Michael Vogel

When you finally choose and buy your keyboard how about coming back here to let us know what you bought and how you came to your decision. Your thread will become a reference for those coming after you asking the same questions you did. For my part I have a Native Instruments S88 note keyboard so not really in your search ball park. All the best in your search.

For some people, anonymity seems to provide a stimulus to speak without thought of consequence. Either to themselves or others. People are quick to quote freedom of speech as a right and something to be protected at any cost yet conversely, little seems to be said about responsibility for what you say and being held accountable for those words. I think freedoms are not absolute but conditional upon our responsible exercise of those freedoms. As others have said though, this forum is pretty well free of nasty speech. Good policies and moderators who apply them fairly keep the forum humming along.

If by some chance you have a problem in opening 2 projects simultaneously, check Preferences/Files/Advanced and uncheck the box "Allow only one project open at a time"

Download the latest Waves installer and run it to get the latest version of Waves plugins. You need to have a current WUP Waves Update Program to go from v13 to 14. I have all (just about) Waves plugins and no issues upgrading to v14. All the plugins work fine in Cakewalk.

Not sure but I think there’s a clue in “mono hardware outputs” vs External insert plug-in. I think the External Insert plug-in is Stereo by design not a bug. As it has to measure the round trip delay/latency being passed through an external hardware device to do appropriate time alignment with the audio in the box. I don’t think it would work on simultaneous yet different streams processed through different devices. That’s been my laymen’s understanding of it for the many years since it’s initial implementation and my use of it. Of course as usual I’m happy to stand corrected.

What happens if you change the extension back to .cwb ? Give it a try.

Welcome to the forum. Quite simply yes. Your laptop should be OK. However, there is a limit to the audio data you can process and the number of individual tracks you can record. Limited by the interactions between your laptops CPU speed, memory, speed of your drives and what is creating the sounds you want to record and playback. You didn’t mention what you were going to record and whether you need microphone/s, guitar etc. The type of inputs will dictate which external audio device you’ll need if any. If its purely electronic sounds generated by the software in your laptop then another consideration will be how you will hear your recordings. Earphones/buds or external speakers. Again your choice of external audio device (read Sound/Audio Card) will play a part in those choices too. When you say in the long run - Cakewalk, while it is distributed under a free license now, has a history dating back more than 30 years. It is a mature Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that has a bright future with a team of dedicated developers some of whom have spent 20+ years writing the code. This forum is a unique extra as the community is involved and passionate, including many professional musicians, composers and producers. Willingly helping. Add to that I’ve not known a forum to have so much input from the developers. While it should never be expected or taken for granted, they make an enormous direct contribution when a particular question calls for their input. Also responsive to direct feature requests and a robust bug reporting system. That’s about it. You’ll have more questions and you’re always welcome to post them here at anytime, I highly recommend you familiarise yourself with the Cakewalk Resource Guide (see links higher up in the forum) and simply hovering over an icon in any Cakewalk screen will show a tool tip and if the online help is enabled you’ll get that info right in whichever window you’re in. All the best.

Ah, Cakewalk at its best. Seriously where else do you get such comprehensive support. I must setup my Waves DIGIGRID devices this weekend and see how MMCSS works in that environment as I’ve not had it running for a while now.

I couldn’t get Amp 5 recognised until the latest update which fixed all my issues. Make sure you’re patched to the latest update only released in the last week or so.

Glad you got it sorted. Just as well you had a switched on DAW builder to work with. They were clearly able to do things we couldn’t begin to suggest.

Are all those instruments to be recorded at once? If not you can do with less inputs and record some tracks first and then others later.

Another important key to speeding up workflow (as you’ve mentioned the number of mouse clicks) is to learn the keyboard shortcuts which make any program work so much faster. There is also scope to edit some default combinations to more suit yourself. Once you’ve begun you’ll be amazed at what you can do. it’s also possible to use 3rd party programs like Auto Hotkeys to create complex scripts to perform regular click heavy operations. There are some regular members who are quite expert at using Auto hotkeys. I’m not one of them.

I’ll often read a post and if I don’t know the answer (related to techniques or user error) off the top of my head, go to the Reference Guide and look for answers.. That’s why I always encourage folks to RTFM.

You could also look at the source of the problem. Perhaps investigate better monitoring of the bands playing during recording and of course practice and improving musicianship. Also examine what is louder or quieter and when. Sometimes the arrangement of a song can create a wide dynamic range. There’s so many areas to explore before trying to fix it in the mix.

Thanks Noel n Lord Tim. I’ve got a hefty mount - glad I over spec’ed originally.