John Bradley

Indeed it is. That knowledge would've saved me hundreds of clicks over the years. I was expecting one of the tools to switch to something like that "region up-or-down" cursor when I was hovering over the envelope itself, not up by the titlebar of the clip. Excellent! I'm hip to the keyboard nudge commands though I mostly use them in the PRV rather than on the automation envelopes. What I was actually asking about is the ability to nudge the handles up or down via the keyboard, which doesn't seem to be a thing. Though I wouldn't be surprised if that's in there somewhere I've never noticed.

Cool! The best feature requests are the ones that are already in there.

I routinely keep nearly all tracks frozen in order to keep my steam-powered PC happy. Sometimes, I need to unfreeze everything in order to make some structural change (e.g., the guitar solo isn't long enough, need to add more repetitions of the backing tracks). Then I need to freeze everything again, particularly if I need to record some more and need to be able to run at low latency. It'd be really handy if I could select multiple tracks and choose "Freeze" or "Unfreeze" to do all of them at once. Not in parallel simultaneously (though I wouldn't say no if that were possible), but sequentially without my further intervention. Bulk Unfreeze isn't critical, given how fast that is. Though it'd still be nice not to have to click each track one at a time. But Freeze can easily take a minute or two per track, and it'd be great if I could wander off and do something else, rather than sit at the DAW waiting for each track to render so I can start up the next. Tedious.

1) I'm taunted by Youtube videos of people using ProTools and other daws. They can have an automation envelope active, select a region using one of the select tools, hover over the envelope in the selected region, and just drag it up and down, which inserts control handles and moves the part of the envelope in the selection all in one easy and intuitive operation. In CW you can right-click the envelope, choose Add Nodes At Selection and then you have to switch to the Move Tool to move the region up and down, and then switch back to the Smart Tool you were probably previously using. It's clunky. 2) I almost exclusively use Jump transitions on my Automation, not Linear. Which means I spend a fair amount of time arguing with CW over the issue. Each time I click to add a node to the Automation envelope, it sets the part of the envelope to the left of the new point to Linear mode, even if it was already in a Jump 'region'. Each node addition requires a right-click context menu to set part of the envelope back to Jump. Some sort of Default mechanism - like remembering the last choice I made on said context menu and using that transition mode until I say differently - would be appreciated. 3) Related: it should be possible to set the transition mode on multiple envelope segments at once. I can select multiple control points (and thus segments) simultaneously, but right-clicking and changing mode only effects the one segment I clicked on. 4) Better vertical precision on the control handles. Currently they're tied to the pixel height of the track (or Automation Lane). In my normal semi-expanded view of a track (say, 100px high or so), I can select a handle on a Volume envelope, hold shift to constrain the motion to vertical, and drag up or down. But because the track isn't displayed hugely, I can only move by .4db increments (or whatever), because that's what moving the handle up or down by a single pixel maps to. I'd like to request a "Precision Mode" similar to what happens when you hold shift and drag one of the Console faders - multiple pixels worth of motion map to a 0.1db change in the fader level, or whatever the smallest value change allowed happens to be for the given parameter. 5) Related to #4. It should also be possible to precisely nudge selected Automation handles using the keyboard (arrow keys plus some modifiers). Personally don't need it if I got #4, but I could see a case where arrow-key nudging would still be a nice feature. Reduced motor skills, trying to work a laptop touchpad in the back of a moving tour bus, whatever. 6) Orphaned Envelopes after you delete an effect that had automation. Why are they even a thing? They should probably show up as a lane when you show Automation Lanes, and also as a selection in the Automation flyout menu tied to the "Edit Filter" field (in both the parent track and the Automation Lanes, if shown).

"Restraint? Restraint's a thing for cattle or love play, not for producing music!"

Session Picked Nylon, Prime Bass, Play Box, and other instruments are newer than Komplete 13 (Sept. 2020 release, apparently), and therefore not included in any of the bundles. That's how they get you to upgrade to Komplete 14 later this year.

Depends how much top-quality stuff you already own, I suppose. I've got Modo Bass, and continue to use it. The basic Komplete 13 only comes with two basses, and I wasn't terribly impressed with them. Not that I'm terribly impressed with Modo Bass either, but I'm used to it. Pianos: I've only got one of the Addictive Keys pianos and that Cakewalk 'Amber' thing, so the addition of all their piano libraries not named Alicia will probably be useful next time I need a piano. Drums: Don't own BFD or SD3. Was considering buying SSD5.5 (only have the free demo) for $120, but probably won't because the included Studio Drummer seems to be NI's take on that sort of thing. Lots of pieces, lots of patterns, etc. Haven't actually played with it yet. But I've been pleased with both Battery 4 and Butch Vig Drums. There's all the synths: Absynth, Massive, Super 8, Prism, Monark, Form, Rounds, FM8, and a bunch of other stuff that runs in Reaktor. Those are probably of the most interest to me. And I didn't own any of the big sampler packages, so Kontakt with it's 26GB library, plus a couple hundred GB of libraries included with KOMPLETE, well, that's bound to be of some use. And I get to play with all the "free, but requres full Kontakt" libraries, so that's a thing. Agreed on Guitar Rig, though. Some nice presets, but clunky UI and a cpu-hog, so whatever. I'll keep using Axiom. Anyway, I have no idea if it's that much better than similar top-tier offerings, but it's fairly industry-standard, and a huge pile of stuff for $200. Considering that I (like an idiot) spent $150 each on FM8 and Session Horns Pro back in the day, it's almost certainly one of the best value/cost VST things I've ever bought.

