Craig Anderton

Does Reaper install some kind of generic ASIO driver, like ASIO4ALL? I've experienced issues with playback on some systems if a generic ASIO driver is simply installed, even if Cakewalk isn't selecting it as a driver.

The only problem I've ever had with loading old projects into Cakewalk is if a plugin is no longer installed. Of course, you can still open the project, you'll just be missing the preset from 17 years ago that used AmpliTube 2  

Some manufacturers are better than others at being able to load presets from old versions, but if a plugin has had extensive revisions over a decade or more, it likely won't be backward compatible.

Don't know if this matters in your case, but Windows running via Bootcamp on Mac systems is not supported.

43 minutes ago, Michael Richards said:

Honestly, do people have to jump on one another. This isn't a barroom, yet some people come for a fight. It is absolutely ridiculous that posts get hijacked by some who only know how to bully other members' thoughts. This recently took place in the post about the new Next and Sonar products. 

I use Cakewalk to produce music. I use the forum to help me make this music. Usually, bullies aren't very good at anything except being bullies, so I am taking a leap that they aren't very good musicians. Bring down someone else since you can't bring much to the table. I don't want to shame these people, but maybe (very discretely) they need to be put in a time out for a couple of months.

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. 

6 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

One could argue that it should feel more intuitive without needing to do that- which is a fair comment - but this is a pretty deep product, so there's bound to be a learning curve to get the most out of it.

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. 

On 6/5/2023 at 3:25 PM, msmcleod said:

However, even if the display is showing as rounded, the underlying value is actually as you've entered it. 

That's my experience as well.

19 hours ago, Glenn Stanton said:

hey, on the plus side, Cakewalk Sonar can start getting reviewed again as it will be a paid product, and they'll have to advertise in the reviewer magazines / blogs / etc to get people to purchase it. the reviewers can, ahem, erm,  once again give their unbiased opinions 🙂and will no longer be unsupported by plugin developers who don't support free products... 

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.

17 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

The companies that have claimed in their marketing literature to have improved the sound of their DAWs' audio engine (as MAGIX, Acoustica, and Ableton have all done in the past decade), were they lying?

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.

22 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Maximum true peak ranged from -0.76 to -3.90dB.

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.

2 hours ago, Steve Moddelmog said:

I keep every version of Kontakt installed on my machine for this very reason.  

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.

6 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Curious, Craig: what do you think of my hunch that while that's true for recording and rendering, it may not be true for playback?

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? 

On 2/21/2023 at 6:48 AM, Dagg M. said:

The surprise was so big that I have started thinking of using Cakewalk permanently which I have never planned to be honest. My main concern is audio engine quality compared to the one inside PT. I would love to hear some opinions about it. And there is one thing that bothers me in Cakewalk, not large enough faders for smooth moving with the mouse, like PT has. Another thing that slightly bothers me is a 'christmas tree' busy look of the DAW that doesn't look very professional, where PT does look way better (in my subjective opinion).

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!