Craig Anderton

10 hours ago, Eric Bohlke said:

I'm getting back into home recording after almost a decade and am trying to stick with the DAW I'm comfortable with.  Maybe it's just so old that it's not going to work properly anymore...or maybe it's something simple I'm missing, but any help/advice would be appreciated.

It won't take you long to get comfortable with Cakewalk. It's like if you visited a city you were familiar with, 10 years later. Most of the buildings you knew are still there and everybody still speaks the same language, but now there are some new restaurants, the walkway along the river has been spruced up, the movie theater improved their sound system, etc. There is a bit more traffic, but you'll quickly find some side roads that get you where you need to go

Besides, you can install the two side-by-side and work with Cakewalk on new projects until it becomes familiar.

On 3/28/2021 at 7:02 AM, msmcleod said:

To be clear, what Craig and I do is slightly more than normalize them...  what we do is split the clips at each phrase, then normalize or clip-gain adjust them individually.  So each individual phrase is normalized against itself, not the whole vocal track.

Even though this is an old thread, some topics are hardy perennials, and are worth repeating

Two other comments...it's important to audition the clips in context, because sometimes a clip will need to have the level pulled back a bit compared to other clips. Also, with this normalization technique, adding even a little compression gives the same perceived results as adding a lot of compression without having normalized first.  Even better, because you need so little compression, you don't have pumping, breathing, or other artifacts related to heavy compression.

Yes, more information is definitely needed. But a good place to start would be to check for updated graphics card drivers, if the audio persists but the video doesn't.

4 hours ago, abacab said:

If you don't know Craig, he worked for Gibson when they used to own Cakewalk, and was the resident DAW guru around here. Sound design is one of his many talents, and I'm sure it is going to take much more than a cheap unsupported synth, with no sound design features, to tickle his fancy, LOL!!!

Yeah, but sometimes you just need a decent GM instrument.

Re Xpand, I'm definitely not looking for a ROMpler. Pigments sounds promising, to say the least.  I have a bunch of friends who love it, but haven't gotten around to checking it out yet. Thanks for the push!

I love Rapture Pro, and have developed a zillion sounds for it.  But it has its quirks, and BandLab doesn't seem to have any interest in nailing down a few remaining issues. And of course, maybe someday an OS change or something will kill it. So...

Has anyone found a virtual instrument that's as flexible as Rapture Pro? You can convince Kontakt to do a lot of the same things, but it's a more cumbersome process. I'm looking forward to any recommendations.

I helped someone with a similar problem. He was running iZotope Ozone as a plug-in something like 20 tracks. That will bring any system to its knees

I realized why I don't have that problem. If I have a lot of audio and I want to convert just one section into a loop, I split at the beginning and end of that section, and loop that clip. So if I unloop it, it just goes back to where it was before looping the clip. 

Also FWIW, if you use amp sims, a lot of the VST2 ones respond to program change messages, but not the VST3 versions.

6 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

It's a nice idea but being involved in production music as I am with it's short deadlines and volume of  tracks required  to make decent royalties, the one-size-fits -all solution holds far more appeal because it reduces complexity and I can write-mix-master and export deliverables all in one session ( which is considered best practice in this world )

Well, back in the 2005-2010 time slot, I was doing audio for literally hundreds of (admittedly short) videos a year. The reason I went for the workflow I did, and I agree it's not for everybody, is that I found over time that doing workarounds in one DAW slowed things down more than the export/import shuffle.  So it was a lesser of two evils situation, not a "this is great, this sucks" situation.

However, I also never had problems when using ReWire, except when Propellerheads was slow moving from 32- to 64-bit OSes. That threw me a curve. It was an interdependency with no decent workaround, but it was the only one I experienced. 

3 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

I don't agree, it doesn't have to be a fundamental change to the existing workflow - They just need to add some much needed tools and update some of the existing ones.

I'll give you two for starters.

I agree those are excellent suggestions, and I get a better idea of where you're going with this. But, I have a more universal suggestion: the industry should not abandon ReWire, but enhance it.

