Craig Anderton

Also, Paste Special (Advanced) gives plenty of options, like how many repeats you want, and where you want the pasting to start on the timeline.

Current support is Logic, Garageband, Live, Cubase, and Nuendo. No Pro Tools, Studio One, Reaper, Samplitude, Reason, etc. So I don't know how important they consider CbB.

Well Noel, I find it almost impossible to believe you're not at your PC There's a Misc - Full Reset.pcp default preset at C:\Cakewalk Content\Cakewalk Core\ProChannel Presets. It includes the Compressor, QuadCurve, and Tube. I modified mine to include the Tape Emulator.

That can be an issue, and is a matter of preference for some people. However, a dark interface is preferable when doing audio-for-video work, otherwise you can get a false sense about the video's brightness and color. What's great about Cakewalk's Theme Editor is that if you have the time, you can make the look however you want...or at the very least, download some of the user-contributed ones (some of which are quite wonderful).

The trend to dark interfaces is mainly because of so many people using smartphones. Black pixels draw virtually no current with AMOLED displays, so it extends battery life (this isn't about brightness, which is the case with LCDs; it applies only if the pixel is true black). Anyway with Studio One, you can have a more Mercury-like interface by going Options > General > Appearance and changing the Luminance controls to positive values. The higher the values, the brighter the interface. Also, you can turn off "Colorize Channel Strips" if you don't like the colors, or reduce saturation to make them more muted. HTH. As to Cakewalk on a laptop, screensets are very helpful for hiding and showing elements to optimize the available space.

X1 was released too early IMHO. Eventually it got sorted out, but you have only one chance to make a first impression I think the current trajectory of concentrating on stability is a smart move. I hope they tackle Rapture Pro next.

There actually was an attempt to get another developer involved, who had serious notation expertise and would have been a good fit. But this was around the time of Momentum, which I think was being prioritized. Besides, Gibson was on shaky ground financially. It's all water under the bridge of course, but prior to being shut down Cakewalk had gone quite far along a possible path of improving notation. The opportunity no longer exists AFAIK, but Bill was not being disingenuous when he said it wasn't "dead" or "abandoned."

IIRC, Studio One was released in September 2009, and SONAR X1 was introduced in December 2010.

Mark, that's really clever

Check out the Matrix View. When you do, you'll first think I gave you bogus advice but as you work with it, and realize you can record into audio tracks and do other cool tricks, I think you'll find it's a useful alternative to "drum machine song mode"-type MIDI editing. If you've worked with Ableton Live, you already know most of how it works. Have fun!

Hey Morten...great news!

I agree completely, I think many people underappreciated the Cakewalk plug-ins because they were "free." Which they weren't, of course - they were part of the cost of Sonar. I always thought Cakewalk would start offering add-ons, including the older plug-ins, but it must not be a trivial undertaking or it would have happened by now. Nor is Cakewalk alone in this. People assume that a third-party plug-in just has to be better than what comes with a program, yet many DAW-specific plug-ins are excellent...Digital Performer's amp sims and Live's beat-synched processors come to mind. As to the original question, I was in LA last weekend and turned a VR designer on to Cakewalk one morning. She connected immediately with the program and when I left in the afternoon, was still playing with it . I really think there are two issues in getting more adoption: 1. Making people aware that it even exists. 2. Making it easier to get started. Currently, the irony is you need to know a lot about the program in order to take advantage of the features that simplify it.

And hopefully it would put Rapture Pro back on track! I still think it's an amazing synth, I just wish they'd clean up a few of the loose ends (e.g., envelope problems, presets not being able to find samples).

Regarding the first, I hear ya. I always start with MIDI parts so I can get the feel of the song before overdubbing audio, but that's not going to work for everybody. In any event it gets me close enough that if I feel I need to bump up or down a per cent or two, I can do that on the master. "Slip Edit" is the standard edit for clip start or end where you hover the mouse over the edge of the clip, click, and drag right or left to extend or shorten. "Slip stretch" uses the Timing tool (under Edit in the Toolbar) or the Ctrl+Shift keyboard command. It's like slip-edit except when you drag left or right, it time-stretches the clip. An approach that might work for you after recording several tracks is: Bounce the clips in a track together into a single clip. Slip-edit the beginning of each clip to the beginning of the song, and the end to a specific number of measures after the end of the song (e.g., 64 measures, i.e., the start of measure 65). Bounce each clip to itself so the change in length becomes permanent. Create a premix (i.e., bounce them all to a single track) and mute the existing tracks. While listening to the premix, try different tempos. Each time you change tempo, slip-stretch the end of the premix to the start of measure 65. Once you've established the desired tempo, unmute the original tracks, slip-stretch their ends to the start of measure 65 at the new tempo, then delete the premix because you won’t need it any more. (I suppose you could use AudioSnap, but I find that more time-consuming.) There are probably lots of other ways to do this, but I think it's pretty straightforward.

