Bill Phillips

19 hours ago, sean72 said:

The new implementation is actually much faster. Here is what you might have missed as I did at first..

Make sure you have the "Smart Tool" selected from the tool menu. Press "T" to open tools menu if it's not already visible on the control bar at the top of the screen.. The smart tool is the one all the way to the left in the tools menu.  I'm not sure if the use of this tool is 100% necessary but that's how I got it to work. 

Then hover the pointer over the audio clip you want to boost or cut the gain on, While hovering, hold down CTRL then Left-Click-Hold and Drag. You will see the clip gain line appear and move in real time as you move the mouse up or down. You should also see the clip amplitude graphic getting larger or smaller as you drag it up or down. 

Not only is this much faster to adjust clip volume but the scaling of the amplitude graphic makes it much easier to match clip levels visually.

Thank you! I've struggled grasping that concept since it was added. Following your detailed instructions, I got it! Thanks again.

23 hours ago, hadada said:

midi track press =+

audio track ctrl + left click

In Track View, for audio tracks, selecting the clip and pressing SHFT + PLUS (+) adds a clip gain envelope and switches the edit filter to CLIP CLIP AUTOMATION. Hovering over the automation envelope shows clip gain. The edit filter text looks like it might be a bug. I didn't go any further.

The CTRL + Left Click didn't work for me.

Did not try the MIDI track option. I don't use MIDI enough to feel comfortable with it.

On 1/5/2023 at 4:53 PM, Brian Hunsaker said:

I plugged a MOTU Traveler mk3 into my Windows 10 laptop Thunderbolt port with 2 more adapters. One turned Firewire into Thunderbolt 2 and the other turned Thunderbolt 2 into Thunderbolt 3 (for which I have a jack). Surprisingly it worked fine and gave the MOTU power. I might have got those backward but I can look them up if you like.

Thanks. That's amazing. My Win10 PC has a Thunderbolt 3 combo USB C port. I'll have to give that a try.

15 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Okay, RX10 Breath Control, Ozone 10 Exciter Neutron 4 Sculptor, Neutron 4 Compressor, RX7 Breath Control, Insight 2, Nectar 3, Ozone 10 Dynamics, Ozone 10 Imager and Ozone 10 all installed on one track, all UI's open correctly.

Unable to test whether either RX10 or RX7 Breath Control are controlling breaths, but at least I'm not seeing blank black squares.

This is on my Dell Latitude 7480 with Intel HD 620 Graphics. 16G RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD.

Thanks. I haven't been able to get back to it to try and duplicate in a new project.  BTW,  for me the blank windows are white inside the green plugin border.

7 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

There was a page on iZotope's site that was selling upgrades from Ozone 10 Advanced to MPS 5 for the low, low price of $149. I learned about it from this site's Coffee House/Deals subforum.

I bought it at that price....even though I didn't already own Ozone 10 Advanced (I did have Neutron 3). All licenses showed up in Product Portal.

I called it Schroedinger's Deal; my (tongue in cheek) theory was that since MPS 5 includes Ozone 10 Advanced, at some point during checkout the purchaser both owned and didn't own an Ozone 10 license, which ended up qualifying them for the "upgrade."

Even though I have sworn off buying more mixing plug-ins, I kind of had to get that collection of suites and individual FX at that price. Even just getting VocalSynth and Stratus/Symphony and Neoverb and RX 10 would have been worth the outlay. I've had their Elements collections and Phoenix/Nimbus and R2/R4 for years, although I hadn't used the Elements suites in quite some time. My own mixing/mastering skills finally surpassed the wizards and presets in the Elements suites and I've bought individual plug-ins that I prefer. The Exponential reverbs are simply the best I've ever heard.

A month later, things got even crazier, iZotope had a sitewide discount of 25%, which people were able to apply to that glitch deal, thereby dropping the price to $111. No regrets here; I think pulling the trigger at $149 was a wise move.

