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Audio FX popup menu using weird font


Steve Howell

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Ever since starting to use Cakewalk by Bandlab last year I have found that, inexplicably, the pop-up menu that opens when you right click on the FX bin for a track is using a different font to the rest of Cakewalk. It's like it's using Arial font instead of MS San Serif. I've always found it irritating, but didn't think much of it until watching a YouTube tutorial video, and noticing the presenter's Audio FX menu looked the same as all their others!

I've attached screenshots of a "normal" menu (the "Tracks" dropdown menu) and also the unusual right-click Audio FX menu in my installation of Cakewalk, to show what I mean.

Has anyone else had this issue and managed to solve it? I asked Cakewalk support and they just advised me to do a full uninstall, which I'd like to avoid, given the time it will take to restore all of my customisations.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and help!

normal_menu.png

audiofx_menu.png

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I noticed the slight different fonts before but it never bothered me.

PS:  I think I noticed it when the fly-out menus for FX plug-ins were introduced and refined.  I think someone called them flatbed menus at one point.  

Edited by User 905133
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It was around March or April of 2021 that they were presenting it in Early Access releases.  At one point, I was exploring what kind of theme-able customizations were in the EA versions.  However, the official release didn't have the colorizable options I explored.  After that, if I recall correctly, there were some more tweaks to make it easier to see the flyout boxes.  

Just so you know, fonts are not customizable.

PS: To my eye the font in the EA release (see link above) seems the same as today.

Edited by User 905133
to add a link that comes close to when the changes were happening
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Thanks again @User 905133  - you seem to know a lot about this. So... perhaps this is how it is meant to work then? Just for clarity, which of the two menus below do you have in your current installation? The one with coloured VST markers (the screenshot I grabbed from your linked post) or the one with all-grey regular-looking menus (which I grabbed from a Native Instruments tutorial page)?

coloured-menu.png

grey-menu.png

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We replaced the Windows style menu with a menu system from a different UI framework.  This was necessary due to a bug in Windows (something they've known about for 12 years!).   Prior to Windows 10, the number of items allowed in a menu was limited to around 4000.  With Windows 10, this was reduced to around 1200 - 1500 menu items.

This was affecting users with more than 1200 plugins - i.e. some of their plugins would be missing from the menus. Also,  we actually calculate the menus first, and use them to populate the plugin browser (so we only need to do it once), so this limitation was also affecting the plugin browser as well.

The new menus don't have this limitation.
 

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I only know about stuff that I explore.  Generally I defer to others who know more than I do.

As for the lists with the colors, I only had those on my PC while I was exploring some of the Early Access Releases as I mentioned.

Some background, Cakewalk has a lot customization possibilities.  Some are relatively easy to do as a Cakewalk user and can be done within Cakewalk itself.  Some require a deeper understanding.  Cakewalk has a theme editor which is handy for those really users into developing full themes and for customizing themes.

I have old-age related vision issues.  That's why I decided to learn how to use the theme editor--to try to make things easier on my eyesight.

As for the colors in the list (VST, VST3, DX), it helped my eyesight to have the bright colors and was hoping the general releases would keep the ability to customize them, but I assume the developers (who I admire and respect) had reasons not to keep it that way.

Sorry to confuse you (and maybe others), I was trying to pinpoint for you the approximate time frame for when I really noticed the font difference that you were asking about.

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