Bill Phillips

11 hours ago, msmcleod said:

1. Open Settings from the Windows Start menu
2. Click "Update & Security"
3. Click "Windows Security" on the left
4. In the main window, click "Virus & threat protection"
5. Under the "Virus & threat protection settings" header, click "Manage settings"
6. Scroll down to "Exclusions" and click "Add or remove exclusions"
7. Click the "+ Add an exclusion" button, selecting folder for each of the following, and any other VST folders/sample directories:
    C:\Cakewalk Content
    C:\Cakewalk Projects
    C:\Program Files\Cakewalk
    C:\Users\[yourusername]\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk
    C:\Program Files\VstPlugins
    C:\Program Files\Steinberg\vstplugins
    C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3
    C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST2
    C:\Program Files (x86)\VstPlugins
    C:\Program Files (x86)\Steinberg\vstplugins
    C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VST3
    C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VST2

If your global audio folder is different from C:\Cakewalk Content, add that too.   You may also want to add any plugin specific directories within your Documents folder.

WARNING - because you're disabling virus protection for VST plugins, you should manually scan any VST plugins / plugin installers before you install them.

If you're using any cloud sync apps (e.g. OneDrive / Dropbox etc), you should either also exclude these directories, or at least make sure those apps are disabled when running Cakewalk.
 

I've never excluded any CbB files from "Virus & threat protection" and I'm not aware of any problems it's caused. If Defender is scanning files while they're in use, it doesn't seem to cause any problems. What am I missing?

17 hours ago, msmcleod said:

OneDrive should be fine as long as it's not trying to sync Cakewalk files.  Unfortunately by default, it'll sync the %APPDATA% folder, which is why I disabled it - it's a pain to re-configure it.

I use OneDrive but it was a struggle to set up, I believe the problem is the user/Documents folder not %APPDATA%. At least that's where I struggled. OneDrive offers to backup Documents. Choosing that option cause performance problems with both CbB and OneDrive because Cakewalk and plugins store lots of information they need in the Documents folder and conflicts quickly arise when both the program and OneDrive are accessing the data at the same time.

To solve that problem I chose to not have OneDrive backup the Documents folder which appears that I was finally successful at but it was very difficult. OneDrive really wants to backup Documents and if you happen to respond positively to one of it's request the SHTF quickly and recovery is very difficult. I can say it's been behaving for months now and I'm very happy having the 1TB free cloud storage for each Office 365 license.

For simplicity and possibility stability. I don't create any folders named "Documents" anywhere and I put nothing in my user/Documents folder. All the folders in the user/Documents folder are placed there by programs and there are a lot of them. My documents folder is 23.4 GB right now. I also keep all of my Office documents on OneDrive and I have a folder named Docs_Bills for my documents on OneDrive. I also have one named Docs_BU that I can copy the user/Documents contents to manually to backup.  OneDrive has it's own Documents folder with shortcuts to documents that I save on OneDrive like OneNote.

Finally, I see lots of potential problems with the way OneDrive works and have been round and round with OneDrive support about them but I get the idea that they understand and are trying to address the problems as they continue their main goal of out Appleing Apple.

18 hours ago, msmcleod said:

 It's worth mentioning that these cloudsync devices work by watching the modified date on the folders. If nothing changes, they'll do nothing.  So making sure they're only watching directories that change when I want them to ensures they don't cause issues.

I really  appreciate that observation. I've came to the same conclusion but been unable to condense it to words. 🤔

I have OneDrive on a separate drive with no other folders on it because I placed a second folder "Cakewalk Projects BU" on the same drive with the idea that I would copy files from Cakewalk Projects to Cakewalk Projects BU and then to another folder with a slightly different name in OneDrive. Before I could do that OneDrive absorbed the Cakewalk Project BU folder.  I still don't have this completely sorted but am backing up Cakewalk Projects folders to OneDrive manually in yet another folder.

Thanks for the candid and detailed review. I downloaded demos. Documentation and UIs look well done.