Similar "legit" deals later appeared at Pluginboutique, although not quite as generous. I think $189 to upgrade from any iZotope product.

iZotope left the page up for over a month, surely they must have known of its existence. For all I know it may still be active. Companies do odd things toward the end of the year to make the books look good. It may have been a sneaky way to extract money from cheapskates/deal hounds like me without harming their standard pricing.

I think I paid $250 to go from 4 to 5.

6 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Your system exceeds the specs of the Dell laptop I'm retiring and it's able to run Cakewalk just fine, even with multiple orchestral instruments. The only issue I can see is that the processor is only a 2 core (4 virtual). DAW's like as many cores as they can get. Is what it is, though.

I'm good at Windows and BIOS tuning, which leads to my computers being from the stone age yet still able to do DAW and NLE work. I just renovated an old Gateway(!) Core 2 Quad system to give to a friend. It runs Cakewalk just fine with 8G of RAM and SATA III SSD, and an older nVidia Quadro,

The 1TB SSD is a very good idea. That 5400 hybrid spinner is the biggest bottleneck on your system. Install the SSD before you install Windows 10. My favorite price:performance brand of SSD's is Silicon Power. You can probably get one on Amazon for $50 and have it tomorrow.

Write down your Windows product key before you burn down the old installation. You can probably install and activate Windows okay without doing that, but be sure. At some point, laptops started using motherboard license keys, but yours is kinda old. Probably had a key for Windows 8?

If you can cram 16 or 12G of RAM in it, do so. The more RAM the merrier, and 16G is about the "don't be concerned about how much RAM you have" point these days. But my old Latitude only has 8G and is fine for DAW work and even Vegas Movie Studio.

Once you get the system put together and Windows 10 installed, it will do its thing of sending a buttload of telemetry to Microsoft. This settles down after about 24 hours. During that time, the system will be unnaturally slow, so don't worry.

To get your processor to spin up to 3GHz and stick around that point, enable Turbo and Speedstep in your BIOS (and check with Lenovo to make sure you have the latest BIOS). Turbo is a must, Speedstep may or may not help. Turn off C States. Use Task Manager (or better still, HWINFO) to monitor where your processor's clock is hovering. Make sure that hyperthreading is also enabled in the BIOS.

In your advanced power settings, set your processor's minimum and maximum speeds to 100% while on charger. This will make for a lot of power eating, so if you are planning on doing a lot of DAW work on battery, you can set it that way for battery as well but expect reduced battery life. Better to just bring your charger with you when you want to get your DAW on.

Get whatever system and video driver packages you can from Lenovo's site (the video driver and chipset drivers are the most important). Then you can go around to the sites for Intel and Realtek and so on to pick up the latest drivers (although Windows 10 is pretty good about hunting down drivers, just check in Updates for optional updates). 

Exclude your Cakewalk project folder and VST/3 folders from Defender's realtime malware scanning.

After you do all that, run LatencyMon and see if there is anything tripping your system up. My new(er) Latitude 7480 is notorious for getting hammered by ACPI.SYS, so I had to track down a workaround setting for that.

A "clean" installation of Windows 10 is fairly free of crapware, but it does enable some things like Skype and Meet and XBox that I'm not interested in on my laptop. You can uninstall Skype and use the Services app to disable the XBox stuff if you don't want them running.

If you want to get even fancier, Process Lasso is a good way to monitor what processes are running in the background and take control of them.

Do all this stuff and your Lenovo should work quite well for audio recording and even mixing. If you've gotten used to it with the 5400 hybrid spinner, you will be blown away by how fast it boots and starts programs and loads projects with an SSD and a fresh install of Windows. It'll be like getting a whole new laptop.

(all bits of software that I mentioned are freeware)

Wow! Thanks. I'll go through all your suggestions as I work through this. Thanks again. 