I use Studio One, Cakewalk, and Ableton Live on a regular basis. Each has functionalities the others don't. I don't have time to wait forever for every DAW to implement every other DAW's functionality, so I have to use the right tool for the right job based on what's available now. 

Studio One does a great job of integrating samples and slices into instruments like Impact XT and Sample One. But, there's nothing like Ableton Live's Session View. So, I ReWire Ableton Live into Studio One - done. Cakewalk doesn't do notation. So I ReWire Notion into Cakewalk. When Sonar had no significant suite of virtual instruments, I ReWired Reason into it. 

The problem is that most DAWs, with the notable exception of Live, FL Studio, and Acid Pro, are only ReWire hosts. That's what I mean by enhancements. If all DAWs could be ReWire hosts or clients, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion. For example, I find Cakewalk's mixing environment very comfortable. It would be great if any DAW could be a client for it. When I need to mix a Pro Tools session, I usually export the tracks, and import them into Cakewalk to do the mix. Yeah, it would be nice to avoid that step - which would be possible, if Pro Tools could be a ReWire client. 

But, it looks like this will never happen, because Propellerheads is dropping ReWire support, no one else seems to be taking up the slack (I asked Steinberg because they were involved in the original development, but never got an answer back), and it's not being made open source. Although ReWire still works with Windows, even when it's not officially supported, ReWire is now officially dead on computers with Apple silicon because there will supposedly never be an Apple silicon-compatible library. So, we'll continue to have DAWs that live in the worlds they do best, not play nice with each other, have people in forums beg for features other DAWs have and be frustrated, and need  to import/export tracks & stems to take advantage of features unique to specific DAWs.

The industry doesn't realize that this kind of a move would grow the size of the market, because people would invest in more than one DAW, so that they could easily do what they want to do. And the creative options that open up by treating DAWs as modules instead of one-size-fits-all solutions are off the hook.   /rant

On 6/5/2021 at 4:12 AM, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

And my point is the Sonar/CBB workflow doesn't cater that well for the largest demographic  

Many of the artists you mentioned use Logic Pro X, whose workflow isn't all that different. And again, as the stats show, for total volume rock + pop exceed R&B + hip-hop. It's not broken down by age, so you could make the argument that R&B + hip-hop is done only by young people, but hey, of the top hip-hop artists, Eminem is 48 years old, Jay -Z 51, Drake 34, Lil Wayne 38, Nicki Minaj 38, Chuck D 60, Donald Glover (Childish Gambino) 37...not exactly kids. 

I'm not saying anything negative about the programs used for making hip-hop or rap.  I just question the assumption there's this giant demographic to which DAWs must cater if they want to get young users. If you look at a lot of the people charting with hip-hop and R&B, not just messing around to have fun, they're not kids. The other 61% of the total volume of sales need an alternative, just like those doing EDM needed an alternative to the conventional DAW, and Acid, and then Ableton Live, were born.

If Cakewalk changed its workflow to accommodate a different demographic, it would fail miserably. Bitwig couldn't take down Ableton Live. FL Studio remains huge. There wouldn't be any incentive for people invested in those programs to switch. So Cakewalk would end up with the worst of both worlds - alienating an existing core, and large demographic, while failing to attract younger users anyway. 

You also said "I've watched my own kids, their friends and my nieces/nephews make music ( they all seem to be into this Trap / Hip Hop / Pop crossover type stuff )  and they're all pretty audio/loop based in their approach and none of them have taken to Cakewalk."

I have no doubt that's true. But I also teach to the under-30 crowd, and they use a wide variety of programs. Many of them still gravitate to Pro Tools. Mac people usually use Logic Pro.  Ableton Live and Studio One are also on the ascendancy.

On 6/3/2021 at 1:21 PM, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

 

Read what I said: "Not all people under 30 listen to, or make, the same kind of music, nor do they all need the same type of workflow."