Got email today from iZotope giving me loyalty pricing for KOMPLETE 13 standalone for $199, regularly $599. (I own MPS 4.) Suprprised no one mentioned this. Been trying to get in to the KOMPLETE world for years, but the entry price was always too steep. Think the best price I ever saw was $399 instead of $599. Native Instruments proved time and time again that they didn't want my money. iZotope knows how to offer "too good to skip" deals, at least on occasion, and has once again extracted money from me. And I couldn't be happier. No longer need I fear the phrase "requires full version of Kontakt"! Deal lasts until March 31.

"in use by another application" FWIW, I recommend using the on-board Realtek audio you almost certainly have for all Windows sounds (random beeps, Youtube, WinAmp, etc.) and using your AudioFire 8 only for Cakewalk. Don't let other applications use the AudioFire, and there shouldn't be an exclusivity issue.

Same here. I bought "3 Delays You'll Actually Use" and "3 Filters You'll Actually Use" before the FX Collection was a thing. Upgrade pricing to FX Collection was always more than I wanted to spend. Especially as I had no desire for any more compressors or preamps. That, and I never actually use the 3 Delays or the 3 Filters, so yeah. Would buy this new thing at $29... and then probably never use it either. Luckily, at $49 I don't have to find out!

See the CSHumanize midi plugin in this thread. Has the advantage that your notes are unmodified, and you can play around with the sliders non-destructively to find values that work for you.

DING DING DING! We have a winner! For whatever reason BounceBuffsSizeMsec was set to 200ms in my config file. Setting it to 20ms, and both Arturia synths in the current project froze correctly without resorting to Real Time. So some synths don't render properly offline if it's too high, either! --- Perhaps this'll solve an earlier performance problem I was having freezing Session Drummer 3 when there was a continuously variable tempo (linear, rather than jumps). Thanks!

Tested on my secondary rig, which is running Cakewalk 2021.11 and Arturia V Collection 8, but not necessarily the most recently updated versions. B3 V2 (vst3 version) did the same thing on this machine. Silent audio if quickly rendering, correct audio of real-time rendering. Running Focusrite Scarlett interfaces (a 2i2 and a Solo) on the two machines, thought I can't imagine the Freeze process would be going through the audio interface in any way.

Hmm. Did a little more poking around. With the same Freeze options checked ("single bounce per track" and "track fx") a Freeze generates a silent audio clip. Tried it with B-3 V2, both the vst3 and vst2 versions, same results. Turning on "Render in Real Time" (with or without the Audible Bounce box checked) Freezes correctly, albeit much more slowly. Meanwhile, there are other synths in the same project that render perfectly fine without requiring "Real Time" to be checked. The free version of Steven Slate Drums 5.5, for example.

If I try to (quickly) freeze the various Arturia synths (B3, DX7, etc.) in a project it quickly generates blank audio. Only way to freeze them is to Render in Real Time, which is less than desirable. Running most up-to-date versions of CW and all the Arturia stuff. Anyone else see this, or is it just me? Note: I'm able to freeze various other synths (Modo Bass, etc.) in faster-than-realtime mode. It's just the Arturia stuff that's problematic.

There was a video from Kush where he showed how he sends a drum bus to 4 different parallel compressors doing different things ("tight", "punch", "smooth", "crush"). Interesting and useful.

Thanks for looking into it. Agreed, it's something else. I ran the same test on an old laptop I've got and it worked as expected - all tracks froze at the same speed. And now, having run the test many times on my main machine, trying various things (disabling all FX, deleting any sends to reverb & parallel compressors, etc.) I can no longer get the 'problem' to occur there, either. Possibly it was just corruption in the project file or the track template I use for the drums. Possibly the machine just needed a reboot. Possibly it was just one of those things. Given the untold millions of lines of code involved in Win10 it's a minor miracle that anything works at all. I'll poke around with it some more to see if I can provoke it into reliably occurring again, but yeah... Still, thanks again. Appreciate it.

