Bill Phillips

What about Melda's mdrumstrip? It's not free but for today, (I think) it's $53. I hope to try it out before that deal expires. 

2 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Ah, sorry! Yeah like standard Windows dialogue boxes rather than custom controls. Think of like the menus that pop up when you click on File / Edit / Views, etc. - those standard grey Windows ones, as opposed to when you right click in a FX Bin and you notice the text is different, there's colours for different VST types, etc.

Thanks.

On 6/10/2023 at 2:03 PM, Lord Tim said:

No, I've seen this too, but rarely.  This is different to the Pause thing which updates the UI very slowly. This isn't anywhere near that slow.

This happens on particularly heavy projects especially, I've found, so things scroll along a little more... low frame rate(?) as was said. Definitely less screen redraws, obviously favouring audio performance rather than screen repaints. But if you open a MFC menu, it'll start scrolling entirely smoothly.

Is MFC Microsoft Foundation Class? Where are the MFC menus found/identified? 

Sorry for the dumb question. I see MFC in a lot of forum posts. Usually I just blow past them, but this time I'm interested. My really capable self-built DAW PC failed fatally. While I'm sorting that out, I'm relying on my not so capable Surface Pro 3 and thought this Pause thing might help. But,  that's still not enough to get through your demo project (Thanks!) without pops and clicks in busy parts.

   Since Cakewalk has one new product in beta testing and will have another one in beta testing soon, I thought this Production Expert blog post might be interesting: 

What Makes A Good Software Beta Tester

Thank you Bandlab and Cakewalk Team! Man, I can't wait to see both products!

Unfortunately I'll have to wait. My DAW PC was apparently fatally injured by a failing power supply and I'm in the middle of deciding what to replace it with. Now, I've got even more motivation to get that done.

Thanks @msmcleod. I've never used Track Manager presets. 

1 hour ago, Will. said:

Secondly: change your recording rate within Cakewalk higher than 16bit.  

"Higher than 16bit?" Shouldn't it be 16bit?

2 minutes ago, John Vere said:

We are not talking about the audio quality that should not be the issue. We are taking about the need for all the other things that a proper audio interface with ASIO supports. Most important is track synchronization.
I find it very odd that very few people realize how important ASIO really is to audio recording being in sync.  
You record the vocals to a backing track in WASAPI shared mode and it will be at least 60 ms late. WASAPI exclusive performance is better but not all devices support it and it will still be late , just by less.  

Then there’s monitoring etc. 

Thanks, @John Vere  That answers my question, Using WASAPI is a significant drawback, particularly for a new DAW user, to deal with.

2 hours ago, John Vere said:

There is no real option other than using a proper audio interface with ASIO drivers if you are recording audio. Everything else is a waist of time and money.

@John Vere are you saying that a USB, large diaphragm condenser mic using WASAPI can't be used to make a decent vocal recording? I haven't tried it. So I don't know; but it surprises me that it flat won't work.

I understand that the USB mic limits you to recording one track at a time and, a ASIO audio interface is needed for recording other instruments. But if your favorite mic for vocals is the USB condenser, couldn't you use it and WASAPI drivers to record the vocal?

6 hours ago, mettelus said:

The Blue Yeti is locked to 16-bit, 48KHz, so another thing to try is make sure the DAW project reflects that before recording, and probably WASAPI shared for drivers settings. You may be seeing mismatch in bit depth/sample rate, but even if this improves you are not going to do your audio recordings proper justice. Andy's recommendations are spot on.

I agree. It should work, though, I haven't tried it. Also, latency may make including the vocal in a headphones mix impossible, and additional connected I/O will be limited to the PC audio interface. 

AFAIK, some VSTs use OpenGL to access GPU processors supporting OpenGL when they are available. I've noticed some now have a GPU tick box in their VST installer dialogs. So whatever they're passing to the GPU, when an adequate one is available, probably offloads the CPU and vis versa. 

Anecdotally,  I use a lot of iZotope VSTs and I like to keep a number of their UIs open during playback. To me upgrading my video card to increase OpenGL capacity seemed to reduce the impact on performance of having iZotope UIs open.

I have long out of print 1st and 2nd editions of "Cakewalk Synthesizers" by Simon Cann. I believe he made these available to people who bought the books in digital form at that time. Those may be available online somewhere. There's about 30 pages on Dimension LE and Pro in the 2nd edition.

49 minutes ago, Keni said:

It seems so to me but I've not done any empirical testing. I always have a tone of resource headroom here so it's hard to know without such testing. This machine is a 2013 Mac Pro 6,1 (Trashcan) with 128GB RAM... I'm running Monterey on the Mac side which I never use and Windows 10 for my daily use as my DAW running Cakewalk by Bandlab!

Oh, your zeon processor is in a Mac. I was thinking it would be in a PC. Thanks.

On 5/5/2023 at 5:08 PM, Keni said:

I don’t speak the language, but I’ve been running xeon machines here for years.

My old DAW has dual xeon 6 core processors @3.06G total 12 cores

My new DAW has a single xeon 12 core with dual threading. Cakewalk sees it as 24 "cores"

 

Both continue to work very well with Cakewalk...

AFAIK, the xeon processors are considerably more expensive than the core processors. Do the xeon's out perform core i7 & i9 processors with  Cakewalk? 

45 minutes ago, John Vere said:

Just a tip. You obviously don't regularly use 1,000 plug ins. Like while testing compressors I had over 80 l installed and loaded. I chose the dozen I felt were the best and to get the rest off my list all I needed to do was go into the plug in Manager and  "Exclude"  the ones I will probably never use. This way they are out of harms way, Cakewalk doesn't scan them ( I think? ) and if I change my mind they are 2 clicks away from being active again. 

