Michael McBroom

In the short term, I just use CW's default, where it creates a new directory for each new project. Eventually, after I've gotten several projects done, I'll export them to an external drive, or in these days of the ever-increasing capacity of USB jump drives, I'm thinking about backing up to them instead. Any backup drive that involves spinning platters has a fatal expiration date, so I'd just as soon not have my music saved to spinning platters. However, since the price of SSDs has come down so much, I'm thinking that I should just use one of these instead -- assuming they're of archival permanence, and I don't know the answer to that question, whether it be a USB drive or an SSD. Even CDs and DVDs have expirations -- you gotta go with the expensive gold ones if you want archival permanence. As for bundles, I have several I created with Pro Audio 9 (Sonar's predecessor) over 20 years ago and unarchived them about a year ago into CWbB. They unarc'd fine, no problems.

You know how in the PRV the controllers have these little squares with minus signs next to them? When I click on the minus sign, the controller disappears, but the next time I visit that track, all the controllers I've "deleted" have come back. So, what's the trick? How do I permanently delete a controller? I've searched through the PRV dropdowns. The best candidate seems to be Tracks/Clear Track Selection, but it doesn't seem to do anything. So I'm stumped. There's bound to be a way to get this done that I just haven't found yet.

An interesting update. I just tried to see what would happen with my laptop, which is running the current version of CWbB, but the Win7 OS. I was able to load 8 projects when finally I got the CW popup notifying me of a crash dump and asking if it should save my work -- a notice I've gotten numerous times in the past for unanticipated reasons. So, it looks like the problem lies with my DAW or Win10 or both.

I have a laptop with 8 GB of RAM also, and I've had lots of projects open with it. The biggest difference between it and my DAW is the DAW is running Win10 and the laptop is still running Win7. This has gotten me curious. I have the laptop upstairs. When I retire to bed, I think that, before I drift off, I'll see how many projects I can load. Something tells me it'll be the same as before. Which would seem to indicate my system's Win10 install is most likely the problem.

Welp, it's been a few days and I thought I should stop back by and let y'all know what I'm doing now. I went to Preferences/Advanced and checked "Allow only one open project at a time." That took care of the problem. I almost never need more than one project open anyway, and for those rare instances when I need more than one, I can always uncheck the box. I remain curious, though -- what's changed in CWbB, when I used to be able to have large numbers of projects open and now the software exits to the OS after I've typically loaded only three? My system has 16 GB of RAM too, so I know it's not a memory issue. I think. Maybe Windows 10 has recently decided to be a resource hog and it isn't CWbB at all?

David, under Preferences/File/Advanced, the box wasn't checked. And there's nothing at the File/Initialization file location, especially no "ExceptionHandlingSeverity value." It's just blank there.

Hmm . . . that's interesting. I'll have to watch -- stack up a few files to see if I can trigger it, and then I can inspect them for similarities, I guess.

Bdickens, I'm running a MOTU M4 and yes, I have Win10 drivers loaded for it. (I bought the MOTU after I switched over to Win10) John, I've gotten those Cakewalk fatal error messages in the past, but it's been quite a while since I've seen one. And I'm not loading TTS-1 after anything. I use TTS-1 a lot and it's usually set up from the git-go. I'll check into the mini dump thing, although I suspect I won't find anything. Like I mentioned earlier, I hesitate to call it a crash. It's more a case of CW just deciding to shut down. I've found that if I just get into the habit of closing previous files now it rarely happens. So it has something to do with having several files open in the background. But I guess they're not really "open," are they.

I don't really want to call them crashes, although I suppose one could. I'm curious if anyone else is experiencing this. Here's the deal, with a bit of history: I guess it started a month ago or maybe a little longer, where CW would suddenly exit to the OS. It wasn't a hard crash or anything, the sort of thing that might have required a system reboot. Nope, suddenly *boink* it would just drop out to the OS. I reloaded CW and everything was back to normal -- until it happened again. And then I noticed a trend. You know how, if you load a series of CW files, the previous one(s) don't exit, but just stay in the background? Well, I began to notice that if I had loaded a certain number of files, it was more prone to exiting. So I started keeping an eye on the number of files that had been loaded, and it doesn't seem to be a definite number -- probably has more to do with the amount of memory each uses? But CW usually exits after 4 or 5 files have been loaded. And I can always tell when it will happen. After loading the last file, when I click on "Play" the transport icon turns amber and then stays that color for a half-second or so, with no sound being played, and then, poof, back to the OS. It got to be so regular that I got in the habit of clearing out the background files so this wouldn't happen. Until one time, and this has happened only once so far, the same thing happened to a file with none in the background. After rebooting CW and reloading the same file, everything was fine. So it didn't have anything to do with the file, far as I could tell. And in case you're wondering, the system is fairly new. It's running Win10 from a new SSD drive, and it has 16 GB of RAM. I have a couple of TBs of open drive space on the drive I use to store my music files. Back when I was running Win7, this never happened. This machine has had Win10 since January, with none of this sort of behavior until relatively recently. I don't know if I should be pointing fingers at a recent update of Win10 or a recent update of CW or maybe both? Or something else, altogether? This isn't really a pressing issue. Nothing's usually being harmed, since it happens when I first press "Play." It's just a matter of curiosity at this point, but of course, I wouldn't mind putting a stop to this behavior.

