Mark Morgon-Shaw

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

Thoughts ?

2 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

That's a great idea, but I think it would have to be curated by one person.

Once something like that's opened to all, you quickly start getting unrelated feature requests. "A chord track would make my workflow less clunky" and such.

To me, "clunky" means features that exist, but function in a needlessly clumsy way.

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.  

9 hours ago, urock said:

Just wanted to say thank you to Cakewalk/Bandlab/Bakers for making this happen in the form of Cakewalk Next!  I put my name in for the Beta and look forward to trying it out and providing feedback.

 

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 

3 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Unless there's some serious revamping, I don't see much good from CbB re-issuing those instruments. Compared with the free and paid offerings in the market atm, both versions of z3t4 are sort of mediocre in terms of features and sound quality. That would be more into keeping with people that want to have access to those for nostalgia reasons.

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.   

6 hours ago, tulamide said:

Whether paid software or not, is unimportant for me.

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 ? 

1 minute ago, msmcleod said:

Despite CAL being deprecated long ago, we've no plans to change its existing behaviour for Sonar, so any CAL scripts that currently work in CbB will work without issue in Sonar.
 

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 

8 minutes ago, lychee said:

Since we're bringing back the Sonar name, why not reintroduce an updated version of Studioware?

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

1 hour ago, Glenn Stanton said:

yeah when i have a complex arrange that jumps around, i save it as a "temp_arrange" file and commit it (avoids the case with auto save or me instinctively press ctrl+s...) and then delete the temp file(s) later - lightweight and avoid any possibility of messing up the main file 🙂 

Yes, essentially a workaround for some clunkiness

20 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Following that idea (and this was alluded to earlier in this thread) why can't we drag things around to the different docked areas, eg: like in Adobe products? In Audition, I can make any one of those areas show whatever I want, so for example, docking an ARA view on a side tab rather than the Multidock would be handy, or putting Big Time above the Synth Rack View, or Markers View in a side dock rather than down in the Multidock, or that kind of thing. Ideally for me (and I've mentioned this before), I'd like the "everything is a multidock" idea where rather than specific areas like Inspector/Browser/Multidock, we have "area 1" "area 2" "area 3" etc and in each area we can add whatever view we want to see. Then, to keep consistency with how CbB is now, have a "classic" Workspace that puts things like Media/Plugins/Notes in the area where the Browser is, Arranger/Tempo/Clip and Track Properties, etc. in the area where the Inspector is, and that kind of thing. And then allow us to split those views or add tabs as we see fit.

 

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. 

21 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

If this would include having a single MIDI track being able to drive two different VSTi's, that's something I'd love to be able to do.

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.

On 6/11/2023 at 10:38 AM, msmcleod said:

I just want to re-iterate what @Lord Tim said in his original post, and add my 2p's worth...

Tab re-ordering are excellent examples of how existing features could be improved (thanks @Starship Krupa / @scook ).

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 ? 

On 6/5/2023 at 7:13 PM, msmcleod said:

1.  Make sure nothing is selected
2.  Click the "Add All Sections to Arrangement" button
3.  Delete the section you want to skip from the arrangement
4.  Click the Arrangement play button.

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.  

3 hours ago, Michael Richards said:

 If you add Repeat, I will buy it.. I wonder why we don’t have that function. It  would make my workflow much quicker.

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. 

3 hours ago, Michael Richards said:

Say you apply a specific delay for a guitar track and want to apply that very specific delay to a piano track. Repeat can do this.

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.    

10 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

If I add bounce tracks in place to sonar will you buy 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 ) 

1 hour ago, Byron Dickens said:

"Mac bias" is very apt. As much as you hear people moaning about CW being Windows only, you never hear people whining about Logic being Mac only.

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

1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Mark with all due respect, you have quoted a bunch of features rather than workflow deficiencies.

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.         

1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Cakewalk is already very feature rich and benefits more from this approach. Look at the improvements to export or tempo management as just a couple of examples.

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. 

1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Every user is going to find something lacking in any given DAW at any time, so its in their best interest to find one that satisfies most of their needs, or use multiple DAW's

 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. 

1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

BTW Bounce render in place is already available in Cakewalk.

 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 )  

1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

I'm not sure what you mean by remote control but it's been available for decades.

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 . 

20 minutes ago, jackson white said:

in Studio One?

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

1 hour ago, Andres Medina said:

Someone mentioned "scratchpad": not familiar with, but sounds like the feature I'd like to get from CW.

15 hours ago, Quinellipe Zorn said:

Re "Update the workflow in several areas where things haven't moved in years.  Other DAWs have much easier ways to do various things." - I'd love to hear what things people want in this regard.  

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

13 minutes ago, Byron Dickens said:

Maybe if you would render all your tracks out as .wav....

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 !