musikman1

Hi, well I just got my upgraded PC back and in the process of checking everything and getting set up again. I have an annoying problem in that Cakewalk is not seeing my midi controller keyboard. I checked in Windows Device Mgr and it is showing up there and showing that it is working properly, but CW still doesn't see it. It just is not listed in CW Preferences/MIDI/Devices. The only difference I can think of is when I upgraded my PC, I now have all 3.0 and 3.1 USB ports, I no longer have any 2.0 USB ports, however, all the 3.0 and 3.1s are backwards compatible, and the ports must be ok because Windows is recognizing it, but CW is not. I've gone through a few old threads here, but nothing seems to be helping. It is an old M-Audio MK-361C, but it had always worked fine before I upgraded my PC. I suck at driver installation, but I did try anyway to uninstall the driver and re-install, but when I went to uninstall I got a message that I would need to close the USB MIDI Series Audio Device Mgr before I can uninstall it. Not sure what that is, so I just canceled the uninstall. Is there something I can do other than uninstalling and re-installing the driver?

Ah, ok, I thought it might be more expensive. I must have been looking at something different altogether. Thanks, but I'm not going to be able to afford the $400.00 at this point in time, but will keep it on the back burner. I may however look into the elements version.

Mark, could you please post a link to the Wavelab software you are referring to? I'd appreciate it, thanks! The one that came up in my Google search runs a little over $100, is that the same one you have? Greenlight, thanks for the link to the free burner software, much appreciated!

I hear what you're saying, and it does make sense. I don't see the point in CW leaving the burner there, unless they're going to bump it up to acceptable level of features. Especially given the fact that I was able to go online and download a burner software for free and install it in less than a minute. I think it's a nice option to have built into CW, for convenience mostly. They will probably toss it soon enough.

It's a round flat disc with a hole in the middle, kinda like a doughnut, you can burn songs onto it. Look in your history books son, you'll see it there. It was around before people began using the internet to steal copyrighted music. The good ol' days. If CW feels like CDs are a thing of the past, then they should just eliminate that extra baggage from CW altogether, if they think it's still relevant, then I'm just suggesting they should at least bring the features up to date so that it's functional for those who still want to use it, instead of leaving it hanging there as a stripped down version of a burner.

To the powers that be: While my PC is out for upgrade I'm using my old laptop, which has a current version of CWbB installed. I wanted to burn a quick CD for a friend with just two songs on it. Both song files are wav files, and have song titles. For lack of any CD burning software on my laptop I decided to try Cakewalk's CD Burner utility for the first time. I was able to drag and drop the two tracks into the track list, and I was able to burn the CD, and the CD did play ok, but I noticed the song titles text was not transferred to the CD, and going back for a second test, I was not able to even find an option to name the songs manually. They just show up as "Track01" and "Track02" on any player I use. I couldn't find anything documented about it, or any settings in the utility UI for this. I know this is not a hugely important part of a DAW, but for some reason, for CWbB's high standard of excellence, it seems to be sorely lacking basic functionality, almost like it was put in place long ago, but CW never got back around to reviewing and addressing what features would be necessary. If it's going to be there, why not overhaul it so that it can do at least what some of the basic free CD burner software out there does, like AnyBurn for one example. Seems kinda silly to give a CD of my original song to someone to listen to, and tell them, yeah man, check out my new song, it's called "Track01"! Silly, right? 😉 Thanks for listening, much appreciated!

Will do, thanks!

Thanks Lord Tim, I'll check out that burner software. Could you please tell me where I can send in my requests for features I'd like to see? I'd like to send in this one about the burner, just don't know where to send it. Thanks!

Yeah a regular burner software is the way I usually go too, I have an older version of Nero on my PC, but seeing as how it is in the shop and I didn't really have anything on my laptop, I decided to give the CW burner utility a try. I wonder if there's a place here where I can inform CW of the issue I had, maybe it wouldn't take much for them to include a couple of minor improvements to the burner utility in one of their next couple of updates?

You're probably correct. In my test of the burner, I didn't burn a track straight out of a project, I loaded a couple of songs into the burner from windows explorer that had already been exported as wav files weeks ago. I just thought it strange that they were files with titles, and the CW burner kinda ignored the titles or just renamed them as Track01, and Track02. No text at all was transferred. You would think if they bothered to include a CD burner utility within a DAW that it would at least be technical enough to do that. It must be a really stripped down version of a burner. Maybe they'll improve on it a little in the future. Thanks for the reply, much appreciated.

I guess no one uses CW's CD burner utility! Anyone have a clue? I'm wondering if there are any plans to update or enhance this utility?