You need to use Mackie mode in CbB. There's no dedicated control surface plug-in for the FaderPort 8/16 that I know of. unless someone like Azslow has come up with one.

I can't reproduce the issue with crossfading muted clips, but I highly recommend editing on the Parent track only when the take lanes are folded up. Also, although the following doesn't relate to what you're saying, it can trip you up when the take lanes are open: If you want to edit the takes, I find it easier to use the specific Edit tool for a function (e.g., Edit, Timing, or Split) instead of the Smart Tool. It seems that when the Smart Tool is in a comping situation, it thinks you want to comp, not edit. That confused me for quite a while until I figured it out. It also took me a while to wrap my head around the positional nature of the Smart Tool. There are three distinct vertical zones in a clip, and the Smart Tool has a different function in each one of them. If the Take height isn't tall enough, I find it impossible to hit the middle zone for doing selections. There's a workaround if there's a blank take lane above or below the take lane with the clip. In the empty lane, click where you want the selection to start and hold the mouse button down, then move the cursor down or up to the track with the clip, and drag to select. Comping does have a few rough edges, but the "rules" for comping are strict. If you follow them, it generally works well. Finally, if you're using Sonar instead of CbB, make sure you have the final version (or better yet, just use CbB). There were several fixes to comping over Sonar's lifetime that helped matters. I hope this helps!

Do you have problems with the blobs running together and making it difficult to find attacks precisely? It's not easy with waveforms either, of course.

I use the FaderPort 8, which replaced an Artist Series controller, which in turn replaced the V-Studio controller because it had too big a footprint for my setup. IIRC there was only one feature I found that wasn't in the documentation Mark refers to, but I can't recall what it is offhand. If you just want mixing, panning, scrolling, transport, etc., the FaderPort 8 or 16 works fine.

The laptop angle is something I hadn't really considered, that does make sense. However in my musical workflow, I'm always jumping around among the various nooks and crannies of the program. I almost never just mix or just track or just use MIDI. I'm all over the place . When Lenses first appeared, I made sets for specific functionalities but at some point, always found myself wanting something that was hidden. However, another problem was the window layouts changing, so Ben's tip gives me some incentive to re-visit the Lens thing. I guess it's that I've been using CbB for so long I know where everything is, and I also make extensive use of custom shortcuts...those, and screensets, cover most of my momentary needs for changes. But maybe it's time to give Lenses another try.

I appreciate what Lenses do in theory, but I have yet to find a killer reason to use them. But Screensets can be really useful, especially if you can get by with 10 favorite screensets. Lock them , make them part of your default template, and learn them....that really does save time for me.

IIRC you have "The Huge Book of Cakewalk by BandLab Tips" - turn to page 368. The "Yet Another Option" on page 370 might be appropriate as well. I still think the easiest solution is to wait until the mix is done, then slow down or speed up the two-track. Otherwise: 1. Bounce all clips to individual, track-long clips. 2. Slip-edit each track to the beginning of the song, and the end to a specific number of measures (e.g., have all tracks end at beat 1 of measure 90). Bounce each clip to itself. 3. Change CbB to the new tempo. 4. Slip-stretch the audio tracks so that they all end at beat 1 of measure 90 at the new tempo. I go into this in more detail in my December 2018 Cakewalk column in Sound on Sound. However, at the moment you need to buy the PDF of the article; I believe their articles don't come out from behind the pay wall until six months after publication.

I agree with pretty much everything there. Splitting and manual stretching/aligning/crossfading will give the best results. I believe Cakewalk oversold AudioSnap, it's fine for drums a la Beat Detective but can't differentiate transients with enough precision to be automatic for non-obviously-percussive material. However, manual labor is the solution. In the Edit Filter, choose transients, move the transients to the actual attacks instead of where they think they "should" be, then snap the transient. As to a real-sounding guitar VST, you need EQ to tame the cabs, and you need to create ambience around it - guitars + amps exist in a space, and because you're moving around, the response is always changing. With many amp sims, I get better results by "building" a cab with EQ than using IR-based responses. I know how to mic guitar amps, but I use VSTs for almost everything because after I finally finish wrestling them to the ground :), I think the results sound better on playback.

I'm with Steve on this. CbB is a better program than Sonar, and you don't lose access to anything you had before.

A lot of times, like when creating uniform vibrato, I don't split at blobs but split based solely on waveforms (e.g., if two half cycles look the same and the next two half cycles look the same, but different from the first two, I'll split between them at a zero-crossing). So far that approach has worked reasonably well.

You specify a guide track, and that's what your track will sync to. Sometimes Vocal Sync works really well, sometimes...not so well. It's happier with shorter segments to chew on. What works best for me is to try it. If it works, great. If it doesn't, I locate the part that's causing difficulty, fix it manually via stretching, and then try again.