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

That is indeed weird. I, too acquired MPS 5 during the Great iZotope Glitch of '22, so I can check out what's going on. I think a number of people on this forum also took advantage of the Great Glitch, but perhaps we haven't had enough time to give that huge bundle of FX a proper workout.

Thanks. I saw and replied to a fb post in the iZotope user group, I think, about similar problems. I'm trying to recreate the problem I had in a new project. 

As for RX 10 Breath Control, It doesn't seem to work in several projects. 

What was the 'Glitches? I upgraded MPS 4 to 5 in November, 

I have experienced very similar problems. See my forum post below. I've also submitted crash dump files to Cakewalk support and a support request to iZotope. 

This probably rules out you, me and other plugins as the cause of the problem. 🥺

3 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Wow those specs are... odd!

The *U series processors aren't particularly powerful (they're more about being light rather than powerful) and 8GB RAM is pretty lean, but I ran CbB on an ancient dual core machine with 8GB of RAM for years and got away with it (although it was pretty painful sometimes). Your biggest bottleneck will be your HDD, I'd say. Swapping my HDD out for a SSD was a MASSIVE improvement in speed for everything, so it's a good decision to start there. This system is wayyyy more powerful than my crappy old one in most ways though, so it could be fine if you're not loading up 300 tracks of orchestral libraries or anything.

Does that thing really have an 8GB SSD in it? 😐 Is that a cache or recovery image or something?

Thanks. I definitely plan to replace the HD with an SSD. I've never done that in a laptop before but I have the Hardware Maintenance Manual. It shows 16 screws in the back cover alone. And it warns that the nylon coated screws will be difficult to remove and shouldn't be reused. But I plan to reuse them. I'll have to make sure to get the right screwdriver.

As for the 8 GB SSD. AFAIR the 8 GB SSD was advertised as a SSD buffer for the 500 GB HD improving the performance of the HD. The SSD doesn't show up in the Disk Manager.

2 hours ago, msmcleod said:

FWIW - I tried a MeLE Silent PC running at 2GHz + 8GB RAM with a 1st gen 18i8, recording 16 simultaneous tracks whilst playing back 32 tracks I'd previously recorded.  The MeLE had zero problems with the recordings. 

Obviously this is nowhere near powerful to mix on (I didn't even bother trying  to add plugins), but for straight multi-track recording, it did the job with no issues.  Considering this thing is only slightly larger than an old cassette case and has literally no moving parts, I was impressed.

I tried recording both to the internal SSD and an external SDD connected via USB3 - it was fine in both scenarios.

This is the rig I used for recording:


 

Encouraging. Thanks. I don't recall ever seeing a MeLE. And you've got 4 line and 1 SPDIF inputs left to add another 6 inputs.

I'm doing clean W10 install on a LenovoIdeaPad U530 Touch. Just creating the usb media is taking forever. My plan is to put Cakewalk on it for recording and rough mixes with a Focusrite 18i8 gen3. It has a 500 GB 5400 rpm SATA HD + 8 GB SSD  and 8GB DDR3L 1600 RAM. I'm hoping that replacing the HD with a 1 TB SSD will improve performance significantly. Looks like it had an optional 256 GB SATA III drive. So maybe it supports SATA III.

Am I wasting my time? If not, any suggestions?

I'm having some strange things happen and I'm wondering if anyone else might be seeing similar things. I'm mixing small project with only a few tracks and only a few plugins so far. I recently upgraded to iZotope Music Production Suite 5 and haven't had any problems with it till now. I also bought about a dozen Waves plugins during their recent sale. I mention that because I hear a lot of discussion of problems with Waves plugins mostly related to losing authorization. I've only used a few of the Waves plugins and haven't noticed any problems.

So I hadn't noticed any problems with this project until today. First the RX10 Breath Control plugin doesn't respond to a very audible breath. The only other breath control plugins I have are from RX 8 and Nectar 2. They don't work either. I opened an earlier project containing the same vocal. RX 10 Breath Control doesn't respond to the breath there either. I've opened and closed Cakewalk 2022.11 Build 021. I tried a wide range of Targets, Gains and Sensitivities.

