Craig Anderton

I used to moderate a forum with a feature where someone could see their own posts, but no one else could aside from admins. When the "bullies" didn't get responses to their trying to stir things up, they became frustrated, and just left of their own accord. Banning people is only a temporary solution, because they can re-register under a different user name. As you said, "some people come for a fight." If no one fights them, their incentive to fight goes away. The only way I know of to deal with bullies is simply not to take the bait.

Zoom out for a second. With today's DAWs, you have the equivalent of a quarter million dollar studio of not all that long ago, and a totally amazing backline. Think of it this way...you visit Abbey Road in 1985 and talk to the studio manager. The good news: Sessions are only 50 cents an hour! The bad news: There's no engineer, no one to maintain the machines, no tape operator, and good luck figuring out the patch bay. That's the position people are in when they buy a DAW. No studio is intuitive, and that includes software ones. Those were also the days with the nastiest subscription plan in history: Sure, you owned your 2-inch, 24-track multitrack recorder. But you had to shell out around $150 to $250 every time you wanted to record 44 minutes of audio at 15 ips.

Take any DAW, and different people will find aspects of it they find more or less convenient than other DAWs. "Clunky" gets into very subjective territory, very fast.

That's my experience as well.

FWIW - Sound on Sound remains one of the few media outlets that still prioritizes readers over advertisers, so kudos to them for that. Cakewalk didn't advertise in SOS, yet they ran my Sonar column from 2003 to 2020. The only reason they stopped running it was because according to their surveys, the percentage of readers using it became a tiny fraction compared to other DAWs. I did contact MusicTech (an online magazine owned by BandLab) about running Cakewalk by BandLab articles, but they weren't interested.

FWIW, some people prefer subscriptions. This isn't only about people who don't have enough cash upfront. For example, if you're collaborating on mixes with someone who uses Steven Slate's plugins but you don't have them installed on your machine, you can subscribe for a month or two, finish the mixes, and move on. Similarly, if you use Pro Tools Artist but need to do something more advanced for a particular project, you can subscribe to Pro Tools Studio for a month for $30. I'm not saying subscriptions are better, just that they work for some people even though they don't work for others. I think the most successful option for companies by far is offering both - subscriptions that include periodic minor updates or goodies, but these don't become available to owners of the "perpetual" version until they do the next major update. For me, the HUGE problem with subscriptions is if your work is held hostage when you stop paying. That's why I thought the old Sonar rent-to-buy approach of "if your subscription stops, keep using the program...you just don't get any updates" made a lot of sense. It was also quite generous compared to other companies of that era (I'm looking at you, Adobe). But putting all the pricing issues aside, the fact that Cakewalk continues moving forward and progressing is ultimately what matters. And it's much better news than "Thanks for your support over the years, we just sold Cakewalk to Wal-Mart, have a nice day"

You might find this article, Mastering a Seamless Album, helpful. Although it's about creating a seamless DJ-style mix with transitions/beatmatching/crossfading, it treats Cakewalk like a mastering program, and the requirements are similar to yours. To hear the album that's linked to in the article, which is pretty much rock despite the continuous DJ-style mix, scroll down to the Singles and Albums playlist. It's the second album in. I'll second OutrageProductions comments about mixes, so it's good you're going to go back and polish them. When you get a mix whose sound you really like, load it into the other songs you're mixing so you have a reference you can unmute and listen to from time to time. The main concern I'd have about the mixes is that the balances of all the instruments are right. If one song needs just a little less 300 Hz or a little more upper mids or whatever, that's easy enough to do in the mastering rather than tweaking multiple individual tracks to get the same results.

Just curious...were they authorized to your hard drive instead of the physical iLok dongle?

Can you just go into iZotope's Product Portal and uninstall the plug-in? Then you can re-install, and re-authorize it to iLok or to your new computer.

Another reason companies don't talk about features in advance is sometimes, something they think is going to work ends up being more difficult to implement than anticipated, or they feel it could be tweaked even further, so the decision is to put it off to a future release. Cakewalk learned this lesson the hard way with their anti-gravity module. But I've probably said too much already.

In ancient times, audio engines had 16 bits of resolution. Then came 24-bit, 64-bit, 32-bit, floating point, sample-rate converters, etc. etc. Technically, every time there was a jump like that, the company could claim an improvement in the sound's audio engine.

That's kind of shocking, isn't it?

I highly recommend disabling Nvidia's audio-related drivers.

The Ctrl/"raise or lower selected nodes" trick also works with track automation. You can think of it as an alterative to Offset mode (which is incredibly useful - it's amazing every DAW doesn't have this!) when you want to offset only a portion of a track's automation.

One of my favorite clip gain applications is altering the level going into an amp sim. It's like having a drive control (higher gain = more amp sim saturation, lower gain = less saturation). Bringing up gain over the course of a clip adds drama because the distortion increases as well, which emphasizes the sense of dynamics.

