Mark Morgon-Shaw

There is hardware you can use to do it on the way in

Thoughts ?

Yes it would be a bit of a free for all if it wasn't controlled somehow. Maybe there should be a Jedi Council for Cakewalk Users made up of power users that would look after this sort of thing.

I feel like there needs to be a place where we can list all the perceived clunkiness , like a big Google Sheet or something , list everything properly for consideration by the Devs rather having to wade through forum posts to find stuff. This would prevent a lot of reptition and good ideas being lost.

Doesn't CBB rely on an external codec for it's MP3 rendering ? We may not all be even using the same one. Mine has never crashed , might be worth checking you have the most up to date version of whichever one you use.

I do slightly wonder what goal is as Mac users havea great free DAW in Garageband that's been around for almost 20yrs now with a clear upgrade path to Logic Pro Or is it to allow IOS Bandlab users to stay within the ecosystem if they outgrow the mobile App

Yeah I haven't thought about those intruments in years , some of them were decent as freebie / stock instruments but there's so much great new stuff been released in the years since that they aren't particularly cutting edge in todays market. I wouldn't want to pay anything extra for them, or would opt not to have them and pay less for the new Sonar. Maybe if they are to be brought back they should be part of some nostalgia type bundle for those that want them. Z3ta was probably the best of the bunch, I used it a fair bit back in the day but for me the excellent Dune II and subsequent Dune III replaced it.

Back to the original question ; WHY EVEN BOTHER MAKING MUSIC??? I make it beacause ( 1 ) It keeps me occupied, I don't really ahve much time for TV and Pubs etc as I'd rather be in the studio (2) It keeps me outta my wife's hair ! (3) Music earnings are part of my retirement income plan, there is a very long tail to the backend sync royalties - passive income type stuff ( 4) Most of all I love the process and I still get a kick when a track gets used on something I might actually want to watch When I didn't do it to try and build an oncome and just did it as a hobby I was a lot slower at making it - Can't believe I used to spend 6 months on something that now would take me no more than a week and when you make a lot of music you just get better at it. My tracks from the old hobby days are fairly terrible subjectively.

Yeah same here, what matters to me is that I can crank out music quickly on it and because I've not seriously entertained any other DAW for the past 27yrs there's no competition really - it would probably take me many months to get up to speed on another DAW which although it may have a few more useful features it might not have some of the features I'm used to using in CBB. I used the pinnacle of the pre-skylight era Sonar 8.5 for almost a decade, completely skipping over the X series and the Gibson debacle until CBB - Even that was a bit of wrench losing my old Sonar workflow , I still miss being able to add an EQ filter without opening the Pro Channel like you could with the old Per Channel EQ. That was a time saver that we lost along the road.

We are extremely lucky to have had access to such a professional tool for the past 5yrs free of charge. Whatever they decide to charge going forward, the value proposition will differ greatly between users. Cakewalk projects record how many hours and minutes are spent working on them. I wonder if that stat is fed back to Bandlab and they can see who uses it the most ? You would probably find a massive disparity betwen casual, pro and semi pro users. Does anyone know how many tracks they've completed over 5yrs of using the free CBB ?

I feel that although some of them are a bit obscure, many of the CAL scripts address gaps that should be added to the core midi funtionality - Humanize for example is native to most DAWs

Studioware panels were pretty innovative but seemed to die a bit of a death sometime in the mid 2000's along with CAL iirc

Yes, essentially a workaround for some clunkiness

I said the same thing several years back as well, but it was something along the lines of having a super multidock with moveable tabs where you could just stick whatever you wanted there including plugins and have them resize to fit etc . It would be a very fluid UI and highly customisable to suit different needs.

This is another oft mentioned request which I think would super helpful,. At the moment I normally copy / paste the midi to tracks of instruments I want to layer/double If we were able to select another midi track as the source from the input dropdown menu shown below ...that would do the trick I think ? Hopefully not to hard to implement and wouldn't impact on those who don't want to use it.

Ahem.. Seriously though I have plenty of ideas for streamlining and improving workflows, some have them have been implemented over the years but others like this one seem to have been ignored. Is the feedback loop the best place for them ?

At the moment it kinda 'skips' when it has play a section out of order - You can work around it by committing to the arrangement and auditioning it properly in the main track view which can then be undone if you don't like it. I think if you can make the playback of the alternative arrangements smoother it would be a noticable mprovement to an already good feature.