1 hour ago, Promidi said:

While I do not use or have ever used Firewire, Here is my take on this.

Blue screens on start up (I am assuming you mean Windows start up) usually indicate buggy drivers or faulty hardware.

Strictly as a troubleshooting action, you might want to completely remove your Firewire PCIe card and drivers so that you only have the USB 2.0 Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 installed.

If you still get Blue screens, then you know that it’s very unlikely to be the firewire

It might also help to get some information from the blue screen - sometimes it can tell you the file or driver causing it.

Thanks. That's one option I'm considering. The main reason for my post was to provide that Fixing Firewire link to anyone who might be able to use it.

I've been having frequent intermittent  blue screen on startup problems for the last month or so. I've updated drivers and nothing has changed. I have both USB and Firewire interfaces. At first I was using the MOTU 828 mkII Firewire interface and thought the problem might be with that so I switched to the Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 USB 2.0 interface but the problems persisted. I decided to contact SYBA the manufacturer for my current Firewire PCIe card and they sent me the link below which I used to manually update my Firewire driver again even though my current driver appears to be identical to the one I just installed. So I'm not expecting that this solved my problem, but I thought that the reference at this Fixing Firewire might be useful to others with Firewire interfaces.

On 11/15/2021 at 11:53 AM, jf said:

Very bad idea having to mess about with track layout to edit audio/midi/tempo.

Bring back separate audio editing window.      (as in cakewalk pro audio 9,  including  the simple to use  editing tools )

Bring back the separate tempo window.            (as in cakewalk pro audio 9,  including  the simple to use  editing tools )

Bring back the separate midi/staff window.     (as in cakewalk pro audio 9,  including  the simple to use  editing tools )

Bring back all the tools and options to the top of track window,  why have you put them all over the place taking up more screen space.

Please.

I'll take a wild guess and suggest setting Workspaces to None then check for the missing Views again.

8 hours ago, scook said:

Most options on the main menu have pre-defined accelerator keys and Insert Soft Synth is one of them.

Yes.  Multiple options is probably a good thing because it's more flexible and supports multiple workshops. Currently I use keyboard shortcuts when they're available and add them when I can.

4 hours ago, Dana Elston said:

Thanks Bill - I think you are correct in what happened here yet I would think it would only duplicate the automation rather than processing them. Well, I just took a close look at my clips and I see that the gain automation changed on the pasted clips. For some reason they all returned to 0.0 dB so that's odd to me. I just took it a step further and tried going thru the same process and I see what happened. When I copied, it copied the track/bus automation but not the clip automation.  So I tried it again checking off the additional box for clip automation and it pasted perfectly.

 So as I was explaining above I definitely copied and pasted. I've been working with Cakewalk since before it had audio capabilities and have a decent idea regarding duplication and bouncing. I'm not a professional but those are pretty basic things and were not needed at this point.

Thank you for your help Bill, I do appreciate it.

You might want to post this on the feedback loop forum. It could be that there is a problem in clip paste processing. Not sure myself.

On 10/7/2021 at 1:25 PM, Lord Tim said:

 

Either thing works well, but there's some advantages you get with Aux Tracks / Patch Points that you don't get with Busses, such as being able to record them easily if you want, or with project organisation if you do a lot of submixing (eg: if you do huge choirs or orchestrated music, you might find you want to submix sections to a single output, and repeat that for every other section, and then submix those to a sub-master for further processing, before sending off to your master bus) then using busses exclusively tends to turn into a HUGE lot of busses to manage, all tucked away at the bottom of the screen, and where you can't easily fold them away in sections like you'd be able to do with Aux Tracks.  If you don't do anything nutty like this, then yeah - it's really down to personal workflow which way is best for you.

I *have* run into Patch Points getting assigned incorrectly, however, but it's much rarer now than it used to be. The thing to remember is that when you close a project, it does housekeeping on any deleted patch points. So it's sometimes best to start with a project that has no patch points in it when you import a template with lots of them in there. And if you decide to delete any, save the project and re-open it before you do any more importing, just to be sure things don't get tangled.