Cakewalk rule of thumb: The longer the delay between updates, the more cool stuff that's in the update when it appears.

Check that Preferences for VST locations includes that folder - navigate to the folder in your screen shot via Edit > Preferences > File > VST Settings, and check that the VST Scan Paths section includes the folder with the plugins.

You could record a loop of your favorite metronome sound, acidize it so it stretches with tempo changes, and use that.

These kinds of changes are another reason to render an audio track as a safety. It's not as good as knowing the "raw materials" that went into making a sound, but it's better than nothing when you have to re-visit old projects. It's not just Kontakt, if a project used AmpliTube 4 and all that's installed later on is AmpliTube 5, I'm pretty sure it won't know what to do with the AmpliTube 4 preset.

I also think there would be a major difference between feeding MIDI data in via USB, and via a DIN connector+MIDI interface.

I haven't done any testing, so I wouldn't know. There is a project I use for testing out different DAWs that consists of exported WAV files. I haven't noticed any significant difference when playing them back on different DAWs, but I haven't been looking for differences and doing deep tests, either. However, I did notice a significant difference after upgrading my monitoring to a Dangerous Music Source, which has really good DACs. I'm sure there are plenty of phenomena with digital audio that haven't been identified yet. For example, sometimes it seems there are "rogue frequencies" in a final mix that I don't recall getting with analog recording. Maybe it's interaction of harmonics? Running signals too hot? Not a high enough sampling rate? The phase of the moon?

A few comments, from someone who has engineered many Pro Tools sessions... Efficiency: Pro Tools started life on the Mac, Cakewalk on Windows. Because Cakewalk didn't have to go cross-platform, it could optimize performance with Windows. Audio engine: IIRC Cakewalk was the first to employ a 64-bit audio engine. The days of DAWs using 16- or 24-bit engines are (thankfully) well behind us. AFAIC, audio engines have more or less reached parity; any differences will likely be due to plugins in use, pan laws, etc. Hardware I/O is where the variables occur. But also, Cakewalk has an upsampling feature. Although not quite as relevant as when it first introduced due to computers getting faster and many plugins including internal oversampling, it can still make a significant improvement in sound quality under some conditions. Fader size: Hold shift to move the fader with more resolution. The mouse scroll wheel, with shift held, is also good for fine adjustments. For a control service, nothing has the same tight integration as the late, great V-Studio, but Mackie Control-compatible devices do all the important stuff (faders, mute, record, transport, etc.). I use the PreSonus Faderport 8, whose dedicated Sonar mode is compatible with Cakewalk by BandLab (however, the Faderport must have at least the 3.51 firmware). "Christmas Tree" Look: +1000 to Lord Tim's and Noel's comments. Cakewalk's user interface is highly customizable. In addition to Themes, Workspace Manager can not only simplify the "look and feel," but optimize the user interface for specific DAW-related tasks. Compared to Pro Tools, Cakewalk's show/hide and docking functionality is more developed. PT does have multi-mono mode for plugins, which is great for mid-side processing or independent processing of left and right channels. However, it's easy enough to do the same functionality in Cakewalk by splitting into buses. FWIW also check out Patch Points, which allow for highly useful routing possibilities. Hope this helps!

Thanks for the link! I didn't scroll down far enough.

Does Elements include spectral de-noise, only only Standard?

Yes, but I'm not sure the choice of frequencies is optimum. I've had better luck choosing odd harmonics, because sometimes the 60 Hz harmonics go up to 540 Hz. Doing additional notches at the even harmonics takes out more of the audio without providing (at least to my ears) the same benefits as doing odd harmonics only. (FWIW the hum reduction preset in Pro Tools uses odd harmonics only.) As to the Multiband, that's always been my secret weapon in Cakewalk! It allows for much narrower bands than many (most?) other multiband dynamics processors, which makes it super-useful for de-essing - just solo a band, and adjust the frequency range to cover the "s" sounds you want to reduce. Multiband also has a knee parameter, which most de-essers don't. That can be useful for giving a more natural de-essing effect. But speaking of Multiband...allow me to be an advocate for a minute. I wrote a tutorial on how to use the Multiband as a frequency splitter, frequency isolator, and if you set the compression ratio to 1.0, a five-band graphic equalizer with variable bands. It also makes a good crossover for multiband processing. And - it does upward expansion, which again is something you don't find in most multiband compressors. One good application is emphasizing drum or guitar strum transients in the upper band while compressing lower bands. It's a really useful plugin. (FWIW I'm not sure iZotope Elements has spectral de-noise, only voice de-noise as an adaptive process. To get noiseprint-type noise reduction, I think you have to move up to iZotope Standard. Maybe someone who has Elements can confirm.)