Anton Pyvovarov

Hi dear community. I'm working in the matrix view to trigger some clips during live performance using my small hybrid Laptop/Tablet. I very much appreciate how pretty much every element can be resized to the need like channel strip, console view height etc. etc. The only piece of UI that is missing there is the track headers of the Matrix view. Those headers at least in my setup are staying pretty much blank, as the names of the tracks hardly ever get that long. That track header cannot be made shorter and takes up a relatively big part of a display real-estate of the small screen, stealing the space for couple more cells of the row . There doesn't seem to be any particular logic to me why the track header in the arrangement view can be made shorter or longer, or even completely hidden, while the same track header in matrix view, which actually has much fewer functional buttons and more limited usability, cannot be made smaller. Not technically a bug, but I just didn't find any tag for feature requests here. Thank you for your feedback and consideration Anton

Thank you. I always suspected that, although in my case it doesn't seems to be because of the wrong octave, as I've pretty much tried all of them

Oh wow, that looks like a lot of features but great that it exists for cakewalk. I will definitely take a look at that. Looks like it will take some time for me to wrap my head around it and i might need help too. Thank you for sharing! Greetings Anton

Dear community, I'm trying to get some meaningful workflow templates with control surfaces using midi my MIDI controller Vestax VCM 600. What I understood so far: - There seem to be at least 5 different ways to control the DAW using midi controllers: 1. creating ACT controller template 2. creating Cakewalk generic controller surface 3. Using Mackie protocol controllers (not my case) 4. Using "remote control" menu of certain channel strip parameters 5. using Keyboard Shortcuts What I'm trying to achieve: The 4 different methods I tried to use all had certain limitations, plus not everything seems to work as expected, or I missed soemthing My goal is to create a flexible control surface, that would work for a templates/track templates as well as for generic projects. the key features I'm looking to get: - ability to control most used channel strip parameters, - busses - global parameters like transport, markers, enabling read/record automation etc. Specific troubles I encountered that I could not solve (from most severe to less significant) 1. Using MIDI controller for Key bindings in "Keyboard shortcuts" menu ok I'm lost here completely, I tried using both my Vestax mixer, and a simple midi keyboard, following documentation precisely. To exclude any internal conflict I used midi keyboard, without any control surface for it, just as an active midi keyboard in MIDI devices. I armed a midi track, recorded a short clip with a single note pressed and the piano roll editor told me it's C3. Then I went to keyboard shortcuts menu binded the Play/Pause parameter with C3, after choosing a MIDI option and checked a the "enable" box. No reaction. What am I missing? The issue is there is no such thing as midi learn or Key" locate" for using midi bindings, so it's a bit of a blind guess. What puzzles me here is , there seem to be no consistency as to what midi note is being produced: a MIDI monitor at my mac computer says it's C1, and the piano roll of cakewalk says it's C3. Of course I tried both C1 and C3, and both of them together as well as all different C notes in all octaves. With Vestax buttons no luck either. 2. I still don't quite understand the ACT thing, there seem to be a very limited amount of channel strip parameters, that can be controlled with it. Ok maybe that's how it suppose to be, BUT! I tried assigning knobs to a channel strip EQ using "focus" mode, and to my surprise I could not find some of the essential parameters in the blue boxes. When I repeated the attempt after dumping the control surface , some of the parameters that were missing showed up, while the others dissapeared (LF gain, HF Freq.... etc) - It seems that ACT can only control a limited amount of parameters at a time, even when there are plenty of physical knobs on the controller available. And if the effect/plugin has more parameters, then ACT voluntarily fits only as much as it can. Selecting sub-banks 2,3,4 didn't show all the needed information either. My question is, is there any way to get about this issue? Like is it possible to use more than one instance of ACT surface for the same controller in order to try to get all the needed parameters covered? - For channel strip parameters, there is something confusing about the behaviour of these green boxes: In the 3rd lowest bank there are some parameters like "Play/Stop", "Record", "Automation Arm", that I'm interested in. If the parameter is on, it shows on in the green box. Same if it's off. However some of them would not turn to MIDI learn mode when you click on the box. Instead - clicking on the lowest green box of the 3rd bank turns "MIDI learn" for both - upper and lower box of that bank. It doesn't make sense to me, as I still cannot assign any controller button to the upper green box like that. [EDIT] 2a. One more thing that I couldn't understand using Cakewalk GenericSurface is when I assigned a knob to a "send" rotary in the channel strip it would only work for a certain types of sends. Specifically, when I assign that send to an aux channel, it would not react to a midi controller, whereas if I'd switch the same send in the same channel strip to a bus channel, it would work as expected. That looks like a bug to me, since you can move that send knob within the DAW, but not from the controller. Any thoughts on that one? 3. Led buttons of my controller won't react when a togglable parameter is on or off. 4. When I played with Cakewalk generic controller surface there were much more options for channel strips. However in the Global section I could find all the needed transport parameters , except for the "Pause". Therefore I tried to bind it to "menus and shortcuts", with no luck either. Questions: 1. Is there any way to configure the led buttons on the midi controller to react on the state of parameters like "solo" "mute" on/off and the like? 2. Is it ok to use Cakewalk generic control surface with the ACT controller and with menu shortcuts bindings all together with the same controller, or would there be conflicts?