 

This is generally how I do it. I'll either have 2 projects open and import my project-sized track template into one and copy the audio/MIDI tracks from the other into the new project, or I'll have everything as their own "source" tracks in a project, then I'll load up a track template, and then move the audio/MIDI data into the corresponding tracks. It's a huge time-saver when you're doing an album project because you can set up a baseline mix for everything to save all of the repetitive grunt work for getting everything into the same ballpark each time, and then you can get on with doing the actual creative work to make each track it's own thing.

I just noticed that I never thanked you for this detailed and helpful response. Thank you.

On 11/13/2021 at 1:31 PM, John Vere said:

Just did a Delay shootout of the collection I had.  

Top pick is Voxengos Tempo delay.   Tempo sync with a readout and multiplier ( important) , VST 3,   Easy to set even though it's a bit complicated to look at. 

 Runners up

Sanford Delay  VST2  Has a good tempo sync using note values and like the sonitus you can set them different left and right.  Small volume drop on insert. Hard to smooth it out it sort of choppy but that can be what you want sometimes. 

Cakewalks Tempo Delay,  its DX! but it has tempo sync with only note values  Volume drops on inserting. Can sort of get close to what you want but limited. 

 Sphere delay by WA Productions.  VST 3, Tempo Sync  but no readout or adjustments. It does sound good even though it is limited in tweaking.   This is not normally  free but I got is as a freebie of the week from Plug in Boutique,  glad I didn't buy it. 

La Grange  by Ursa DSP  VST 3   Tempo sync but no adjustments  a fun delay with bizarre results well worth collecting.  

You didn't mention Valhalla Supermassive. Did you look at it? It's a stereo delay and lacks individual L/R delay settings; but it has a lot of other interesting stuff going on. Lots of presets.

One other one I didn't mention is Voxengo Sound Delay. It has super short delays (L/R & M/S) that can be used for alignment or to produce some really interesting spacial delay effects. I suspect that it can be really interesting when applied to melodic content.

8 hours ago, Dana Elston said:

Never experienced this before in Cakewalk. I copied 19 tracks (audio and midi) and pasted. When reviewing the pasted tracks (audio in this case) it's as though it processed the fx in my fx bin on the pasted tracks only. You can see in the attached pic the wav files on the right side have increased.  I've pasted tracks like this before and this has never occurred. Anyone else experiencing this? Thx!

Provide more detail on the steps you followed in producing the pasted clips. Copying and pasting clips will not apply track fx. I pasted the clip copy dialog box below. Note that it will apply clip and track automation. Clip automation would show up in the source clip but track automation would not. So if the source track has track volume automation raising the volume that might explain the pasted clips being at a higher volume than the source clips.

Also you refer to copying and pasting tracks. There's not a way to do that. Tracks can be duplicated or bounced but not copied and pasted.

1 minute ago, John Vere said:

 The hard to find feature is the sync to host. Sure most you can set the tempo, but if the song has a tempo map with changes things get ugly.  

IMMSMW, the Sanford stuff ha been around a while but I avoided because it was 32-bit. I think 64-bit update is recent. 

I can't check right now but I believe all 4 of those support tempo sync. 

4 hours ago, Kevin Perry said:

I'd also add Boz Digital Imperial Delay

FreqEcho is also VST3.

Thanks for correction on FreqEcho.

Boz delay isn't free. I didn't mention it but the delays I listed are all free.

On 11/9/2021 at 7:24 PM, John Vere said:

Ya, I have scanned all the freebie Delays and downloaded a few. Not even close. It seems odd because delay doesn't have to be as complicated as a lot of them seem to be. I got spoiled by my Yamaha 01v delay which had tap tempo and a very similar interface as the Sonitus.  I have been trying the  Voxingo Tempo delay that seems the best so far, 

Well, I'm constantly doing the same thing and these 5 are interesting to me. None are very similar to Sonitus Delay, but there may be one here that you haven't looked at and seems interesting to you. They are sorted top to bottom from basic to interesting. All are 64-bit. Only the last one is VST3.

