Lord Tim

If you have the means to, you'd do a specific mix to use in a live situation. For example, knowing that one output will go to the PA and the other will go to the drummer, any stereo panning effects would be flying between what the audience hears and what the drummer hears, so it doesn't make any sense to use anything like that. Go as mono as possible with your mix, split it to separate busses (one for the drummer with click on three too, and one for the PA) and yes, export that as your MP3.

Yeah, if you're bouncing down to 2 track for MP3 then you'd have it all prepped first, which would include mastering. I'd caution against doing too much mastering-wise though, since it'll be going through a PA, into various speakers, getting processed there and there'll be a room sound involved too. Keep it as simple as you can. Really, you need to come up with an inventory of what you have first, and then work with that to reach the goal. I mean. I could say "just get your 32 channel I/O and patch that into the foldback desk via a splitter and then send each feed to foldback and in-ears", but if you have none of those things, any advice you'd be given would need to be adapted anyway.

Interesting, I came across the same kind of thing switching projects before with the crossfade indicator. I put it down to an anomaly but this might be related.

I think it really depends on the material at the end of the day. If you're watching a jazz or folk band, or an orchestra, you want to hear every bit of those live dynamics - orchestral music especially. The contrast between a delicate flute interlude and then having a shipping container full of trombones and timpanis land on your head right after is pure joy! HAHA! Ruin those dynamics and you ruin the vibe and miss the point entirely. But anyone who has been to a metal or punk show will have a different experience. Even taking into account that the bigger and more produced shows do have compression and limiting liberally applied over the entire mix and master outs, when you're in the crowd and the speakers and amps are cranking, your ears naturally compress things. Whenever I'm doing anything that has that kind of intensity, I want to capture that live vibe. Maybe those cymbals take your head off. Maybe the guitars are just a touch too loud. Does this feel like I'm standing right in front of a band just going nuts and their wall of amps are blasting? It needs to be visceral and exciting. And you do definitely get that with a fairly slammed compressor/limiter on the out in that case. The low end especially needs extra attention when things are going a million miles an hour and the bass and kick drums are having a life or death battle for that frequency space - those dynamics need to be locked down and controlled or the entire mix will get away from you. There's certainly degrees between soft rock and hardcore punk though, and should have the same kind of care applied to how much you want to smash the mix at the end. Like everyone has said, use your ears. Don't just slam the limiter because you feel like you have to now - you don't - it should be an artistic choice based on what the song needs.

Quite a lot of the streaming services (Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple, etc) have the levels adjusted to a common listening level now, so in the past you'd want to have your track as loud as possible to stand out from the rest of the music you're listening to, but now the streaming services will simply turn it down if you've mastered it too hot. Check this link out for a better explanation: https://www.masteringthemix.com/blogs/learn/76296773-mastering-audio-for-soundcloud-itunes-spotify-and-youtube Of course, if you want to slam the compressor and limiter on the master for artistic reasons, then absolutely have at it! Some music really does benefit from a heavily compressed mix (some really does NOT at all). But there's really no good reason to do it to be competitive if your goal is the streaming platforms.

My counter to that is you have no real idea what's going to happen at the master stage if it's the kind of music that will most likely have a fair amount of limiting done to it. First, I do absolutely agree that if you're planning to send your stuff off to a mastering engineer, let them do their job! Like Craig says, they more than likely have much better toys and far better skills than you do, so don't tie their hands by limiting their options. Take any dynamics effects off of the master unless it's something crucial to the sound of your mix before you send it off. But with that said ... If you're doing a style like metal or modern "radio" pop/rock where it's likely going to be hit hard with limiting later (to whatever degree, now that the loudness wars are kind of done) then you need to have an idea of what you're giving the mastering engineer because that can *also* tie their hands. How a mix is going to react to those effects is something you need to keep in mind. Generally you'll find that any bed instruments like rhythm guitars get much louder, cymbals get harsher/washier, you lose the snare or it loses transient definition... lots of things like that. So how do you deal with that? One option is to send stems so the mastering engineer can rebalance the mix if things start to get lost. The other option is to get your mix sounding great with nothing / light compression on your master outs, then strap a fairly aggressive limiter over the master and listen to the changes. You'd want to try to match the loudness levels of the commercial mixes you're aiming to get close to. Do a new mix with that on there, getting it close to what you were originally going for (with that added loudness you'd get from a limited mix) and then *take it off*. It will sound super weird and pokey sounding now, but this will be EXTREMELY dynamic now, giving the mastering engineer huge amounts of headroom to play with for processing later. Bring both mixes to the mastering session and talk to the engineer about it. I've found the best mastering people will want to work with you to get the best product and will give you guidance about what they need. Every style of music will have its own requirements and goals, so don't take what I'm saying as a one size fits all thing. If you're doing acoustic folk, or jazz or something, the chance of this stuff being slammed as hard as a melodic death metal mix is kind of nil, so it's not worth going to this kind of trouble. But it does pay to at least have an idea once your mix goes off, and good communication with your engineer will really get you over the line!