Follow-up: It isn't a Session Drummer 3 thing per se, as I did the same experiment with the free version of Steven Slate Drums 5.5. Same results. Freezing any of the outputs that have sustained sounds (overhead, room, etc.) takes forever compared to the kick or the snare. It would seem that freezing these tracks is going through the (Cakewalk) Audio Stretch algorithms, for no readily apparent reason. And there's no obvious way to tell it to not do that. Of some note: If I select the output tracks and do a Bounce to Track(s), that renders all the tracks simultaneously and without any slowdown whatsoever. Which is ideally how I'd expect freezing the synth to work as well. Suppose I could just mute the synth and drag the rendered clips up to the output tracks as a workaround, though that's not nearly as convenient as freezing/unfreezing. --- Also, I found that if I set Freehand Smoothing to Jumps, and drew a somewhat-straight line connecting the two tempos, it would draw them as a series of jumps. This Freezes much faster than having a single continuous linear tempo change between the two points. (I explicitly set the TempoMapDecimationResolution to '1', which is the coarsest granularity available.) That's keen, but I'd like to be able draw a straight line in the Tempo Track and have it replace that with a series of Jumps snapped to 1/4 notes or whatever when I release the drag. The manual ( http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Tempo.07.html#2000135 ) seems to be saying that I can hold SHIFT, then click and drag a line with the Line Tool and that's what should happen. Only it doesn't for me. Holding either SHIFT and then clicking+dragging in the Tempo Track with any of the Draw tools does nothing at all, either during the drag or upon release. And clicking first and then holding SHIFT during the drag doesn't do anything different from a normal click+drag. Shift-click+drag works as expected elsewhere in Cakewalk - contrained moves in the piano roll, precision fader moves, etc. So I don't think it a case of some other program 'eating' the shift-click event. Heck, it even works within the Tempo Track itself: shift click with the smart tool does a constrained move of the nodes. It's just the Drawing tools that don't work as expected. I have Snap turned on in the Control Bar, and have both the Snap Note and Draw Note Duration set to 1/4 for good measure. Neither Snap To nor Snap By have any effect. The nodes drawn in the tempo track with any of the Draw tools just go wherever they want - they're not snapped to the grid.

I should note that continuous tempo changes were probably the cause of the initial glitching of the crash cymbals, so if I could get semi-continuous tempo changes somehow that'd probably alleviate the need to freeze the synth in the first place.

I use Session Drummer 3 as my default drum VST. Recently I noticed a problem where crash cymbal hits would occasionally glitch during playback and/or export, despite there being no audio dropouts reported by Cakewalk. So I've taken to freezing the drums, which I'd prefer not to do, but whatever. I have SD3 sending its various pieces to separate tracks in Cakewalk (kick, snare, hat, toms, crash, & ride), so when I freeze the synth it freezes the kick, the snare, the hat, etc. in that order. The weird bit: I noticed that one one project it was taking forever to freeze the crash and ride tracks. The kick, snare, hat would freeze in a few seconds, as expected, but it'd take literally minutes to freeze the crash and the ride. After much poking, I discovered that Session Drummer 3 hates continuous tempo changes in the song, but only on the sustained sounds. Why that would be, I have no idea - it shouldn't be stretching the audio of the samples just because the tempo is changing. A crash is a crash. To reproduce: Start a new project, instantiate SD3 running separate outputs as above. Paste some midi drum loop that features crashes and rides, and repeat it out for 80 bars or so. Open the tempo track and verify that there's just a single tempo point (120 bpm at 1:01:000). Freeze the synth. Should take a couple seconds per track, and finish doing all of them in 30 seconds or so, at least on my rig. Add a second different tempo point (140bpm or whatever) somewhere in the middle of the midi, say at bar 40. Have the tempo JUMP to the new tempo. Freeze the synth. Takes a couple of seconds per track, same as before. Now, set the line connecting the two tempos to LINEAR. Freeze the synth. The kick, snare, and hat go about as quickly as before, the toms are noticably slower, and the crash and ride are so slow that it looks like the program has frozen. Several minutes to freeze each of them. --- Bug in SD3? Seems like one, but who knows. Certainly it's never going to be fixed if it *is* a bug, so I'm looking for a workaround (short of "stop using Session Drummer"). Is there a way to specify the granularity of continuous tempo changes? If I could draw a linear tempo change but have it 'look' like a series of discrete tempos every 16th note as far as SD3 is concerned, that might do the trick. Though I don't know why SD3 even cares about the tempo in the first place. Yes, it has a pattern playback that syncs to host tempo, but I never use that and clear out all the patterns by default. I'm just sending it notes from a piano roll.

Cheaper than Melodyne...!

I was much more impressed with Arturia's Tape MELLO-FI, fwiw. Wouldn't pay $99 for it, but grabbed it at the much lower intro price (free) and have been enjoying it. Even used the 'tape-stop' effect in one of my tracks.

I played with it briefly. It does a thing. Loses several points in my book for not having a wet/dry control. Even with all the controls to their hi-fi'est setting, the thing eats high frequencies unless it's bypassed - so unless you like really lo-fi, you're going to want to put it on an aux send. Inconvenient.

But Waves is having a 'sale' - today only, any plugin for $29.99! Act quick, you don't want to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

FWIW, I noticed that certain plugins (?) apparently didn't like the default "200ms" bounce buffer size in the Export dialog. I'd get weird glitching in the output file (both wav and mp3), in a non-repeatable manner. Not crackling per se, more of a stutter effect. Bumping the Export bounce buffer down to 60ms cleared that up for me. Note: This was in 2012.11. Haven't tried pushing the buffer back to 200ms in 2012.12 – why look for trouble.