Sanford Delay

Valhalla FreqEcho

TAL DUB-II

UrsaDSP Lagrange

Valhalla Supermassive

4 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Thanks for looking that up, Bill. I don't spend as much time at Tom's as I used to, so I miss little tidbits like that.

Fortunately, they're talking about video drivers, which should impact almost no one. Even if you are one of the people affected by this, your DX plugins won't stop working in your DAW. For that matter, even if you're playing an 8-year-old video game on your 8-year-old computer you probably won't be affected, either.

btw, I am on a 7-year-old computer myself and happily playing the latest video games on it at Ultra video settings (with a recently upgraded video card).

Thanks. Glad it won't affect DX plugins. My processor is a 6850k. That's a little newer than the 4000 series numbers in the article. But it is  too old for Win11.

8 hours ago, bitflipper said:

 

DX is a software spec. It doesn't require any specific hardware support. It's not going obsolete. DX isn't just for music production. It's used by thousands, perhaps millions of business applications that Microsoft isn't going to suddenly kill. The "X" in X-Box has the same meaning as the "X" in DX. Bottom line is you needn't worry about your DX plugins suddenly dropping dead on you. As long as Cakewalk continues to support them, you're good.

The article I read was on Tom's Hardware. I mistakenly thought support was being withdrawn for new processors but it's actually older processors (4th gen) that are losing support. 

intel shutting down DirectX 12 support for some older processors

18 hours ago, John Vere said:

The Sonitus stuff is DX like the Tts1 so they are becoming very outdated. Sad as many of us still like to use them. But I’m slowly finding replacements Only one I haven’t replaced is the delay. Can’t find anything close in design ( for free😬) 

I saw something from Tom's Hardware or CNET I think stating that Intel might be dropping DX support because of security concerns for some processors. 

3 hours ago, RBH said:

Ok I understand the video better, thanks.  I'm still on 2021 09  but I will try to see if 2021-11 works any differently for me. As far as generally utilizing clip gain, it has always worked for me though I likely am working with a higher zoom level and editing small clip selections.

Thanks. I guess I'll submit it to the Feedback Loop. 

14 hours ago, RBH said:

If I'm seeing your video clip correctly ( old eyes so maybe not ). It looks as though your trying to select in the upper part of the clip  - and missing the envelope line outside of it's select range if you are trying to directly select the line. I'm having a hard time seeing exacty where your clips begin and end with-out the clip headers showing. I agree that it's sometimes hard to get the envelope nodes selected for editing - the way I assume they should be selected.

Thanks for looking, but the situation you're describing doesn't exist in the video and isn't causing my problem. I have "old eyes" too and am replying to you on my phone. To see the video clearly I tapped the video clip in landscape view and used two fingers to zoom in. 

I'll explain what's going on.

I placed the cursor above the clip because the envelope is at +6 dB putting it at the top of the clip boundary and the cursor must be above the envelope and above the top of the clip frame.

Once the cursor was above the envelope between two nodes and the level adjustment tool cursor (probably not the correct name) appeared. I clicked once to select the segment which shaded the clip area between the  two nodes.

I then clicked the tool again holding it this time. In the video clip the cursor turns yellow. Then I dragged down which should lower the selected segment but the segment doesn't move. I tried this several times. No luck. 

However I was able to click on one of the nodes defining the segment and drag it down to lower the gain for the shaded segment that way. 

Hopefully that clears it up for you. 

I need some help troubleshooting a clip envelope editing problem I'm having that I'm guessing others might run into as well. I don't think it's new with 2021.11 though I only ran into it after I began using 2021.11 (build 010).