If you choose to interpret this as saying rap doesn't matter, that's the wrong interpretation.  The last major remix I did was a Chuck D track, who as the lead rapper in Public Enemy, helped establish rap as an art form. The most recent song I mastered was from Martha Davis, of the Motels, who does incredible pop music. My point is that there are multiple markets for multiple demographics, and they don't all draw boundaries on the basis of age or genre. Rock and Pop together exceed rap in all categories shown in the graphic below, except on-demand audio and video streams, where they're essentially tied.

Top 10 artists is meaningless to judge a genre, total sales and streams are. And I'd also definitely question classifying Billie Eilish as a "rapper." To quote from the same report you quoted:

Billboard reports that BTS is also the top selling artist in the United States this year so far when it comes to the overall album sales (physical CDs and digital album downloads) of their entire catalog, as they’ve sold 757,000 copies of their albums in the first half of 2020. 720,000 of those sales were physical albums.

Also from Nielsen music for 2020:

Top 5 Pop Genre Artists

1. Billie Eilish – 1.676 million album sales, TEA, and on-demand SEA
2. BTS – 1.417 million
3. Taylor Swift – 1.328 million
4. Justin Bieber – 1.129 million
5. Halsey – 1.009 million

My point is there are a lot of different people making a lot of different music, using a lot of different approaches. BTS isn't exactly old white guys, and Taylor Swift is 31. 

14 hours ago, bdickens said:

Death threats? Really?

I think it may have been a misinterpretation of "death thread," as in "Windows 10 threads have been beaten to death"

8 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

Young people won't naturally gravitate to Cakewalk because the workflow doesn't support how kids are making thier music. 

Not all people under 30 listen to, or make, the same kind of music, nor do they all need the same type of workflow. Just because FL Studio and Ableton Live are doing well doesn't mean that Pro Tools, Logic, Studio One, etc. stopped selling. Part of this is because the overall market size increases over time. New people are getting into this world faster than old people are dying off :)

Regarding updates, I think it's a binary decision - keep everything updated, or nothing updated. The eLicenser is indeed problematic, but just reinstall the software and you're back in action.  Same with iLok. Native Access and Waves Central update automatically, which is great.  When you open them, they often update themselves before proceeding.

Also be aware that you can roll back Windows updates...wait a week or two, and try again.

I know how frustrating it is to have something that once worked all of a sudden not work. 99% of the time, I just need to check for updates in whatever is causing the problem. It's also worth checking the drivers. For the other 1%, there's nothing I can do - like when it took forever for Propellerheads to develop a 64-bit ReWire library. I had gone from a 32-bit to 64-bit OS, and all I could do was sit around and wait.

A final piece of advice: getting frustrated makes solving the problem less likely. Take a deep breath, and think for a bit - if you're having problems with the eLicenser, re-install the eLicenser software. If an audio interface is acting up, check for new drivers. The solutions are out there, and finding them shouldn't be too much of a speed bump. At least it's less of a speed bump than aligning your tape bias and EQ every time you load a new reel of tape  

The reality is that recording systems always required maintenance. The big studios had techs, so the artists didn't have to think about it. Now, you have to be your own tech. That definitely interferes with making music, but it's the price you pay for having the equivalent of a $250,000 physical studio sitting on a hard drive.

Unless I misunderstand the question, if the clip started off as non-looped, you can just turn off looping, unless you bounced the clip to itself after setting the loop characteristics.

But back to the younger demographic...I do seminars to at places like MTSU, where the demographic is entirely college age. They're very enthusiastic about the subjects covered in the seminars. They like having their learning process shortened, because they can learn from my mistakes, or gain from my experience. When I talk about Cakewalk, they're responsive.  They just don't know about it, or this forum. 

When forums were the only game in town, sure, that's where you had to go, and participation reflected that. Now there are so many online places to learn things. I just posted an Instagram video on how to create a cool preset in Helix, and it got 2,400 views - more than it would get on the Helix forums. Yet, the Helix forums are the go-to place for deep information, and participation seems to cut across a variety of age groups.

