would already be locked in before you added any audio.

From what I gather, the timebase that everything works to goes back to how it was originally implemented in the old Twelvetone days and has been enhanced over the years since (Bakers, please tell me to stop talking now if I'm way off base!) so there may be limitations with how tempo works with certain operations currently. It'd be good to know either way what's going on.

That being said, I've personally never run into this kind of problem because my workflow is quite different, despite doing music that can get fairly complex with tempo and meter changes, so how you're using it may shed some light on something that needs to be looked at.

Ultimately, it should be able to stretch audio right when changing the tempo on different parts - without resizing, trimming issues, clip jumps, doubling clips, etc. These are things that shoulnd't normally happen, regardless of the workflow. Most DAWs do that, certainly Reaper and Reason do it well, CW does it, too, officially, except that it doesn't work.

2 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

That's happened to me on occasions too. I solved that by uploading to somewhere like Imagur or Giphy and copying in the embedding link - that usually does the trick.

Thanks, I took your advice, and it worked like a charm. 👍

I've replaced all the webp files with gif links.

https://giphy.com/channel/Tryggvasson

for those who about to comment before seeing what the problem is - for terror of getting infected.

10 hours ago, InstrEd said:

Olaf wants to do it but CbB is not really the DAW for that style IMHO

If this poor implementation of things it actually purports to do were changed, it would actually be my DAW of choice, but this way many functions which are actual functions of the DAW - so they shouldn't be a stretch - are barely functional.

I've tried various stuff - Harrison, Reaper, after coming from Reason, but all have their limitations. They don't misbehave like that, but are limited or overcomplicated in other things. I'll look into them some more. Still waiting for Luna for Windows. Reaper actually has a knob by which you can vary the tempo - absolutely no issues - no clip rearangements, no trimming problems, no clips jumping 500 bars, no nothing.

10 hours ago, InstrEd said:

if you don't like the advice given just nod and move on

I normally do, until the guy gets butthurt that "he was doing it wrong" - it was about him after two lines - with an answer that didn't address the problem in the first place. You know, dropping by just to let people know they're doing things wrong - without knowing what they're actually doing, or bothering to check what the problem is - and he's doing them right 😉.

Hey, @bdickens congrats, man!

@InstrEd This IS preproduction for me. You get to decide on tempos beforehand when you have a band to rehearse with, and have all the parts and structure figured out before recording. That's how I did it, too, when I was in a band - and if the guy had left smugness aside, he would have known that's normal - nothing revolutionary about it.

But since I record everything myself, the playback in the DAW IS my band, and rearranging parts and playing them at different tempos is exactly how  I can replicate figuring the parts out with "my band" - especially this song that comes out in pieces - the hardest to take shape of all my work - and now impossible, thanks to CW not working.

But regardless of all this, I don't think giving advice on your workflow - even if doable or relevant - is needed to justify reporting bugs in the program 😳.

I fail to see how those (huge) bugs would be alright on a different workflow. It's like some people want the programs to work badly, just so they can prove some (imaginary) point. Egos get inflated, the problem stays.

Anybody want it fixed? I do. And, objectively, I think it should be.

7 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

I'm not going to download any file I don't know what it is

Unfortunately, not knowing - or even caring - what something is doesn't stop people having opinions on it these days.

7 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Just FYI, those are .webp files which basically are a Google replacement for JPG

You'd think people would know that. At the very least, not imagine somebody is posting stuff on the forum just "to infect their computers" - probably protected by three separate antiviruses. If do, at least not imagine opinions.

7 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

it might be more accessible to people here to transcode them over to JPG or animated GIF to make them easier to check out

I've tried to upload them as GIFs first, but the upload failed. AVIs are too large, so this was a compromise solution.

7 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

t'd be good to narrow that down to see if it's actually a CbB thing or local to your machine environment

I've thought about it, too, on several issues, but they get repeated on different Windows versions, and different hardware. Besides, it's hard to imagine that that sort of behavior, if you check it out, could be caused by anything other than CW itself.