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Fawudd

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  1. First of all, thanks to everyone for chiming in, and thanks in particular to Bob Bone, who spent about 2 hours with me by phone going over settings both within and outside of Cakewalk. I offer the following as constructive input to Bandlab. Fortunately, and for reasons which continue to escape me, the majority of new users do not have an experience like mine, or the future trajectory for CW would be compromised... 1. I expect that most new users will be looking at a few options within a low budget. I was using $0-$100, so free had an instant advantage if it was competitive. However with Free, you also look at support, community, etc. Cakewalk remained a finalist. 2. Feature/Functionality is somewhat personal depending on goals. One man's bells and whistles are another' mandatory requirements. Cakewalk remained a finalist, but multiple solutions met my basic needs to record, track, manipulate, mix, and master. 3. Workflow is highly personal IMHO. The extent to which it is achieved out of the box, vs after some tweaking and adjustment, vs not-at-all is in the eyes, ears, and fingers of the beholder. Cakewalk was the leading finalist for me at this point. 4. Configuration and Performance became a deal killer. I did not initially know this was an important differentiator. My 2 machines, i5 Desktop 16GB SSD, and i5 Laptop 8GB SSD, were above minimum for all finalist DAWs. It is only when I noticed the crackles and pops that I paid attention. I could see that the engine within CW was overloaded and was losing buffers. I tried to look for solutions. I did RTFM 🙂, and I did look online. I found multiple threads and even a few videos on the performance topic (mostly non-complimentary and devolving into zealot-fests). I applied some of the suggestions for buffers, etc but the issue persisted. CW itself had little in the way of help/advice. I assumed I was up against CPU/Memory limits. At this point in my evaluation, I shifted focus back to my original plan which was to create the same project in each and take it through the mixing phase. For kicks and giggles, I exported the midi project from CW, imported, added the exact plugins, and hit play. Strangely, the crackles and pops were gone. Since they were somewhat random, I ran this multiple times. I did the same on the laptop. Also gone. Same hardware, same interface, same ASIO drivers, same buffer, same project, same plugins, same everything. I tried a 3rd non-finalist (although this was an abbreviated test). Gone. I then created this original post hoping to get an official from CW and/or the community to set me straight on CW configuration. Even with further suggestions, I could not resolve the issue, so I abandoned ship and concentrated on Reaper. In a final attempt for kicks and giggles, I watched Windows resource monitor while opening, loading and playing the file in both, and it seemed to confirm what Cakewalk's performance monitor suggested, that it was consuming many times the resources and hitting limits. The story would have ended there, but Bob Bone reached out to me weeks later, and offered to walk me through some helpful changes. He did, and he is to be commended for his efforts. I mentioned to him several times that CW should employ him to make and post videos with the suggestions on their site. They could also reach out to Mike from Creative Sauce, but I digress. My desktop was now at 32GB, but even with Bob's improvements, I still had the same issues, just fewer of them!! My trust in CW was shot, and I am moving on after this promised post to the forum. The fact is that even if you can find fault with some of my diagnostic steps, or the research I did, I am probably similar to others. Even if you suspect my hardware, this experience is across 2 separate devices. I had another solution that was within my paltry budget, which performed well, had a more robust manufacturer support infrastructure, and what seemed like an equal or stronger community (I don't actually know the size comparison). It has its own plusses/minuses, but running well on average hardware and being multi-platform are enough to overcome some UI and workflow advantages! Even if you discount my individual perception, CW's own performance monitor says it is overloaded and losing buffers. Threads on CW forums, competitor forums, and from "defectors" 😁 create a perception that CW does not manage resources well and/or that the engine is flawed in some way. Someone made a point about criticizing a free product, and it is valid. However, part of the rationale for making it free is to erase barriers to adoption, and seed the market. It is also far from free it it requires you to throw hardware (well above the stated minimum) at it in order to gain comparable levels of performance to others. I am hoping that CW continues to develop an otherwise competitive product, and that at some point, there will be an upgrade or bug fix that leads me back this way. Thanks for your patience with this long post.
  2. From BandLab's perspective, I am not sure I see the point. You would invest a bunch of time/effort/$$ to then try to break into a very competitive Mac DAW space, going up against industry standards. Better to write something new from the ground up to be cross-platform and provide a path for a healthy base of Bandlab users. Either way, this is no small undertaking, so the long game Business case needs to be compelling..... From my perspective, I would love to see a standard file format adopted that goes beyond Midi 0 and 1, to include plugins, patch names, automation, etc. That would make portability sooooo much easier between systems and platforms. However, the big boys would have little incentive to play.....Well,......one can dream.....
  3. CJ, I am using ASIO with my M-Audio 192/4 set to 48K. See below. Drives are SSD, but I do not have a dedicated drive just for audio. This is the same machine used for both DAWs, so no hardware differences. My older surface Pro is the same for both DAWs as well. I am hoping to use the DAW on both the workstation and a laptop. Thanks ps:same buffer size in both, which is the recommended by the M-Audio.
  4. Hello All, First off, full disclosure. I am in the midst today evaluating both Cakewalk and Reaper for my DAW. I like the UI and the pro-Channel in CW, so workflow is a bit better fit. However, I am having performance issues in Cakewalk that I am hoping is due to settings and need some help. I have created exactly the same project in both DAWs. 12 tracks of midi in a 4 minute song. It is not very dense at all. Same instruments and effects on the same machine (i5 16Gb). In CW I get crackling and periodic stutters that do not happen in Reaper. I even get crackling sometimes when soloing a track. The very first time the song is played in CW it has an audible glitch when it first plays certain instruments. Seems better after that. The performance monitor is mostly in the single digits for % used, but periodically the engine spikes to 300%+ and buffers are lost. Nothing else is running on the machine. I cannot decipher any rhyme or reason to when this occurs. I ran both DAWs on my less powerful laptop and the performance issues are worse for CW including a few crashes. This all seems to be down to the performance of the engine and its consumption of resources. I have seen posts regarding buffer size and configuration settings, but I would like to get an official guide to performance settings for CW. I want this eval to be based on correct setup of CW rather than me fumbling around in the dark. BTW, running 2020.04 Thanks
  5. Thanks Tecknot for the response. I just completed the process over 2 days and it was a royal pain with some of the license controls and reinstallations. I did save the templates and workspaces as you suggested, so that helped. Since technology fails, and hardware upgrades happen, it would be great if CW would bundle up all of your settings and preferences so that they could be applied in one step to a new instance. On the bright side, my new hardware is faster and more capable, and CW does a good job of telling you about all of the missing components in your project as it loads.
  6. Fawudd

