Lord Tim

Mastering plugins are notorious for adding latency. They usually include linear phase EQ, and limiters with look-ahead, which both add a HEAP of time to audio sync, so even if you have a super beefy machine that didn't care about the CPU requirements, these things would still introduce latency because of how they work.

If you could come up with examples of what it doesn't work on, that'd be useful to pass on to the Bakers. I think consistency is going to be one of those things that everyone keeps returning to when we start talking about getting rid of any clunk. Quick Grouping really should work consistently across all controls.

Yeah, same. That's odd - it sounds like something was blocked during the install. Try disabling any antivirus software and try to reinstall and see if that helps.

Just wanted to address a couple of points: Aside from holding down CTRL as the modifier, how is that different or better than just swiping down the tracks in CbB and adjusting a fader? If anything, that follows most of the Windows paradigm by having CTRL as a multi-select thing. THIS, on the other hand, is definitely something missing from CbB, and I'd love to see it added. We can make Aux tracks or Busses, but if you have complex routing or sends from those tracks, it gets complicated super fast. What's especially baffling to me is we can do proper groups (not quick groups) but you can't actually automate things like volume using a grouped control. Even with that extra clunk of having to use groups, that's still better than having nothing at all, although I'd much prefer a VCA track. CbB has multi-add as well - select all of your tracks, hold down CTRL (following the same paradigm as mentioned earlier) and right click > Insert Send. This is another much wanted feature from me. Definitely clunk by definition - it's something you *can* do now but there's a heap of extra steps to achieve it, where it's handled much more elegantly in other DAWs.

Yeah, Sonar is essentially the next version of CbB so renaming the main CbB forum to Cakewalk Sonar makes sense. Cakewalk Next is definitely its own thing so a new forum specifically for that would be a logical idea.

Or you could end up like Vegas Pro where those guys are doing a mammoth job trying to get decades of creaky code up to scratch but are clearly struggling because of their limited resources. It's definitely a lot harder with a legacy product, rather than starting from scratch like Justin did. I think the thing we need to remember going forward was that this first iteration of Sonar will be similar to how CbB was when it changed from SPlat - that was identical to SPlat but with 4 months worth of bug fixes, and that's it. But look at it now - it's a HUGE improvement from where SPlat was 5 years ago. Overhauling the bitmap based UI is a MASSIVE job alone, so even if nothing else changes in this first version, that alone is solving a bunch of issues going forward and making user facing updates a lot easier, rather than having to work around 20 year old UI decisions. It'll be interesting to see where this ends up in 5 years, like CbB.

Either way, the performance of a SSD drive, even with the worst kind of config, shouldn't be the bottleneck here. Grab Latency Monitor: https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon See if that tells you anything about the glitching.

This was one of my criticisms of his first livestream, that he didn't provide examples (and fair enough too, that was beyond the scope of what the stream was about). Well, here we go, this is great! Very elegant implementation for those things in S-One. It'd mean a bit of a re-write in some cases for Sonar I'd imagine, and the Chord Track is very likely something already on the radar since it's been a long-standing request. One thing that I would argue is that for day-to-day use for doing multi-out instruments, you'd set up a template. I couldn't imagine screwing around with setting outputs and naming them, etc. when I can right click on a blank spot, Insert Track Template, and I have all of my instrument ins, outs, busses, colours, names... all done for me in 2 seconds. It takes a while to set it up first, but then it's set and forget. I do really dig the drop-onto-a-track send creation, although since we have patch points/aux tracks this could get a little confusing as to what you'd prefer to create. I actually thought he was going to mention MIDI routing, which is definitely a sore spot in CbB, so that synth chain thing was a bit unexpected. Cool idea! I do something similar with Bluecat's Patchwork plugin, but it would be nice to have a native solution like this. But these are great things for the Bakers to have a look at for sure.

Those instructions should say Preferences, not Options. Press P to open that up.

