Stephen Rybacki

Thank you for the responses.  I currently have a Nektar Panorama P4 that works GREAT in both Reason and Reaper -- just not Cakewalk.  I'd make a switch of I can find a comparable piece that does the same things and recognizes Cakewalk as well.

It's not terrible though since I also use a Yamaha MO8 that has a DAW Control function that DOES work with Cakewalk in a limited way - but is to my right, not front and center as the P4 is.

I know I can fiddle with ACT and such, but are there any currently supported surfaces that work with CbB (SONAR)?

21 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

If the internet is gone permanently, I think you will have far worse problems than not being able to use your DAW
You can authorize cakewalk via the offline auth mechanism but yes that requires at least a remote internet connection somewhere.
Pretty much most software today is tied to some sort of activation mechanism, its just how the industry has evolved.

All it takes to do that is a Kessler Syndrome scenario and we're there.  It could happen too.

Anyway, IF that does happen, I'll be too busy hunting and gathering to give much of a crap about pop music anymore 😂

17 hours ago, mettelus said:

I think you answered your own question and spent the rest of your post confirming it 😃 If the internet exploded and you never got another update ever again, CbB as it is now will exceed your needs. As with most complex programs, focus on what you want to do and learn that; it is easy to get overwhelmed/frustrated to try to learn too much at once.

Wait, the Internet is going to explode?  I have mixed feelings about that 😀

12 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

There's no call for forcing yourself to warp your head around any piece of software when there are so many great alternatives. You have a powerful enough computer to run any DAW on the market.

Of the other two, Cakewalk will surely satisfy the needs of a singer/songwriter and then some. For that kind of thing, you want something with good tools for comping and mixing. I can record in anything, but give me Cakewalk when it comes to mixing time. As far as comping, Cakewalk has a full set of tools. It has a learning curve for comping, to be sure, but I don't know of a DAW that doesn't. I've never run into a comping task that I couldn't accomplish with Cakewalk's tools and workflow, but I still from time to time get into "flurry of Ctrl-Z's" trouble when using the Smart Tool and turned out it wasn't in the mode I thought it was. My more confident workflow with editing is to switch to the Edit or Draw Tool I need rather than relying on my memorization of what the Smart Tool is supposed to do in a given situation.

That's my caveat: Cakewalk is great for comping if you remember to loosen your grip on the Smart Tool.

Although I have a license for Reason Lite, I'm much less familiar with it because I couldn't get my head around it. I never even got as far as recording anything, so I don't know about their comping tools.

No software, regardless of licensing model, is immune to abandonment. Sonar was payware up until 5 years ago, Cakewalk, Inc. had been around for 30 years and was owned by a much larger company. Then, poof. You're old enough to remember when WordStar, then Word Perfect absolutely owned the word processing market. The mighty may fall. A program like Cakewalk or Chrome that's not expected to earn its parent company revenue in the form of license fees isn't necessarily less "safe" than one that must constantly keep its user base updating in order to earn a profit and justify its existence.

For that reason, I encourage people to remain at least familiar with one DAW other than their primary. At least familiar enough that if DAW A breaks for whatever reason, you can at least get tracks down with DAW B when inspiration hits rather than struggling to get it into record mode.

There's some FUD about "will Cakewalk keep working if BandLab and its validation server goes away?" I have faith in both the Cakewalk devs, and then if there are legal issues, the world of hackers, that if that ever happens, a solution will be found.

Well, I know Reason pretty well and yes it has comping tools.  Their focus in this last few years is using it as a plug-in with other DAWs.  You can still use it stand alone, but I sense the majority of people have gone to Ableton, Studio One or whatever using their Reason investment as a super duper VST.  The more I spend my time perusing how-to videos by a some of the fine YouTubers out there, the more I like it.

37 minutes ago, Craig Anderton said:

Specific DAWs (including Cakewalk) have specialized features that other DAWs don't have. Unless you need a feature that can be found only in one DAW, Cakewalk will do pretty much anything you want it to do, and do it well.

Of course, the biggest advantage is the money you would normally spend on a DAW, you can spend on plug-ins to supplement what comes with the program. 

 

 

Hi Craig, glad to see you're here.

Thanks folks for the thoughts.  I might as well stay with SONAR until it doesn't matter anymore I guess.  I've got to just settle in and do this daily and get a real workflow now.

Longish post but there is a question here.