bdickens, well, BiaB tries at least. With this piece, since BiaB doesn't have a provision for anything smaller that a quarter note as a beat value, I selected 5/4 as the time signature. To display this, BiaB alternates between one measure of 2/4 and one of 3/4. This is fine, but when you play the piece, the staff view's scroll goes kablooey. So you can't follow the notation as the piece is being played. <sigh> But at least the playback is correct -- I mean, in 10:8 and all. The only other exotic time signature I've tried in BiaB is 11:8. It plays it back faithfully, but there's no capability within BiaB to display any sort of time signature that would work. Odd that BiaB has an 11:8 style, but no way to display it (same goes for 10:8, I suppose). I can configure the tune as MIDI and d/l it into CW, either by import or just loading it via File|Open -- doesn't matter. I can then assign the correct time signature, but the same thing happens with 11:8 in CW. It displays 11:8, but a lot of the notes that are displayed are not aligned properly. Honestly, at this point, I'm past caring. The tunes sound right, which ultimately is most important.

I'm aware of the Staff View's shortcomings. I've learned to live with most of them. But it would be nice if it were internally consistent at least. I suppose I could import the piece into MuseScore, one of the best notation-based piece of software out there. I just haven't taken the time to get good at that interface yet. But even if I did, who's to say that CW's Staff View wouldn't do the same thing again, if I re-import the file into CW.

I realize this request is for a rather narrow feature with a view that not many folks use, namely the Staff View. But I make heavy use of CW's Staff View, and it is the primary reason why I have stuck with CW for over 20 years. As clunky as it is, it is infinitely better than having no Staff View. This has long been a pet peeve of mine, CW's errors at enharmonic spelling. Most recently having to replace well over 100 Db's with C#'s. It would be nice if CW were smart enough to realize that, when no key signature is specified, aka key of C, chords, like D major7 should be spelled with a C# and not a Db. Scale passages such as E D Db B, etc., are also suspect. So, anyway, my wish to be included in this wishlist is for CW to have a global search and replace of note names, and possibly durations and velocities as well. But most important is the ability to do a global search and replace of note names. It would probably be best to have this feature include a "confirm" button, for those rare instances when CWs enharmonic spelling is correct. I realize all this will do will make the Staff View look correct, and doesn't change the structure of the music. But it's nice to have this capability for those times when a score needs to be printed, or when sight reading through the piece.

I'm using the Staff View here, but I imagine the PRV will reveal the same oddity. Okay, I composed a piece of music with a 10/8 time signature, using Band in a Box to generate the accompaniment. It did what it was supposed to do -- well, sort of. BiaB made a hash of things from the standpoint of its Staff View also, but that's a topic for the folks over at PG Music. So anyway, I took this composition, saved it as a MIDI file, then imported it into CW. Before i imported the MIDI file, I took a blank CW template and set it up with a 10/8 time signature. Imported the file, no hitches, no glitches. It sounds fine in CW, but the only problem is, when I go to view the piece from the Staff View, even though it's supposedly showing a 10/8 file, it is playing it as if it is 8/8, or 4/4, whatever. At the top of the Staff View, it's showing ten hash marks per measure. But the music is being displayed as if there are only eight 8th notes worth of time value per measure, resulting in the music moving up one quarter note's value each measure. When I listen to the piece, I can count notes in the composition from one measure to the next, and arrive at ten 8th notes per measure. I can also optically count ten 8th notes per measure -- in some sections. In others not. That's where it gets messy. There are sections of the piece, especially held chords, where there are only eight 8th note values being shown. And just to make things really confusing, even in these spots where eight 8th notes (values) are being shown, I can still count ten 8th notes per measure as I listen to it. Weird, huh. Now, I suppose I could go into the file and physically change the time values in these sections that are displaying things as eight beats per measure. But that won't account for the fact that, when I listen to these measures, I'm counting ten beats, even though only eight are being displayed. I'm not sure what to do about this. I mean, the music is unaffected. It's 10/8 from beginning to end. It's just the appearance in the Staff View (and probably the PRV as well) that's messed up. It would be nice to get things to agree, though. Any ideas? Is there a fix for this?