    SI Bass Pitch Bend

    I am new to Cakewalk and I am trying to apply pitch bend to a bass note. For the TTS Bass patches, you can specify semitones of range to easily perform an octave. For the SI-Bass, it appears to have no settings (that I can find), and seems to respond to the full range of PB with a single semitone. From reading forums, PB seems to be dependent on the virtual plugin, so I am puzzled by the lack of range/adjustability on the SI Bass instrument. Apologies if I am missing an obvious adjustment...
  7. I have noticed this same gap/transition issue with the arranger. It does not occur running a loop of the same section. Happens on a simple section which is not dense. I have not tried low latency, but if looping is fine shouldn't the arranger also be fine? ps: This is a great feature once it gets sorted, so kudos to CW.
  8. What is the best way to backup Cakewalk so that all of its configuration is captured, and it can be restored onto a new workstation I am getting tomorrow. I would rather not reinstall and spend hours getting things (workspaces, plugin directories, etc) back together if I can avoid it. I am assuming that I can just put projects, audio files, and plugins back in the same relative place. ps: I am intentionally not restoring the entire workstation, so all I care about is Cakewalk. Thanks
  9. How long should the upgrade take ? The Bandlab assistant has been “Installing” for about 20 minutes. I am reluctant to stop it without some guidance. Thanks
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