Mark Morgon-Shaw

Put the tracks into Folders and then name the Folders the same as your buss 

4 hours ago, greg54 said:

I hear ya'.    You may not agree, but I consider my Adam Audio A7v monitors to be very good,

I mixed a ton of music on the original A7's that's on TV.....they translate well ( in a well treated room ) except for the real low end/sub. For that I had to rely plugins to see what was going on down there and adjust by eye.  

I thnk this would be a good idea, pops and crackles can occur otherwise

20 hours ago, greg54 said:

Mark Morgon-Shaw:   I will check out that book.

Thanks, everyone!

No worries, you've had a lot of advice here. Some good, some great - plus the odd thing I don't really agree with 😆. 

But I've made the journey from bedroom studio dabbler to writing for TV where it's expected that you mix and master your own tracks.  These are a few things I've learned on that journey.

1. You can deliver decent mixes on any playback system if you get used to how it sounds

2. Get decent stands for your speakers - they will sound at their best this way

3. Proper room treatment helps a lot and needn't cost a fortune - You can mix without it it but it will take you longer 

4. Plugins to even out the room sound like Sonarworks Sound ID are also a great help includindg the headphone version

5. Subs in a small room are a nightmare

6.  If the arrangement sucks so will the mix

7.   Being able to instantly switch between several different playback types is massively helpful i.e. Nearfields - Mono Auratone/Mixcube - Old Boombox  / Computer Speakers

8.  Taking a break is important to reset your ears every hour or so

9. A/B referencing against commercial mixes is the best free training and more easily accomplished with a dedicated plugin like Metric AB

10. It's easy to be tricked that something sounds better when it's louder

11. You don't need to tweak every single track in your mix - " Do no harm " is sometimes the best way

12. Topdown mixing is a good method to learn mix fast and effectively 

13. L-C-R Panning is also a good technique that will make mixing simpler and faster and forces you into good arrangements

14. You can learn almost anything on Youtube

15. But the best way to learn is just do a lot of mixing i.e.  My 600th TV mix recently was a lot better than my 1st from 6yrs ago 

It's a huge subject and thre's a lifetime of learning to be had. The main goal is to have your mixes translate well to other playback systems .

I would say making your mixes translate well is a more difficult skill with headphones than speakers but people do manage it .

I always reccommend " Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio " by Mike Senior, it's  a great step by guide to mixing that really helped me out when I needed to up my game.   

9 hours ago, Byron Dickens said:

Do you lock the doors to your house when you leave? Do you lock your car will you park it somewhere? Why? Are you living in fear or something?

No they both lock themselves automatically. If it's gets stoen it's not my car anyway. 

23 minutes ago, paulo said:

So you're one of those climate change denying anti-vaxxers then?😀

No I'm one of those atheist , non TV watching rationalists 

4 hours ago, Byron Dickens said:

So, how about that email address, banking information and passwords?

Man, your naivete is breathtaking..

They're on the dark web in various data breaches, just name your price.

It's not naivete I am fully knowledgable I just don't subscribe to fear mongering. 

12 hours ago, Byron Dickens said:

If you think this is only about companies trying to sell you mouthwash or barbecue grills then you're just naive.

No.  I'm  blasé.  For the record I just helped my employer get ISO 27001 certified, I am fully up to date on cyber security I just don't care - as an individual it doesn't affect me. Have at it.   

2 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

In that case, why don't you give us all your email, bank account, etc. passwords so we all take a look at the info in there at our own leisure? Shouldn't make a difference and I don't see why people are so hung up about keeping that information a secret.

Sure what's your email address

2 hours ago, Byron Dickens said:

MasterWriter doesn't harvest your personal data and sell it to anyone with a bank card either.

I don't care who knows what about me , they can have all the data they want - makes no difference. Never understood why people get hung up on it.  

That's a huge topic. I don't think you could do it justice in the notes section.

I have both on my machine, I use Reaper to check if I ever have any issue with a VSTi or plugin - Just to rule out Cakwalk.

Never had a problem running both on the same machine, don't believe Reaper installer changes any settings that might affect CBB. 

Good Tips ! Thanks

When opening the FX in any FX bin I think it would be really handy if for multiple plugins instead of having to click each one to open it , that all the plugins in that FX bin live in their own tabbed window to make it easy to flick between them and make adjustments.  

7 hours ago, Misha said:

"How do you mean 'most circumstances' - it usually either passes or fails"  That is not true. It depends on the load that computer carries at specific time frame.  

The load shouldn't make any difference.  It isn't a measurement of how much load the machine can deal with before it craps out. It's basically letting you know if any drivers are causing issues to your audio processing. If they are, then dealing with them will improve the audio performance

I don't find any big difference between CBB & Reaper's audio performance at the same latency. So if you experience that  scenario, it's likely something local.

On 6/27/2023 at 12:52 AM, Misha said:

DPC checks fine under most circumstances.

How do you mean 'most circumstances' - it usually either passes or fails ( obviously the longer you leave it running the better )

This is after opening CBB and playing this week's project through a coupla times. This PC wasn't alway as well behaved I ended up changing the graphics card to cure some spikes that pushed it into the red and made it "unsuitable". It's go nothing to do with how powerful the PC is.

On my previous i5 PC , from 12/13  years ago there were DPC latency issues and after some exhaustive testing I tracked it down to a sensor built into the case which iirc flagged if the case had been opened.  I disabled it in the BIOS and the problem was gone. This is why it's more worthwhile for some folks to buy audio PC's from specialist manufacturers as all this sorta stuff is tested and sorted in adavance. Personally I like to build my own machines and fine tuning them is half the fun.  

On 6/15/2023 at 5:39 PM, Giovani Dal Mas said:

Good tool.... but do not have MP3 birate option for example....

That's because it's an external codec , so CBB doesn't know what bitrates are avilable as these can vary by codec

2 hours ago, Holger said:

Hello CD soulfrontier here!

How are you? 

Yeah I am good, nice to see you here at last   

But Cakewalk don't write your ASIO drivers. How does your machine fare under a DPC latency test ?

Alexa. Turn the red light on

7 minutes ago, Holger said:

Well, comparison between DAWs can be boring or confusing. 

Willkommen Herr Bremner !

15 hours ago, mettelus said:

LOL, this is good. All those years ago when my school suddenly had a TRS-80, maybe I was using Cakewalk and didn't know it!

We had those in my school too , whole room full of them

I am still waiting for the BeOS version of Cakewalk

5 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

P.S. He also showed (but didn't talk much about) how you can resize the modules in S1's mixer, which I have wished for since I started using Cakewalk. There can be a LOT of wasted real estate in the Console depending on how many FX and Sends you're working with, whether you need the gain knob visible, etc.

I talked about this years ago somewhere on these forums and postulated it would require a move to vector based GUI to be doable so it will be interesting to see if we get more mixer view options now going forward.