While my PC is out for upgrade I'm using my old laptop, which has a current version of CWbB installed. I wanted to burn a quick CD for a friend with just two songs on it. Both song files are wav files, and have titles. For lack of any CD burning software on my laptop I decided to try Cakewalk's CD Burner utility. I was able to drag and drop the two tracks into the track list, and I was able to burn the CD, but I noticed the song titles were not transferred to the CD. They just show up as "Track01" and "Track02" on any player I use to play the CD. Anyone know how to fix this? I couldn't find anything documented about it, or any settings in the utility UI for this. Thanks!

Thanks for the computer lessons guys, much appreciated! I did end up going with the x5600 - 6core-12thread, but I don't have the computer back yet, so I can't say anything about how it performs until then. I did talk to my tech who is doing the job, and he said he also has a x5600 in one of his PCs and he describes it as "a beast", he obviously likes the performance. I know that performance when it comes to music production is different in many ways compared to just regular computer tasking, so we'll see how it goes when I get it back. I'm sure that the SSD drives I had him install will make a huge difference too, they're rated at 3400mbps I believe, and that's probably 5 times or more faster transfer rate than my old spinning WD HDD. Plus a bump in RAM from 8GB to 32GB should be an improvement as well.

I see, well when it comes to certain computer parts, nothing is crystal clear to me anyway. I do have a reliable computer tech who does my upgrades, so I trust him. There are two choices I'm looking at, and I'm wondering if there would really be much difference between these two processors. I'm just running Cakewalk, but I do use some CPU heavy plugins, and mostly audio tracks as opposed to MIDI tracks. Sometimes I use Sony Vegas to do some small video projects as well. 5600x... https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-5600X-12-Thread-Processor/dp/B08166SLDF/ref=asc_df_B08166SLDF/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=475750632217&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=18174886754171346090&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002211&hvtargid=pla-1038719530487&psc=1 5800x... https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-5800X-16-Thread-Processor/dp/B0815XFSGK/ref=pd_rhf_cr_s_pd_crcd_5?pd_rd_w=BkGaU&pf_rd_p=8019ba47-0a12-4976-b76b-5c932d60db6f&pf_rd_r=SSP9GZEH6HN6629QG198&pd_rd_r=4d79c963-35eb-4b1f-b459-4a770dcbfb13&pd_rd_wg=HHYQS&pd_rd_i=B0815XFSGK&psc=1 Ok, correct me if I'm wrong,..... so I'm guessing that pairing the less expensive 5600x 6core/12thread with 32GB RAM and a fast SSD drive would be sufficient for what I'm doing in CW? Or is it gonna be that much difference in performance/speed to go with the more expensive 5800x 8core/16thread? See, right now I have a 3core/6thread (which I originally thought was just a "6 core" (there's that terminology again!), and CWbB performance meter is showing 6 separate core measurements for it, so I assume the CWbB meter will show 12 for the 5600x and 16 for the 5800x. I could actually keep the processor I have but I'm upgrading everything else, so I may as well follow suit with the processor as well, rather than doing it separately later on. Any thoughts?

I'm not big on computer terminology, but I've noticed that some people will call a 6 core - 12 thread processor just "12 core", and an 8 core - 16 thread processor just "16 core". Am I to assume that for example a 6 core - 12 thread is really a 12 core?

Was just looking at the Ryzen 8 core/16 thread, up around $4-500, the 6 core/12 thread around $3-350. I'd like to go 8 if I can get it and still keep the total upgrade budget manageable .

If I can manage it, I may end up upgrading my processor and motherboard along with the SSDs and RAM, otherwise I'll stick to just SSDs and RAM. My friend was recommending Ryzen AMD 5600X 8 core 16 thread processor. He said it's very fast and outperforms some of the Intel i series processors. I don't know much about the technical end but I know he is very good at what he does, he's been a business computer tech for years, so I trust his recommendations. The customer reviews on that processor are mostly very good from what I can see.

This could work, I see what you mean. I noticed though that the outside main folder of a project and the cwp folder inside both share identical names. So both would need renaming, but if I rename it at the SaveAs point while in CWbB, then I think both get renamed automatically. Yes it's the way I've always done it, it's just that I had not created a system for backup files, I just had been dragging them to an external HDD in another folder like Cakewalk Projects, only it would be Cakewalk Projects Bkup, or something like that. I just ran into where I had daily revisions I wanted to backup as well, and I'd have to keep replacing the previously saved backup. I am looking to keep a few daily backups for awhile until I know I can get rid of some of them. So what scook and John said about adding dates to the backups to keep them in some organized way sounds like a good method. It may likely be even more secure than drag drop to the external, I've accidentally copied a project or two to the wrong folder, one took me awhile to find! lol Ok I see John, makes perfect sense. So you would always have at least one dated backup of any given project in the album folder. I'm glad there is a second option, this is good! I do like the "by project" setup a little more, it is more familiar to they way I set mine up now.