This most certainly would be a way to solve the OP's issue without actually removing plug ins from the folders. Most take up very little room. 

A good example of this way Melda had installed ( my fault) about 50 demo versions along with the free bundle and the demos expired as I slowly found out. This was becoming very annoying so I excluded all the demos. Some of them I will probably purchase someday so the activation will be very simple if I do.  

Thanks @John Vere! I'm going to do that, starting slowly. I'm also working on an old laptop installing Cakewalk and plugins for someone else. That's one of the reasons I ended up with so many plugins. For them, I'm trying to get to around 100 FX plugins and excluding the ones I don't think they'll need will be a good way to avoid uninstalling and reinstalling as I waffle.

On 4/28/2023 at 10:42 AM, msmcleod said:

This was changed a while back to get around a long standing (> 11 years old) Windows bug that has gotten worse since Windows 10 - if you go beyond around 1000 menu items, it starts removing items.  This wasn't an issue in the past, because not only was the menu limit much larger (around 4000), most people didn't have that many plugins.

So the workaround is to popup a brand new menu using a different UI framework.

Thanks @msmcleod. So that's it. I have more than 1,000 plugins and noticed the change but didn't think twice about it. When I didn't see the fly out, I guess I clicked the "Insert Audio FX" line in the menu which opened a new plugin selection window. and went on from there.

On 4/20/2023 at 11:55 AM, Keni said:

Yeah, as I suspected....

 

I would love to simply run the uninstaller but I don't wantit to remove any that I actually use/want... and there doesn't appear to be any way to specify such during an uninstall unless I'm mistaken...

Some, like ToneBoosters have more flexible installers that support Install/Uninstall and changes in the plugins installed. I just finished uninstalling ToneBooster plugins I installed by mistake and installed the older versions which are free using The ToneBooster installer and found it handled partial installs and uninstalls pretty well.

On 4/20/2023 at 1:50 AM, T on Y said:

Watched a 'Creative Sauce' you tube video on this topic

Can this be applied to 'Guitar Rig'

I assume that there would have to be a 'Global' wet/dry mix option but havent found it yet

Or ..... can this be done some other way ?

Thanks. I'm going to check that out.

1 hour ago, John Vere said:

It's isn't really called a wave editor as that's a title reserved for programs that are dedicated to that task. 

I agree 🤣

As for the rest, I think, we're both looking at the same Elephant from different ends and describing what we see. And what we see is different, but it's still an Elephant. 🤔

12 hours ago, msmcleod said:

When using a wave editor, the wave file is permanently changed.  This is how the whole mechanism works - i.e. when you launch the external tool, you're giving control to the wave editor to edit the file directly.  When you save, Cakewalk recognises that the file has changed and updates the clip accordingly.

To be honest, I very rarely use this workflow - it's only ever as a last resort when I actually need to edit the waveform in detail.   For scenarios like the OP's one, I'd probably re-record, but if this is not possible, then a wave editor is probably the next best thing.  Yes, you can split the clip and mess around with clip gain and fades to hide it, but smoothing waveforms out by hand can be quicker for one-off clipping issues.

FWIW I've compared editing mistakes to just re-recording over the years, and in most cases I could record another 10 or so takes in the time it took to edit the mistake.  And of course I'm improving my playing at the same time.

@msmcleod thank you for explaining. I'm not saying that wave editors don't change the wave files and that the rendered clip will reflect those changes, AFAIK, in the same way that Cakewalk does. When you are using a wave editor what you are editing is the wave file. But Melodyne, as far as I can tell, is different. It's not a wave editor. Melodyne uses an algorithm to convert the wave file into the blobs and lines you see and edit in the Melodyne editor. It's the blobs and lines, not the wave file, that you are editing. When you're done in Melodyne, the blobs and lines are processed by an algorithm to create the rendered wave file. So, I don't think that Melodyne is a wave editor even though it's used instead to a wave editor to do the same job probably easier and better as @John Vere said.

53 minutes ago, John Vere said:

Actually when you render a Melodyne edited clip the original clip is permanently changed

I haven't used either wave editors or Melodyne very much. I'm just trying to understand. I have considered them (wave editors and Melodyne) to be two different things ( one where you cut/paste/fade/drag/re-draw existing wave files and the other where you are editing audio [not waveforms] and then rendering a new wave file).

Which leads to the question: Is the wave file permanently changed or replaced? It appears to me that Melodyne uses an algorithm to create the replacement clip. Whereas, a clip editor returns the original clip as edited by you as long as no pitch or tempo stretching were applied. pitch changes and tempo stretching would produce a replacement clip.

1 hour ago, John Vere said:

But Melodyne has really become the tool for me now. You can not only fix pitch but timing, glitches and even levels are easy to fix. They thought of everything. 

And the comment about having to go to the menu. Custom keyboard shortcuts are your friends. Example Gain = G.  
Open Melodyne as regional effect = Z.  Render Regional Effect = X. 

I think I understand that you're saying Melodyne is the best at producing the results that were historically achieved using wave editors. 

But Melodyne is not, AFAIK, a wave editor. I believe that Melodyne translates wave files to blobs connected by lines that are a metaphor representing the audio.

In Melodyne you are editing audio,  not the wave file. When you're done and bounce the clip, Melodyne translates the final blob sequence into a new wave file, not an edited one. 

On 4/18/2023 at 3:41 PM, John Balich said:

fo

und it..much mo' betta

Translation please. What does that mean?

  On 4/18/2023 at 3:41 PM, John Balich said:

fo

und it..much mo' betta

What does that mean?

6 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Acon's Acoustic 6 Basic Edition (which is free)

Did you mean Acon Acoustica 6? If yes, looks like  it's been upgraded to Acoustica 7 which is no longer free.