Not a bad idea which could be really handy but for the examples you gave you could just select multiple clips ( Ctrl - click ) and then use the Process menu to apply it to all of them in one go. Another option I've used is to get a Stream Deck and program the buttons with macros of the things I use the most. I quite often want to transpose certain midi clips up or down an octave. This can be a bit cumbersome - Process - Transpose - type in the + or - 12 semitones - OK. So I now have a dedicated transpose up or down button that selects all those things for me with a single button press which is much quicker. Would it not be simpler to just set the delay up on it's own bus and then you can send whichever instruments you want to share the same effect. ? I think the basic idea has some merit but like most sugestions there are already ways to acheive the same result in many use cases. We also has the duplicate commmand ( Ctrl-D) to repeat copy/paste of audio and midi clips. I use that all the time but not everyone knows about it.

Yes ! Or subscibe - or rent to own etc. - whichever looks the best option ( I sell SAAS so I have a good understanding of different licensing models )

I remember when it wasn't Mac only - back in the Emagic days..iirc Magix bought the old Windows code and rebadged it as their own DAW

Thanks Noel. Whilst I wasn't specifically citing them as workflow deficiencies when answering the OP, I would argue some of them are workflow deficiencies, some are new feature requests and some of them fall into both categories where a new feature can address an existing workflow issue where it takes more steps to achieve the same outcome in CBB/Sonar than some other DAWs. A prime example of this would be an integrated sampler where swapping out a kick drum sample for example takes seconds to drag & drop and updates the whole song, but currently we may have to delete and replace each sample on the track , or open up the drum replacer and work that way. A new feature that massively enhances the workflow of sample based producers. I'll be interested to see how it works in Next and hopeful that it will make it's way to the new Sonar in due course. Yes there have been many excellent improvements over the past 5yrs, I would add the Arranger to the list too. Amazing really that we have been given these for free. But it also sets the bar moving forward as a paid product and the competition have not been idle either. I always tell people that the best DAW is the one you know. I've used various versions of Cakewalk since the mid 90's and I've never found a good enough reason to switch to anything else. I started out as a complete amatuer but now I make 80 - 100 music library tracks a year which yields a reasonable part time income. I do think it lends me a certain perspective that not all Cakewalk users are privy to such as working to deadlines, making deliverables and just the sheer variety of genres expected of library composers in general. It's a completely different ballgame to when I made music out of pure enjoyment and the demands on the tools become magnified as the workload increases. This is why I will argue endlessly for ( or against ) certain things that I believe will help drive the software to become a more adept tool for those of us working at the coal face of production music. Only in a cumbersome way - see this discussion ( FWIW I wrote my own macro so it's a button on my Stream Deck - better workflow ) This type of thing https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.presonus.dawremote&hl=en&gl=US A proper way of controlling certain aspects of the DAW from a mobile device Thanks for responding Noel, I realise that other Dev Teams may have more resources at their disposal, I think the team have done a great a job since the switch to Bandlab and I hope the switch back to paying for it again will help accellerate the growth of both platforms. When not making music my other gig is IT sales of cloud based packages which includes an element of on site hardware and as part of my role I often have to report back to the Dev Teams and come up with new ideas for features and QoL improvments so I am always happy and comfotable to give feedback and suggestions as someone who also clocks up a lot of hours using CBB .

Yeah they are a good way of trying out new parts or arrangements without affecting the orginal track

Off the top of my head .... 1. Proper sampler / sample based workflow 2. Chord track 3. Easier hardware integration for control surfaces etc 4. Negative offset 5. Bar zero 6. Spatial Audio Ready 7. Remote Control 8. Varispeed 9. Retrospective Midi Record 10. Scale constrain 11. MPE Supprt 12. Bounce/Renderin Place 13. Loudness Metering 14. Updated Browser 15. Scratch Pads

Exactly. This is how you should archive tracks and guard against old plugins not working. Run stems or track outs - then it doesn't matter what happens. You can still reconstruct the track in an editable form. Example from today's session . Everything the Music Library requests so they have some options when working to picture. For those who think that might be a PITA it's much quicker than in the pre-DAW days , we had to make a safety copy of the tape and then write down all the settings for the outboard gear !