I write using musical notation and I've dabbled some with MuseScore. To me, it seems to be one of the best notation-based products out there. Way better than Notion, which I paid good money for and which I don't really like. I've also dabbled some with Reaper and I find it has a much steeper learning curve than Cakewalk, but I don't believe it can do anything that Cakewalk can't do. CW can hang with the best DAW software out there -- with ease. I'm assuming that you can produce a good midi file from your MuseScore tunes. That's all you need, when it comes to Cakewalk. I write a lot using Band in a Box and I import all my BiaB compositions into Cakewalk as midi files. Once they're in Cakewalk, I can do pretty much anything I want to with them. I can make relatively easy adjustments to the score using Cakewalk's Staff View -- not as comprehensive as MuseScore, but it can get the job done in most cases. VSTs are an unlimited resource with Cakewalk (and most any other DAW), but don't overlook Cakewalk's built-in multitymbral DX synth -- TTS-1. Its sounds are, for the most part, quite good and it puts almost no load on the CPU. Because it puts such a minimal load on the CPU, I'll often load multiple instances of TTS-1, not because I necessarily need more than 16 channels, but because TTS-1 becomes an audio track that you can then apply all sorts of audio enhancements to that you cannot do with midi tracks. So I can dedicate EQ and other audio effects to specific midi instruments instead of groups of instruments. And, of course, if a group doesn't require the sort of individual attention by pairing a single instance of TTS-1 with a single midi track, you can always have it work with multiple midi tracks, and it does a good job. I feel it's worth noting that many, if not most, VSTs are monotymbral and you must load separate instances for each midi track. Some VSTs are fairly CPU intensive as well, so this limits their total usefulness. Since CW is free, I recommend you take your time and give it a proper try with your MuseScore midi files. I think you'll find that there is very little it cannot do. I don't consider myself to be a CW power user, and I'm continuing to learn even though I've been using it for years. There are entire dimensions of this DAW that I've done little more than scratch the surface with.

I finally upgraded my system to Windows 10 a few months back. I ended up doing a clean install so I had to reinstall Cakewalk. Now, prior to the change in OSes, Cakewalk would stop at the end of a piece and return to measure 1. Ever since the OS upgrade it's stopped doing this. I don't know what OS-related function or trick is causing this, but I suspect it's something simple that needs to be set -- or reset. So, what's the secret?

That's him. Cool, I didn't know he was a member of Yes for a while -- they were my favorite band back in the early 70s. He's still active. So maybe a letter to that Boston address will find him.

Well, slartabartfast did an excellent job of summing things up. Y'all will note that in my original post, I was requesting information on how to contact the owner of the copyright so that, if I chose to publish my derivation of the work, I would not run afoul of any copyright restrictions -- have all the i's dotted and t's crossed, so to speak. I'll try the email first and hope for a response. I'm curious if cakewalk.com is still a valid email domain. I'm sure Ivan (or Igor or whatever his name is) is still around somewhere. Update: I sent an email to igorkhoroshev@cakewalk.com and it got bounced. The return message stated that the email address doesn't exist. Oh well. I guess I can try snailmail next.

Hey guys, thanks for the responses. Johnny -- Doh! I shoulda thought of that. Well, there are email and PO Box addresses there. Wonder if they're still any good. This was some 20+ years ago. Thanks for supplying a copy of your version. I'll be listening to it momentarily. John, in light of the statement at the end of the note, referencing the use in a commercial endeavor, seems to me they don't regard this clip as a mere clip. But I'd like to think you're right.

Way back in my Pro Audio 9 days, I discovered this really cool tutorial that Cakewalk included with Pro Audio. I've renamed it so many times over the years -- usually just some version of "tutorial," but I did find one copy of it that was named "Boston Rain." I'm thinking this is probably the original title. It's just a little 16 bar blues, 32 bars in total length. I IV7 bV IV7 I is all it is, but it has a really cool melody that I like and it's in E Dorian -- what could be better for a guitarist to solo against? All voices are MIDI and I think the instruments were originally Piano Sax Bass and Drums, but somewhere early on I converted the Piano track to Organ, selecting an organ voice with a bit of a B3 grind to it. The organ really makes it, I think. Anyway, I would like to expand on this piece, perhaps add some sort of bridge section, and then publish it. But to do so, I'll need the authors' permission, and then if any royalties result (well, one can hope, can't one), I'll have ASCAP handle the chores. I've never attempted to publish anyone's music but my own, so I don't know how to go about this. I figured that the forum here is as good a place to start as any, and probably better than most. Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer. I'm including my arrangement of it so far for you to peruse. The "YES!" I added after I found it at last. Boston Rain YES!.cwp