There's nothing inherently wrong about like-minded people congregating in the same place, except that given all the competition for attention, it's unlikely that others will stumble on some place by accident that they might want to know about. But, let's not look at the past through rose-colored glasses, either. When this forum was at its peak in terms of attendance, there were a LOT of whiners, spammers (kitchen cabinets in Manchester, anyone?), crazies, and the noise-to-signal ratio was high. The Cakewalk forums were pretty civilized compared to many other places, but in its current incarnation, the crazies are pretty much gone.

I still have my Sound, Studio, and Stage forum, which has been in continuous operation for over 25 years. It has nowhere near the participation it once had, but that gives a certain freedom to discuss anything, and not have to deal with crazies. Some of the information in there is pure gold, like a guy who said that he no longer needs to wear headphones when tracking vocals, because he uses a figure-8 pattern mic, and points the null toward the monitor.  It really does work, but I would not have considered checking it out without reading his post. Once you record vocals without headphones, you might never go back.

Perhaps the biggest problem with forums is lurkers. Lurkers in my forum outnumber posters by 10 or 20:1, and even more. I posted a thread once asking why people didn't participate. One guy said "I feel like I'm attending a panel discussion with smart people, and I have nothing to add." I can't imagine someone saying that on TikTok

20 minutes ago, John Vere said:

I think it’s something like 1,000,000 of us now. 
We all switched when Sonar died. CbB is Sonar Platinum with all the bug fixes and updates. 
Installing it will not erase Splat so you can keep everything as it was and jump right into the new version. 

In fact, DON'T uninstall Sonar Platinum! That way you can keep the full set of plug-ins and content that came with Platinum. Just install Cakewalk, they co-exist happily side-by-side.

Cakewalk is a much better program in multiple ways, because it benefits from additional years of development. You may have some initial confusion ("What's this arranger thing?"), but it will all fall into place as you work with the program.

Re PDFs, a lot of people load PDFs into tablets, or even smart phones, while they work on a program at their desktop. In that context, being able to search easily is helpful, and they don't have to give up desktop screen real estate.

Also, if you create your own presets, remember to back up the data in the Shared Plugins folder. If you need to reinstall Cakewalk, your custom presets will not be included in a standard install.

23 hours ago, azslow3 said:

You can write thanks to Stainberg for killing MIDI in VST3 and making VST2 obsolete... Not a joke.

You can also ask Overloud to change Program Changes to Control Changes (which are still allowed in VST3) or implement horrible workaround to support PC and check it really works in Cakewalk (Steinberg SDK does not really follow Steinberg documentation for that SDK in that part, so no one really knows how to make it work universal way... again, that is not a joke).

I've yet to find a VST3 amp sim that responds to program changes, although many VST2 ones do. I was told by a developer that it's possible to implement program changes for VST3 plug-ins, but that companies aren't doing it for some reason...I don't remember why. Or maybe it's actually not possible?

Cakewalk doesn't need to steal your music, we have record companies for that

36 minutes ago, RICHARD HUTCHINS said:

Okay, I downloaded ample bass P lite. Have to say Sounds ok especially for free! To those with patience here's my question; it works ok using the mouse, I get the bass notes on to the track. But my guitar wont trigger it.

Play the bass part on guitar, use Melodyne to convert the guitar part into  MIDI (i.e., drag into MIDI track), clean up the data as needed, drop the notes down an octave, and trigger your bass instrument of choice.

On 5/18/2021 at 6:52 PM, Social Exodus said:

It's nice to see you're still here Noel.  And I see Craig A. still is here too.

I also have a few other Cakewalk assets, like Rapture Pro, Concrete Limiter and the other Pro Channel goodies.

Nothing's changed for me...I've been using Sonar/Cakewalk, Studio One, and Ableton Live since their respective initial 1.0 versions.  Rapture Pro is tied with Kontakt for being my most-used virtual instrument, the Concrete Limiter has some kind of mojo that's not in any other limiter I've used, etc.

Using three DAWs has made me proficient at transferring files back and forth, so I can use each program for what it does best. I have to say that the current Cakewalk incarnation has achieved what a lot of us had hoped would happen. I can't understand why anyone wouldn't move from Sonar to Cakewalk, especially since you can still hold on to your Sonar goodies.