Thanks scook, this is good stuff.....I like the idea for the "To External" folder, using Save As to directly save an "update of the day so to speak." I know I don't need to worry about the project name being the same if I'm saving the daily update to a different folder than the original's location. Looking ahead to when you would move them from the To External folder to the external HDD, how are multiple copies of that same project being named? If you try to save in the same folder you get prompted to overwrite existing, they can't share the same file name. So the first thought for me is I would need to add a revision date to the end of the file name while in the Save As dialog box, is that basically the method you use to avoid duplicating a file name? I'm looking at my project files in Windows Explorer, and all my CWbB projects are in the C:\Cakewalk Projects folder as usual. Each project has a main or outside folder, and inside that are the audio folder, and the .cwp file. When I move them to an external HDD for backup, I just move/copy that entire folder as one item. I would be interested in seeing a screenshot of what a typical heirarchy tree and folder names would look like for the multiple backups of the same project on the External HDD . Whoa you have a lot of music! So when you're saving projects to your Album backup you are likely dating the file name so as not to duplicate the name if there are a few other copies in that folder. This is all good, I appreciate the discussion. I am really trying to become more efficient with how I store backups, and want to just keep it simple at the same time. For my Mixes, I have always used a simple folder setup with subfolders separated by project name.

Once saved, I do still drag project folders from one HDD to another for safe keeping. They are self contained with all audio inside too, so they should transfer just fine. I've never had an issue with moving them around, it's when I used the overwrite when saving from CW.

I'm just trying to establish a backup system without things getting too confusing, especially if I'm going to keep any older versions of a song/project. As I mentioned above, at the end of my recording session, I just want to save the project as it currently stands because changes have been made, I just want to double backup in case the one in the Cakewalk Projects folder on my main HDD gets corrupted or something. What do you mean John by "container folder"? ....I assume you mean your CW Projects main folder?

I see, interesting, all I want to do as I save any newly added tracks on a given day and make an extra backup of those changes somewhere else safe besides my main C drive, like an external HDD. Let me make sure I'm understanding this right......So hypothetically if your project name is "My Song", that means if you are using Save As option every time you save new changes as your project grows and new tracks are added, then you must be needing to name it a different name so as not to overwrite the one of the same name that you previously saved, so it would mean naming the current one "My Song 2" or something like that, correct? Then you delete the older one(s) as new revisions get saved, is that right? Ok, so that is why I was getting issues, I did stop using that method once I ran into an issue. It wasn't with every project, but it happened, so I stopped doing it that way.

Did a "rename/save project" search and saw this thread. I have a simple question along similar lines........ I frequently double backup my projects I am currently working on to 2 external HDD. For the longest time I would just copy the project folder (with all its contents and audio) to the External HDD, and select the Windows "overwrite existing file?" option for the backup project folder of the same name on the External. Then I noticed I began getting some audio errors if I needed to reload the one off the external to my main PC drive. Hard to describe, but let's just say I believe that maybe some of the audio either got corrupted, or the old audio didn't all get deleted when I did the overwrite with the currently updated version. I thought maybe if I had Archived tracks in that project it would cause the issue, but not really sure. So when I want to back up now, I began to first delete the existing backup project folder on the external HDD, then just copy the currently updated one to the HDD, thus eliminating any overwrite issues. Aside from being a little risky deleting the older backup first, is this a good way to backup my project to a HDD? What method do you use? Thanks!

Ok Will, thanks, I watched the video. Seems pretty simple to connect. I do have a couple of questions though.... I assume instead of using my Behringer mixer, I'll be using the audio outputs of my audio interface to send the record and playback signals to my studio monitors, and control playback volume with the A/I That being the case, when I get to a scenario where let's say I already have recorded a drum and a bass track in CWbB, now I want to play those tracks while I record a new keyboard synth track. Using the setup described in the video with my A/I connected to my mixer, will I be able to control the playback volume of the drum/bass playback separately from the volume of the new keyboard track that I am recording live? This is an issue that I have now with just using the Behringer alone because if I use the control room/headphone volume knob on the Behringer, both are sent to that knob, so it raises or lowers both my playback and record volumes simultaneously. So if I want the drums and bass to be quieter so I can hear the keyboard part I'm playing better, the only way to do it is to use my volume controls within CWbB. It's one of the things that prompted me to change and go with a USB mixer that has multi USB so I can send the playback tracks to any channel and therefore control the levels separately.

Thanks for that link Will, interesting, ..gonna watch tonight. It never really occurred to me to connect the two.