It's fairly common to run a compressor over busses, even the master buss. Some people use these as "glue" compressors since it kind of crushes the sound to tame some transients and make it seem thicker, and "glues" the mix together more. I personally don't like to use single band compressors on the master too much, preferring to use a multiband so I have a bit more flexibility for what frequency area I want to crush, how much attack and release, etc., but I've been in a lot of mastering studios where it's common to use a gentle single band compressor first to "knock the tops off" of the transients before you send that to the final limiter. Running a series of compressors rather than trying to do that all with one set more aggressively can make things sound a lot more natural. For anything I master here from other clients, though, I'd really recommend hardly any to none on any mixes I'm given. You can't bring back the dynamics on a mix that's been squashed too much, and it's really easy to go too far if you're fairly new to using compressors on the master buss.

This is stuff we've done a lot over the years. It's fiddly but if you approach it in the right way, it's fairly foolproof. Basically, it's like people have said here - you'd split the MP3 as the drummer mix with the click on one side and the front of house mix on the other side. To do it right, you'll need a cheap mixer or you have a world of potential issues to deal with (which isn't to say it won't work, but your chance of failure will increase). So, get your mix together and set up 2 BUSS tracks: Drummer and FOH. Send those to your sound card outputs. Set them both to mono, pan Drummer 100% left, and FOH to 100% right. Change the output for every track except for the click to go to FOH. This will be what you're sending to the audience and whoever else wants it (say, the foldback speakers across the front of the stage). Bear in mind that if you have any tracks with crazy stereo effects, it might be best to set those to mono or it could sound a little crappy once it's all folded down to mono at the end and panned to the right in your FOH Buss. Set the click track output to go to the Drummer Buss. Then, go through any other track you'd like the drummer to hear and add a send to Drummer Buss and set it to PRE. That's going to be the mix you'll want to send to your drummer. The reason I'm suggesting PRE rather than POST is that typically you'll want the click track BLASTING loud and the balance to be a little different to what you'd send out to the front of house. So those sends will kind of be a completely independent mix to what you're sending to FOH. At this point you can mix this down to an MP3 and have your drummer mix on the left, and the front of house on the right. And you could play that back with an iPod or whatever, with a split headphone cable sending one side to the drummer's headphones and the other side to the mixer. But where this is a problem is that you'll need to make sure the mixer side is running through a DI so you're getting the proper signal levels, and the drummer will either only be getting audio in his left earphone, or if you've set it up so the channels are joined, we found there's a good chance on some players that it ends up giving you all kinds of bleed, and worse, it may not actually be loud enough if you've got someone who hammers his kit. What I'd suggest is running into 2 channels of a cheap mixer. Run the left output into channel 1 for the drums, and the right output into channel 2 for the front of house. Typically those little mixers have balanced outs so you should just be able to plug an XLR into it and you're all set. Drums, you should be able to plug your headphones into the phones out and you'll get HEAPS of level for the drummer. The only real gotcha here is the routing can be a little weird on some mixers so you're getting independent outputs. As a good example, we used to run a Mackie 4 channel mixer. The click/drum send would go to the drummer via the headphone output, but we had to send to the front of house vix an Aux send on it, because there was no way to split the channels and have them come through both ears of the drummer's headphones without that. Your mileage will vary from mixer to mixer though, but I definitely recommend that over a split cable thing. The other option you could try is dragging a laptop on stage and running the outputs of your soundcard directly to each place while the mix is playing back, It's a little more risky for problems to appear during a show, but you have complete control over who gets what then, and taking a lot of steps out of the equation. Not recommended if you don't have a beefy machine or a soundcard with good drivers and decent headphone preamp / balanced outs. Hope that makes sense!

Sorry @Ben Staton, I tried that when it happened to me last and it remained stuck unfortunately. The only way I could even get the audio to stop playing at all was ending the task, which obviously killed CbB. In a way I wish this happened more often for me, because it's extremely rare, and usually when I'm in the middle of something deadline-crucial so I can't do more tests.

The zoom window stays visible for me.

Can confirm that I've seen this behaviour too. It's only happened a couple of times but it's pretty annoying. I'm wondering if an ESC key exit from that function might be a good idea?

Absolutely agree. I set CbB up on a new machine recently and I had no idea what was going on with the downloads until they actually started installing.

Yep, I hear you - I asked for this too, and I believe this was added last year sometime. You need to insert an MCI event in the Event Viewer, which is easier than it sounds. @msmcleod - is this something you could explain properly?

Let's not jump to conclusions just yet - if it was a bug in the EA then we'd all be complaining about it, yeah? The trick now is to narrow down if it's something on your system that's a problem, something on your system that's exposing a problem in the EA (which is the point of this - we want the proper release to be stable, right? That's kind of our jobs if we're trying out these releases) which we can explain to the Bakers so they can fix it, or something has borked during the install. Can you give more info on your system and what's happening exactly?

Yeah, I've seen this maybe twice. It's so random it's a really difficult thing to report, and I could never to get a consistent recipe to reproduce it. 😕

Yeah, listen - I was told I'm not supposed to leak any upcoming features, but... well, it's DEFINITELY the Cakewalk Hovercraft we've been promised all these years (now as a Pro Channel add on). You heard it here first!