Okay, just so's you know where I'm coming from, the sum of my experience regarding CC Control is only a couple of the CCs found in the PRV. Mostly Volume, really. But I know there are many others and some of them I could definitely use. It can be a pita trying to use them with kb and mouse, though, so I'm thinking about buying something that will make the process simpler. I already own a few keyboards that I'm sure I could set up as MIDI controllers, so rather than going the route of a kb controller, I'm thinking about what Sweetwater likes to label as "mixing control surfaces." I don't have many hundreds, or even thousands of $$ to spend on an item, so given a rather spare budget, the surface that attracts me the most is the Korg NanoControl Studio. Reading through the reviews, I note that a few of the reviewers have successfully configured it to work with Sonar and CWbBL. So at least I know it works with CW with a minimum of effort. But as always, I'd be interested in learning about other devices that may work as well, or perhaps even better, with CW. And lastly, since I'm still scratching the surface with CCs and how to implement them, is there a tutorial anywhere you can recommend that will bring me more up to speed on this topic? As always, thanks in advance.

Hi John, so I take it that your answer to my question is a no, then. I tried your alternative and mine doesn't work like yours since yours is already defaulting to the CW app. On my system, SPlat is now the default if I were to click on any of those files. And I don't know what going to the Core folder is supposed to accomplish. You can't change associations from there -- or at least, I can't. I think it'll be easer at this point to just uninstall and reinstall CW. That should take care of the problem, right?

I just recently put together a new computer system for my DAW and installed Win10 on it. Which means I've been having to reinstall everything. The very first program I reinstalled was Cakewalk. I'd been having some problems with my old Win7 system's audio, so I wanted to make sure that was a thing of the past. It was -- or is. But just for the sake of backward compatibility -- or grins and giggles or whatever -- I also reinstalled my old copy of SPlat. Now when I did that, Win10 did something I wasn't expecting. It re-associated my CW files with SPlat. Annoying. So I went into Settings > Default Apps > Choose Default Apps by File Type -- where I expected to be able to tell Win10 that I wanted my CW files associated with CWbBL. But Noooo. The only option this brain-dead function allows me to do is choose SPlat. Now, this isn't the sort of thing I've had to do much of in the past, but I don't recall earlier versions of Windows being quite so myopic. So, considering my options, I thought, hey, I'll just d/l CW again from Bandlab. But nope, the only way I can do that is if I UNINSTALL it first. Grrrr. Well, I'm not looking to go quite so drastic as all that, although if I have to, I will. So I'm deciding to cool my jets for now, but what I am wondering is this -- when it's time for another CW update, will I get my CW file associations back as well? Anybody happen to know this?

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. Actually, it does help because it tells me that, for whatever peculiar reason, this problem appears to exist just with my machine and is most likely not a bug -- in the traditional sense, it would seem. I really, really, dislike machine-specific issues like this. But what are ya gonna do? I just upgraded the machine. Not gonna toss it in the bin and go for another one. At this point, I'm wondering, is the popup any sort of flat file that I might be able to edit or is it machine hex code that is auto generated? If a flat file, if I can find it, I can edit it.

Shane, your file dates agree exactly with both installations of CW I have on my PC. When I saw that the two different installs agreed exactly, I got concerned, cuz it was only just a few days ago, when I was running CW from the old drive in Win7, that I saw the patch. What changed? Heh, a lot changed. New OS, new install of CW -- although it's supposedly the same as the one I was running just a couple of days ago, or so say all the file dates I've compared so far. I don't much like the idea of having to create a user preset and I have an uneasy feeling that my machine has just stumbled across a bug that might not be reproducible -- except on my machine, of course. I've finally put to bed a similar non-reproducible problem with an earlier incarnation of this machine. It sure would be nice if I could have a vacation from this sort of thing before problems start appearing again. But what have I got to lose. May as well reinstall.

Thanks, Mister X. I've d/l'd the server and plug-in modules. Now all I have to do is get my other machine up and running. Should be in a few days -- waiting on that new drive. abacab, yeah, so far, it's working nicely. No hiccups and the music sounds great. I gotta say, though, I don't care much for the Win10 interface. I don't understand why M$ had to change everything around. I guess I'll get used to it, though.