The Nectar 3, Neutron 4, Insight 2, Visual Mixer plugins seem to be performing normally including Assistants. That was up until the Breath Control problems started. Since then the iZotope plugins still seem to be performing fine but when I open their UIs I'll get a blank screen. The UI doesn't draw. At one point Cakewalk crashed but it hasn't happened since. I plan to send the crash report

During troubleshooting I noticed a RX 10 update was available and installed it and then deleted and re-inserted RX 10 Breath Control to be sure it was the latest. That didn't help. RX 10 Breath Control still doesn't work and when I opened the Nectar 3 UI it came up blank.

14 hours ago, Tony Beveridge said:

If I want to record e.g. bass, guitar, midi, Focusrite gets set down to a buffer size of 64 samples, or else the latency is awful. If I want to mix or master, then I have to set Focusrite up to 1024 samples, or the engine keeps dropping out. 

I usually use separate recording, and mixing/mastering projects. For recording I use a minimum of low CPU/OpenGL impact plugins required for for the musicians' monitoring mixes. The recording and mixing/mastering projects can share an audio folder so that incorporating new recorded tracks into the mix is relatively easy. You'll still need to toggle the buffer size but that can be handled in the Preferences for each project. I'm not sure if having both projects open at the same time will cause a problem but I don't think so.

1 hour ago, msmcleod said:

• Track Filter = "Clips":    CTRL + drag in the lower part of the clip to alter the level of the ENTIRE clip-gain envelope

Thank you @msmcleod. This is news to me, but it's clearly stated in the screenshot I included that the Edit filter is set to "Clips." As is so often the case, the answer to my question is staring me in the face but I don't see it. I think my problem is that automation editing is by far the most common editing I do and the editing tools are so expansive and powerful that I get lost. What I need to do is learn that "Creating and editing automation envelopes" section of the Documentation that I took the screenshot attachment to my last post from.

On 10/21/2022 at 5:21 AM, msmcleod said:

This should have been fixed in 2022.09.  

The "ctrl-click in lower have of clip" way of selecting a clip envelope still isn't working for me in 2022.11. In the attached GIF you can see that the smart tool is selected and the in-clip selections shown are being done using ctrl-click. I move the cursor while holding ctrl-clip to highlight that I'm holding ctrl-clip. No envelope selection is being made. I finally managed to do it I think by multi-clicking a single node.

9 hours ago, Laurence Levin said:

Yes, I do have only the Focusrite drivers chosen. 

 

Well with my previous computer, I could use the internal audio device for YouTube videos and stuff and my Focusrite interface just for music projects. And I don't want to disable the audio on my webcam. 

I'll check Power Options.

Thanks everyone 🙂! Happy Holidays!

You should still be able to do that. I Cakewalk preferences select the Focusrite. For all the other applications that play through the Windows sound system, I have a little speaker near the right corner of the tool tray. Clicking that little speaker lets me choose the Windows speaker output. I usually pick the PC sound card SPDIF output which I have routed to the SPDIF Aux input on my monitor controller which allows me to listen to Windows audio through my monitors/headphones.

Note your new PC might have several sound cards (on graphics card for example) in addition to the one on the PC motherboard. I try to disable all those leaving me with the PC sound card outputs and the Focusrite output.

By the way your Focusrite may have a loop-back feature. Mine's too old for that. But if your's does, you may actually have two Focusrite output options, one for audio output and one for loop-back.

5 minutes ago, msmcleod said:

You can synchronise wordclock over SPDIF - this is completely different from synchronising playback and tempo.
 

Thanks. I missed that. Looks like I was off topic. Sorry.

29 minutes ago, Jordi said:

i think i can use the digital spdif outs and ins to sync but i'm not sure, i need to test.