First off, I don't do this for a living.  I am strictly a hobbyist who is really interested on the process of music production, and also a guitarist of the singer songwriter persuasion.  I took a few classes at Berklee College (online) and acquired both Sonar X2 and Reason 6.5 as a result.  For the mere $60 it cost me, I also bought Reaper. Since then (2013), I've tried figuring out all three (and upgraded each along the way) so that I have SONAR Platinum (which I got free as a result of participating in market research by then Cakewalk), Reason 12 and many Rack Extensions and Reaper 6.  Needless to say to quote an old Indian proverb "If you chase two rabbits, you'll lose both" - I have not become really good at any of them.

So I've decided it's time to focus on ONE DAW, and get to know if inside and out.  Reaper, to me is rather obtuse and my brain doesn't work that way.  Reason is really easy for me to use and I love the rack metaphor, but it is primarily targeted at the EDM crowd and MIDI music production.  It has some fairly good guitar sims curtesy of Kuassa  but nothing like say Overloud TH-U which is a great program.  That leaves CbB with all the trimmings of SPLAT plus Overloud TH-U and Addictive Drums.

Anyway, the TL;DR question...Is it worth it given my stated skills and goals (singer-guitarist and aspiring songwriter) to hitch my star to CbB?  I can still use Reason an12 as a plug-in so I don't consider that investment as a loss.   I love the workflow in the Skylight interface and I'm blessed with a kick-butt computer setup (Legion i7 8c16t gaming machine with a NVidia RTX3070 GPU and 32 GB of memory plus to curved 4k monitors), but I would hate to put in the effort in CbB if it is destined to be obscured (and as a result abandoned) by the PTP giants like Presonus, ProTools, etc.  Can CbB be all I'll need for the rest of my life (I'm 63)?

10 hours ago, Cactus Music said:

So you managed to install the old ASIO drivers?  That’s odd because I tried on 2 different W10 computers and got a warning about incompatible driver. Not that it matters but I wanted to use it on my office computer.  I’m just using the onboard audio which is just fine but it’s a hassle when I want headphones as the jacks are on the back. 

No, I didn't actually.  Didn't even bother to try since I'm on Windows 11.  BTW, your Youtube videos have been very helpful!

2 hours ago, Cactus Music said:

The problem is you can only use one ASIO driver at a time. You can use both interfaces but not together in ASIO mode.
 

You would have to try either WASAPI or WDM. The Focusrite supports WASAPI but older devices often don’t. 

So you can do this if you need extra inputs to record a live session. But you don’t want to be using WASAPI or WDM for overdubs or they will not be in sync. You definitely need to stay in ASIO mode for best performance. But for a live session 2 or more interfaces can work  just fine. 
 

Is that an M Audio fast track pro by any chance?  I have one too but it doesn’t have W10 drivers so only runs on W7. 
 

If this is only to occasionally use the SPDIF then you can easily just have both interfaces connected but don’t turn them both on. Before you open Cakewalk turn on the one you want to use and it will be ready to roll. I do this with a set up were I have a Tascam 1641, a Scarlett 6i6 and a Motu M4. 

Yes it is a FastTrack Pro, and I'm on Windows 11.  The real goal is to be able to record my Yamaha MO8 synth, using digital if possible.  But I can string a couple of 1/4" cables to my Focusrite if I need to do that just as easily.

Thanks folks, great forum here.

OK, that makes sense.  Thanks for the reply.  I guess it'll remain my emergency backup.

I have an older M-Audio interface I replaced with my Focusrite, but that old interface has one thing that this Focusrite doesn't - a SP/DIF connection.  So I'd like to have that as well.

Can this be done, or is it more trouble than it's worth?

I don't know if this will help or not, but I have an original M-Audio MIDI-Sport 2x2 MIDI interface just languishing in a box somewhere.  If you pay for shipping, you can have it if you want it.

BTW, what does MCU actually stand for?

10 hours ago, Clovis Ramsay said:

@Stephen Rybacki I can only speak for Reason and CbB as I have used Reason for ten years now, it amazes me at how well it manages CPU and memory.   When compared to VSTi's in CbB, the difference in the handling of CPU and memory comes down to Reason inst. when used inside the Reason DAW (Not the VST Reason Rack plug for use in all DAWs ) are not virtual instrument "VSTi's".   

Now I don't know how many cores your i5 CPU has but I was running Reason 11 on  an old HP Pavilion with a AMD 1.70 Ghz Phenom II Qaud Core P940. 4GB Ram.  Now back in 2009, this was a serious laptop of the day with a GPU card but is not able to run Win10 so I opted for Win8.1.  Reason not once ever gave me trouble except that Reason is way to keyboard shortcut focused and sometimes I feel like im reading a language I cannot speak while trying to edit tracks.  The mixing board is modeled after SSL and includes official SSL Channel and Bus comp.  Reason is a powerful and great sounding DAW and has the least impact on my old slow outdated laptop I use for running midi keyboards for writing.  But you will have to learn a new language in terms of editing and getting around the DAW,

Or you could get Reason and use the Reason Rack plug in that comes with it and open up Reasons instruments within Cakewalk so that you can have best of both worlds!