Ah , I see. What seems to happen though is audio driver doesn't like , when the audio setup is not exactly the way it was last time the project was opened. Even if it's just plugged, or unplugged headphones in the computer. Does it mean I have to always plug audio interface and all the gear in before opening the project?

Another thing that puzzles me , is sometimes it simply won't change to a different buffer setting. After I press apply it jumps back to the previous buffer size. And while using a DAW for playing the other times when the load becomes too much there comes a delay, that makes playing impossible and audio unstable, so that after some time it cracks down. I don't really understand yet how to go about such behaviour. It is generally so glitchy and unstable, that i almost give up the idea of playing virtual instruments live with this setup. it seems to me like either these windows drivers are way too unreliable for a performance situation, or I am just missing something.

Actually I have no option of 128 samples. The minimum I can set is 96 samples with 2ms input and 8ms total roundtrip latency of 8ms. And the next option is 192 samples with 14 ms roundtrip latency

Yes I did. Although I'm not sure I would not actually need it. I have also Ableton installed on the same computer, and in case I need to use it without audio interface, I basically have no driver for it, since Ab... doesn't support WASAPI, and that MME/Direct Sound thing is totally unusable, so in that case ASIO4ALL was the only option.

I have to say I'm not very experienced with windows audio drivers, as I've been using mac since I've learned my first DAW. Until now I wasn't aware, that WASAPI is meant for built in audio engine only. Furthermore I was using a wrong asio driver all along (ASIO4ALL, instead of MOTU Asio) What I did notice though is that, as far as latency is concerned the MOTU ASIO driver will be less efficient, then WASAPI exclusive without the interface. To be able to use strings and piano libraries without "cracks" I have to setup buffer size higher and have no less than 15 ms. So with what I have , if having least latency is needed i'm right now better off using no audio interface, but just usb input and a headphone output with WASAPI exclusive. As I was (unknowingly) trying to use WASAPI, with my MOTU, it worked very unstable and as a result the aforementioned artefacts. Thanks to all for the tips !

It's a MOTU micro Book II

Thank you, I would do that, but I try to keep overall latency as low as possible, which works great for exclusive mode, the shared mode gives a much higher latency. So I wanted to know if it is possible to work out that behaviour, and what is causing it anyway?

Dear Cakewalk wizards, I'm a new user of Cakewalk and have been in the process of setting up the audio engine with cakewalk recently. I have a strange issue while using Cakewalk under WASAPI exclusive driver mode. In short - the audio engine gets "thrown out" every once in a while. Suddenly the audio produced by playing a MIDI instrument via KONTAKT gets some wild digital artefact with overtones which sounds like some nonexistent LoFi computer synth. This happens spontaneously, while I'm using the program but also sometimes when I plug/unplug the power, open a browser etc. If I hit the playback button it chokes the playback for a split second and then continues to run normally as if nothing happened. I'm using a rather low buffer size, because I need to play and record instruments live, but it doesn't seem to happen due to overload, sometimes it happens even if I do nothing. It seems like some kind of conflict with the Window's system audio, or I don't know what Anyone has an idea of what can that be? Thank you Anton