OK, this is all kind of confusing all up. It's like there's certain things that are getting confused with other things and non-related stuff which is muddying the waters. I'll address the Realtek stuff in a bit, but let's talk ASIO first. Taking it slowly, can go over each point with me to explain exactly what you've done? 1. You've cleaned out the registry and have ONLY installed the ASIO driver for the Focusrite? Nothing else? 2. With the Focusrite plugged in, and you've chosen ASIO mode in the Driver Model in CbB, your project will get a dropout with every buffer setting. 3. If you remove Wider from your chain, the project plays Is this all correct? Some plugins can be glitchy and will cause a denormalization that stops the engine, and some especially really don't play nice with double precision 64 bit audio. If it's the case with Wider, I'd suggest finding one of the many other great stereo imager plugins and using that instead. The bit depth of the interface has nothing really to do with the audio engine, so don't worry that your interface is 24 bit and there's this 64 bit thing. It's 2 different things entirely. Regarding the "corrupt audio region" thing, that can happen if there was some kind of disk error. It shouldn't be affecting playback at all, but it's worth doing a disk scan to make sure there's no errors for a start. It's possible there was some kind of write error at some point and it broke a WAV. You can try saving a temp copy of the project and deleting tracks until you can find the offending one (there's a feature request where a corrupt region was highlighted in some way - that would be super handy in this case!) Why the sound of WASAPI is boxy sounding is a complete mystery, it shouldn't sound like anything (glitches aside if there are any). I'm wondering if this is maybe running through any of those dumb Windows enhancements, eg: Spatial Audio, some kind of EQ, etc. on the system? ASIO wouldn't be taking that path at all, so wouldn't be using any of the enhancements.

Please start a new thread with your issue. On the surface a lot of these things can look similar but might have radically different causes and fixes and these threads can get confusing and tangled really fast.

It's tough. I agree in principle to a curator but I can say my needs would be different to, say, Erik's when it comes to what I consider clunky being a long-timer, and Erik coming from Mixcraft and looking at this with fresh eyes. But I do absolutely agree that "clunky" should basically mean "existing tools that aren't as intuitive as they could be, or poorly documented so people aren't seeing the benefit of the current implementation." I think that's really the crux of the thread right there. We already have a good fair whack of stuff (and often even more) than in other DAWs, but A: you gotta know about it to use it, and B: sometimes there's so much legacy baggage involved (for better or worse) that it might be worth revisiting how these tools work.

As far as I'm led to believe, it's going to be more or less the same as what we have now but just scalable to fit different resolutions. At the very least there'd most certainly be a dark and light mode, so having the forum match would be awesome! I think @Jesse Jost is looking after a lot of this kind of web stuff, am I right Jesse? Any chance of us getting a Tungsten theme?

How about a Tungsten and Mercury theme option, so it mimics what CbB does now?

There's a couple of ways to do this currently, but neither are great. One is to use a Chrome or Firefox extension that makes a custom CSS sheet that it uses instead of the default forum CSS. It works but some elements don't look great. The other way is to invert your screen colours. Press WIN and + to open Magnifier, then do CTRL+ALT+I to toggle the screen invert. This will invert graphics and pictures too, of course. The best way would be, of course, to have a dark mode theme. If we look at the bottom of the forum you can see a Theme dropdown box where we can select the current one or the old CbB one. It'd be great to have a dark mode theme in there too for sure.

Interesting, similar vibe here: Is this the same error you're seeing? This isn't crashing for me or another user in that thread, so it sounds like something is common and clearly not working on your systems that's making this encoder crash. If you have a crash dump, definitely get that over to support. A lot of people used LAME as their MP3 encoder until the Cakewalk one was unlocked years back, but I personally prefer exporting to WAV and then using some audio editor (such as Audacity, which is free) to do the final silence trimming and exporting to MP3.

Or you could look at it like this: "There is a loose and sparking wire in my basement that's a fire hazard, it's got to be fixed!" "That sounds dangerous, did you tell your landlord about it?" "It's not my responsibility to tell them, they should know already. I'm not going to tell anybody about it and just let it keep happening!" *house burns down* If the devs don't know there's a problem, how do you expect them to fix it? There could be something particular on your system that's happening to cause this crash, and that's the entire point of that message you got.