Thanks so much for the thoughtful reply. My i5 has 4 cores and an on board GPU by Intel and it runs Windows 10 beautifully. Very responsive.

I guess i wasn't clear enough in my original post; I already do have Reason and yes it seems to run the things I do fine. It does however seem to take forever to start... Do you notice that? I'm on R11S with a bunch of rack extensions over the 8 years I've had it. 

I just happened to notice that both CbB and Reaper load up darn near instantly by comparison so that was where my question was coming from.

At present, I have 3 different DAWS that I am vacillating between - CbB, Reaper and Reason.  I have an older i5 Ivy Bridge chipset machine with 28gb of memory and a pair of solid state drives -- meaning the long pole in my particular tent is the CPU at this [point.  I was able to salvage new life out of this box for around $200 by getting the SSHDs and RAM upgrades vs paying $1300-$1700 for a faster CPU and less RAM and less hard disk space.  Sidenote -- why do we still call SSHD drives "hard drives"?

Anyway, my question is this; of these three  DAWs, anyone care to weight in on which is the lightest in terms of base CPU usage, aside from VSTs etc?

22 hours ago, marled said:

I cannot join the fanboy symphony, though I really like the interface and concepts of Sonar Platinum.

Cakewalk by BandLab? For me there were not many useful changes, just the visual change of clip gain comes to mind (even if it is not always reliable). Things like the plugin browser or the export module seem redundant and useless IMO. I could never cotton up to the Articulation Maps and the Arranger, too sophisticated and intransparent (i.e. I often missed something, maybe my faults or I am too dull). Still there are some of the great, old features that would need some love: AudioSnap, Take Lanes, Drum Replacer, VocalSync, ...

When there was the Gibson debacle I tried different other DAWs, but I could not find a real replacement at that time. But the ongoing instabilities of clip editing in take lanes and AudioSnap in CbB forced me recently to invest in learning Reaper what I don't regret! Absolutely reliable, easy to install and lightweight! I also noticed that clip gain runs so much better and stable down to the maximum zoom level.

But for work with virtual instruments I still use CbB 2020.08 . I am too accustomed to its work flow! And for mixing I haven't decided yet!

You are right about Reaper -- it's very lean and extremely stable for sure.

I got started on SONAR with X2 Studio and Reason 6.5 back in 2013 for a Berklee class I was taking at the time.  I loved using both, albeit for different reasons.  When Gibson shuttered Cakewalk, I was SERIOUSLY upset since I by that time had SONAR Platinum with Lifetime Upgrades.  Not to mention the Pro Channel upgrades, Rapture Pro and other stuff to boot.

So, I leaned hard into Reason (currently have R11 Suite) even to the point of trying to learn synth programming (I am a guitar/mando player) which I do enjoy.  But Reason has gone the way of others and now offers a subscription model that they SAY will not supplant perpetual licenses like mine.  The good news is that Reason itself is a VST that can be added to any other DAW at will.  So, I've decided that R11 is my last stop on the Reason bus line.

I also spent $60 and got Reaper which is also cool, if maybe a bit arcane?  It is sort of like SONAR, but missing the elegance in my opinion -even if it is powerful as all heck.

I am not a professional in any way -- just an older music lover with  a genuine need to learn new things like recording.  Of all the software for this purpose I have ever used, I liked SONAR the best really.  And so I am back to really give Bandlab a decent shot since they've picked up the ball and run so well with it.  From what I see, it works and acts just like SONAR, right down to all the plugins from SPLAT working like they ever did in Cakewalk.

So I am looking forward to reengaging with this community at this point.  I am guessing you're all fans so feel free to beat me into submission sooner than later with effusive praise

11 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Welcome back! BandLab volunteered to fulfil the lifetime membership responsibility so there was effectively no change for lifetime members 

It's nice to see you're still here Noel.  And I see Craig A. still is here too.

I also have a few other Cakewalk assets, like Rapture Pro, Concrete Limiter and the other Pro Channel goodies.

Good to be back!

Well it's certainly "pro" enough for me! 

I gave up on Cakewalk after the Gibson thing because I was a so-called "Lifetime Member" with SPLAT.  I was so ticked I could have spit nails.

4 years later, it doesn't seem so bad and honestly, I miss using SONAR so here I am.  Again.