I know that envelope editing has had a lot of recent improvements which have been very useful to me. And for the most part envelope editing works pretty well for me except for some things like selecting the whole envelope or a number of nodes to move as a group. In this case though something that's seems to be rock solid (selecting and dragging up/down a envelope segment between two nodes) works consistently intermittently for the audio clip shown in the video below. It's also occurred on other clips but not on all. At this point I'm generally making small changes to envelopes drawn earlier without this problem I think. It might have something to do with take lanes because the two BV clips both have two take lanes and the Bass DI clip below has a single take. I don't recall any issues making a couple of clip envelope adjustments on the bass clip.

There are two takes of the clip. The shorter one is soloed. I've tried adjusting the automation both in the take lane and in the track. I seem to have the same problem in either case. Basically, I can move the cursor into the segment selection area at the top; click and release to select the segment; then click again and try to drag down but the selection is dropped frequently and doesn't move. When this happens I've learned that I can grab one of the highlighted nodes and drag the segment down.

I don't think this contributes to the problem, but I'm learning to use a Kensington Expert Wireless Mouse (trackball). So I've tried this with both the trackball and a conventional wireless Logitech mouse. They are both active. In the video I'm using the mouse because I'm much worse at this using the trackball.

As you can see in the video, the select and drag operation doesn't work. Sometimes it does. I've tried every combination of track or take lane being selected, having the focus, having the clip selected. None of that seems to make a difference.

I'm using 2021.11. I ran into this on the Early Release (010) and for the video was using (015). I haven't worked on automation on these clips for a while (probably October)  and don't recall having this problem before. I have clip automation on every clip and I've been working on this song for years on and off, though is is a new mix started back in September.

In the online documentation under Using tools to perform common tasks I found this but nothing else:

To raise/lower an audio Clip Gain envelope
1. Set the track’s Edit Filter control to Clips.
2. Select the Smart tool
.
3. Hold down the CTRL key and drag the bottom part of the clip up/down.

Tip: For greater control over clip gain envelopes, set the Event Filter to Clip Automation > Gain.
Note: Clip envelopes can be adjusted in the parent track or in a Take lane

On 11/5/2021 at 2:03 AM, Terry Kelley said:

Right, if I was using versioning I could do that. What I want is for any file that is save to be placed in the recent window and not be dependent on a successful exit of the program to show up.

Why wouldn't you use versioning if you're looking for a way to recovery lost work after a crash? I don't understand the problem your describing. And I believe that Recent Projects are "recently saved projects." So if you never saved it, it won't be there. 

On 11/5/2021 at 2:03 AM, Terry Kelley said:

Right, if I was using versioning I could do that. What I want is for any file that is save to be placed in the recent window and not be dependent on a successful exit of the program to show up. I can save the file, have Cakewalk crash and it won't be in the recent window.

Minor and not worth pursuing.

Not minor. If you can reproduce that, you should submit it as a bug.

One of my concerns with auto-save has been what happens with auto-save during export/bounce. Turns out it could have been a problem but no more. Near the bottom of the Bug Fixes list for 2021.11 is "Disable project auto-save while File Export/Bounce to Track(s) dialogs are open."

I'm leaving auto-save on and no longer worry about it impacting rendering.

11 hours ago, Terry Kelley said:

The only reservation I have about Auto-Save is that I am trying to avoid losing some work. When it saves isn't tied to what I am doing

Auto-save is not synced to what you're doing but I don't recall it causing me a problem though I suppose it might if it saved while I was recording or rendering. 

11 hours ago, Terry Kelley said:

I do wish the last save before the crash was in the recent file screen. It appears I have to exit CW nicely (not crash) for it to show up. I figure that if I saved it, odd are I would want to recall it first thing in most instances. Not a big deal though - I just have to find it via Existing.

Well if you're using versioning,  and go to File>Revert, you'll be able to select anyone of the saved version available. I'm not at Cakewalk so I can't verify the command. 

4 hours ago, scook said:

That's right because auto-save is not not part of versioning.

My reply was an attempt to explain the differences in the two features.

 

 

Yes. You clarified the differences for me. Thanks.