I don't do a massive amount of work with production houses myself (more of my scoring to picture work is internal or for my own video production company) so take what I say as a general bit of information. There's others on here who have WAY more experience with this than me (check out the Production Tips forum for a few people for a start), but from my knowledge of it all, you're going to basically get what you get from the studio - you work to their specs. Most likely it'll be some flavour of ProRes, likely also with timecode baked in. You'll also get standard SMPTE offset timings and all of that kind of thing, so you need to set your DAW up to cater for that, so whatever you give back, that just slots into their workflow, or if they have any suggestions of alterations they have done, there's no misunderstanding about what part they mean. For example, they can reference 00:02:25:51 to 00:02:26:07 as the area that needs replacing, so having your DAW timeline sync with any timecode offsets is super important. CbB as it stands can't shift video in the timeline unless you change to the older rendering engine, and that then prevents you from using modern video CODECS without needing to fiddle around with transcoding, etc. I may be missing something here (someone educate me if I am, please) but I also think that you're not able to set timecode offsets for the video either. CbB can export video, but typically you'd just be sending out a mix and stems as audio, but all with the same timing as the video for ease of sync. If you're just scoring to your own thing, it works pretty well. I've done this a lot myself with no real issues at all. I do all of the video grunt work in my NLE and if any big changes need to be made, I'm able to switch back and forth between each app to do the necessary adjustments. No production house will be giving you this kind of leeway when they just expect their clients to work the same way each time. They have enough to worry about besides trying to work out where to drop in the audio they commissioned you to do! We're probably getting a little off-topic for the theme of this thread, but it'd be good to open up a new thread and get a bunch of people who work in this world extensively to chime in and see what's missing.

Yep, that is the workaround. You can't use a lot of modern video formats when you switch to the older engine, but it does let you move the video around. Not a great compromise, honestly, and only one of a few shortcomings in the Video View workflow. I tend to do the same thing by prepping my video in an NLE first and sorting all of the timing out before getting in into CbB and it works well for me, but if you've been delivered a ProRes 4:2:2 MOV file from a production house to score the soundtrack, with specific SMTPE timing points, etc. this whole workaround falls over pretty fast. This is definitely on my list of must-fix things for this particular area.

In my earlier post, I mentioned to go to Preferences > MIDI > Devices. Can you see your keyboard in both Input and Output, and they have ticks in the boxes for them? One you have that set up, you should be able to choose your keyboard in the Output on the MIDI track.

OK, after following my instructions above, did that solve the problem by changing the MIDI Input and Output?

For what it's worth, this also gets installed with Magix Vegas Pro and it's unstable in that app too. Not surprised it's crashed Cakewalk on you.

OK, I think we're going around in circles a little bit here. Let's get some clarity. Is this all correct: You have your keyboard connected to your computer. Inside Cakewalk by Bandlab (CbB) you can see your keyboard as a device. When you record, you're recording a MIDI track, correct? It'll look like dots and dashes rather than an audio waveform. With that MIDI track, the only thing you can hear is any Cakewalk instruments coming out of the computer speakers. You are hearing your keyboard playing back the sound as well as those Cakewalk instruments. Assuming this is all correct, you have the Output on your MIDI track set to a Cakewalk instrument (likely TTS-1) rather than your keyboard. If you check in Preferences in the MIDI > Devices section, you should see your keyboard listed in both the Inputs and Outputs parts with ticks in their boxes. If that's the case, if you open up the MIDI track you've recorded, you should see the Input (I) and the Output (O). Both of those things should be set to your keyboard, rather than Omni or anything else. This should just get the sound to play through your keyboard. The next hurdle is, did you want to record the sound of your keyboard into CbB? If so, you'll need an audio cable connected into your audio interface to do that. If you're recording with onboard audio (eg: your computers built in soundcard, this won't give you very good results). I'd suggest in that case to use a VST virtual instrument, or buy an audio interface with proper connections.

The Cakewalk Installer is the way to go. There's not many reasons to use Bandlab Assistant for anything these days, and any app updates are handled inside CbB itself now once it's installed. I would say Sonar will be the same going forward.

No, this is an area that needs improving. I'm not here for an argument about it, though. If there's areas that need looking at, it should be looked at. All I'm saying is that a lot of stuff that people say is lacking or slower may not be.