You probably can for audio if the interface you want to sync with has an spdif in. I've used a combination of word clock, adat and spdif to sync several audio interfaces. I have no experience syncing midi interfaces.

Follow this link to Bobby Balow's Raytown Productions video on 7 Waves Hidden Gems to find a link to the H-Comp give away valid for 48 hours from the time the video was posted.

I know many on this forum don't use Waves plugins but figure some do that might want and not have H-Comp.

Happy Holidays.

Out of the blue, If the two PCs have audio interfaces, Can't you just sync the audio interfaces (word clock would be great for this) and sync the two PCs to the audio interfaces. That would be my first choice?

7 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Import in whatever song you want to use as your reference and put it on the REFERENCE track and solo it. That will be sending the output of that track directly to your metering so you can see what it's doing.

I think if you mute all tracks being mastered except for the one you're currently working on, you can use Exclusive Solo to toggle between the Master Bus and Reference Track to compare them.

On 12/13/2022 at 12:39 PM, KennyP said:

Hi:

Would you please tell me where I can get/download the Cakewalk mono delay/echo plugin, which I believe was included in the X2 Producer?

 

Thanks,

 

Kenny

 

Can't you use the Sonitus Delay that's, I believe, included with Cakewalk by Bandlab? 

21 hours ago, Mo Jonez said:

Anyone using Neutron Visual Mixer notice Cakewalk slowing down at all?   When I add Neutron Visual Mixer - add it to my Master bus - everything in the DAW slows down a bit,  a second or so delay in things opening up, meters are a bit delayed, etc, overall the DAW runs a bit slower.  My system is pretty fast.  My buffer is at the max 1024.  Everything is bounced to tracks except some tracks have volume automation running.  15 tracks, each track with one FX. 

I'm not there yet on the mix I'm working on but I use the iZotope Music Production Suite and just updated it. I wish there was a meter on every track showing CPU and GPU load to help us understand what's going on. I know two big issues are look ahead and over sampling. So using bus and aux tracks for plugins that use either look ahead or over sampling will allow multiple audio tracks to share these resource consuming plugins. It would also be nice if the plugins with the fancy GUIs that are so useful to me had a switch to turn off the GUI (leaving just knobs and sliders) when the GUI's no longer needed.

I can't seem to get satisfactory results using MIDI keyboard entry to select harmonies. See screen shot.

1. I added a MIDI track with my MPK49 as the input.
2. I enabled MIDI in in the Nectar VST3 dropdown
3. I enabled MIDI in the Harmony module.
4. I deleted existing nodes on the Harmony XY grid.
5. I selected Nectar 3.1 as the MIDI output.
6. Once that was done nodes 5-8 apeared on the XY in the Harmony module but they don't seem to respond to keyboard notes played.
7. When I play and hold a note while the song is playing I can hear that note faintly playing behind the song but I don't see any notes being added or moving on the XY grid.

I've looked for but can't find any Cakewalk specific help other than a 2015 Cakewalk Forum post that told me about the Enable MIDI In option on the VST3 dropdown. iZotope seems to default to the "?" mark help screens in their videos but that help screen for me opens the iZotope Nectar help page.

I did find this for setting up Nectar 2 MIDI control for supported DAWs. Looks pretty much like what I did.

Ok. I went back and poked around some more. Nodes 1-4 were hiding under nodes 5 & 6. I'm guessing nodes were added each time I was able to get MIDI working. So I spread them out. I moved the MIDI fader to 127 and selected Voices only in the harmony module to better hear what the MIDI keyboard was doing. Looks like the MIDI notes set the node note values overriding the note values entered in the nodes. The nodes do glow. So it looks like it works more or less.

Anybody else using this feature? What's been your experience? Are you getting the same results I am?

3 hours ago, Jack Stoner said:

I settled on a Dell gaming laptop primarily as gaming models have more cooling,  Something to consider when choosing a laptop for recording use.

I had disregarded gaming models. Thanks for the insights