Let's not talk about how it's curved, just in case she says anything else... 😒

I have a 32:9 curved monitor and for the most part it's pretty great. Only 1080 high though, and at essentially 2x 27" HD monitors stuck together, things are just that touch too large for me - I'd recommend a 1440 over a 1080. That aside, being able to have views open that you'd ordinarily have to close to persevere screen real estate is great. CbB isn't so bad since the Skylight interface is pretty well made, but things like After Effects or Premiere Pro where you'd ordinarily be switching tabs to get to certain effects or parameters is wonderful just having them open in front of you. The first day is weird using CbB since there's just... so much in front of you to look at 😐 but when you get used to it, it's really hard going back to anything smaller. I rate it! 🙂

^ This. CbB exposes the names that your audio interface gives it, and that's usually named in stereo pairs, so what you end up with is weird names that seem to skip numbers. What it really is: Input 1 is really 1 (left) and 2 (right) Input 2 is really 3 (left) and 4 (right) etc. So look at your input list and you'll able to work out the "missing" channels. What you might find helpful is going into Preferences > Audio > Devices and checking Use Friendly Names to Represent Audio Drivers and going up and double clicking each input and naming it something a little more sensible (eg: the first channel of my interface is exposed as US-16x08 ASIO IN 1, the second is US-16x08 ASIO IN 3 etc. and what I've done is renamed the first one In-1L/2R and the second one In-3L/4R, etc. MUCH easier to read and keep track of.)

Yeah, that's crazy big. The .CWP size has no bearing on the bitrate or anything like that - it's basically a document with pointers that references the big audio data elsewhere. Are you definitely saving as a Normal Cakewalk Project (CWP) rather than a Cakewalk Bundle (CWB)? It's not out of the question for a bundle to be that big and take ages to save.

I find it a bit odd having that behaviour. Things should be pratical. This is by design. The scroll wheel is used to move around the active window usually, or to scroll through track headers, etc. Imagine if you're scrolling a track list and your mouse goes over the volume fader and you change your mix by accident. Having to actively make a decision to select the control you want to affect definitely stops unwanted changes.

You might be able to rescue it by doing a bit of spectral editing using something like Adobe Audition or Audacity (free). Have a look here at the manual: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/spectral_selection.html Sometimes you can get some pretty decent results if you can home in on the noise you don't want, other times it destroys too much of the original sound you want to keep, but it's certainly worth a look considering it's a free tool.

I ask myself that "why am I doing this again" question every damn time 😑 Haha!

Sure, is - just select everything you played on the track, then go to Clips > Bounce to Clip(s) (this is in the menu above the track pane, not the main menu at the top of the screen). And that's it

It depends on how many, and what kind of vibe you're going for. If it's just a couple, I'd treat them all like a lead vocal - compress, EQ, possibly de-ess and add a little hair with saturation blended in. It's all really to taste. I'd usually go Compression > Saturation > De-esser > EQ, but if it's a particularly "woofy" or bright mic, I'll add an EQ first before the compressor to get rid of the junk I know I won't be using, so it's not affecting how the compressor "hears" it. I'll usually pan each one a little off centre just to give them a little bit of space. On the other hand, if we're talking Queen / Def Leppard kind of layers, the first thing I do is aggressively clean up between any phrases. Those little breaths or lip smacks on the vocals? Multiply that by 50 and suddenly it's super loud and super distracting. Cut it close, crossfade, get it clean. I'll typically separate each harmony part into its own Aux track so if I have, say, 10 layers of vocals singing a particular harmony, I'll run all of those into it's own Harmony 1 sub group Aux track, and I'll pan those fairly wide. I'll repeat that for each harmony part, and then run all of those combined Aux tracks into a Choirs master Aux track. On that, I'd EQ first to remove the crud (there'll be a lot with so many voices), compress, add saturation (being careful not to go too nuts since it's already pretty thick), de-esser (you'll get a lot of sibilance build up) and then an overall EQ for everything. One big tip is to also do a "whisper" track, where I'll dedicate a few layers to whispering the vocal. You'd be surprised what kind of air that adds to the mix. For each of those situations, I'll treat them like a lead vocal with reverb and delay to taste, and I'll usually add some kind of slapback with chorus to fatten it out a little (not too much), each running in sends rather than on the tracks as inserted effects. It's rare but sometimes on the big choir stuff I might add extra chorus or stereo widening effects, if I feel like I'm not getting the size I'm after. A couple additional tips is don't be scared to aggressively high-pass everything. There'll be a lot of stuff you just simply don't hear in context. Adding a little bit of high shelf boost from around 6khz up can also add a nice sheen. If you're finding it's swallowing the lead vocal a little, try dipping the EQ on the choirs around the point where the lead vocal is mostly sitting (say 800hz?). It'll let you keep the loudness of the choirs but give the lead more room to stand out. And finally, if you're planning to do the 60 layers of backing vocal choir thing like I regularly do here, stop and have a word with yourself before you begin. Do you REALLY need this stuff? It's a crazy amount of work that gets old realllly fast when you're doing it! It sounds amazing, but it's not something you want to do "just 'cos"