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**Tech Tip** The color-coded marker trick in Cakewalk using a MIDI clip


Christian Jones

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Just a quick tip on a much more functional marker arrangement alternative to what's currently offered in Cakewalk. The marker situation that's been offered in Cakewalk since forever isn't as useful as it should be imo; too small a font to read, text from one marker within proximity will actually superimpose on the text of another.. I found this video maybe a year ago and I'm sure many of you are already hip to this, but for those who aren't..

The guy in the video explains it well, but in a nutshell you use track 1 as your marker track, you input a MIDI note on bar 1 where it's only function is to give you a MIDI clip to stretch, split, color-code etc - it's not set to trigger anything, and in the track view on that MIDI track in that gray bar area immediately before the clips pane (don't know what it's called) where you see some numbers listed vertically.. you click and drag up in that area as far as it will go until the numbers become an enlarged piano roll and this will hide the MIDI note so you just have a clean clip to manipulate into markers, similar to the built-in marker feature in Pro Tools.

Just thought I'd post this here real quick because.. well there's no Techniques section.

Start @ 1:02:20 

 

Edited by Christian Jones
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Yeah you would have thought the bakers would have seen the value of this and gave us a marker strip that is above or below the timeline. The shortcoming of this example is it will disappear as you scroll down far enough to hide strip 1 and it won't show up in the marker windows of the control panel which is how I navigate markers. But the select-a-section function is real cool so I'm going to have to try this.

Hey bakers. We want this.

 

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8 hours ago, bitman said:

Yeah you would have thought the bakers would have seen the value of this and gave us a marker strip that is above or below the timeline. The shortcoming of this example is it will disappear as you scroll down far enough to hide strip 1 and it won't show up in the marker windows of the control panel which is how I navigate markers. But the select-a-section function is real cool so I'm going to have to try this.

Hey bakers. We want this.

 

True on the disappearing of the marker track 1 when you scroll down far enough, but the supplement for that is to use Cakewalk's markers in conjunction with the MIDI clip markers.. At the beginning of each MIDI clip marker you'll insert one of Cakewalk's markers - just don't name it anything or use some kind of shorthand. This way they'll show up in the Marker View and in the Track View you can jump/navigate the MIDI clip markers by way of the Cakewalk markers w/ the ctrl+shift+page up/down command, and when you scroll down out of view of the marker track then Cakewalk's markers will be the guide. 

Yeah until they give us a legit marker strip this is what we get. 

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On 11/3/2019 at 7:58 AM, bitman said:

Yeah you would have thought the bakers would have seen the value of this and gave us a marker strip that is above or below the timeline. The shortcoming of this example is it will disappear as you scroll down far enough to hide strip 1 and it won't show up in the marker windows of the control panel which is how I navigate markers. But the select-a-section function is real cool so I'm going to have to try this.

Hey bakers. We want this.

 

A while ago I proposed a customizable timeline ruler, described here:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Offset-Mesure-One-m3097431.aspx#3098058

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Tonight I tried what the OP posted. I like it, it's pretty.

I opened the marker view and started copy / pasting the midi marker names in making new marker markers as I went.

It's all a bit fiddly to do but it's pretty, and makes navigation to different parts very easy.

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This has always bothered me. Is there a way to change the font and font color? I’ve looked and have never been able to solve this, but always figured I’m missing something.

Doesn't it seem like an easy situation for the bakers (are the BandLab guys still considered bakers?) to fix?

If they can’t fix this, please spend some time with staff editing. Please.

And if they can’t do that how about this, give us a hot key to repeat the last function, whatever that function is. 

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On 11/2/2019 at 1:58 PM, bitman said:

Yeah you would have thought the bakers would have seen the value of this and gave us a marker strip that is above or below the timeline. The shortcoming of this example is it will disappear as you scroll down far enough to hide strip 1 and it won't show up in the marker windows of the control panel which is how I navigate markers. But the select-a-section function is real cool so I'm going to have to try this.

Hey bakers. We want this.

 

+1. Yes, please bakers. This  would be tremendously helpful navigating around a song by sections. 

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Craig - was this your trick originally?  I think that adding functionality to the arranger window could cover a few bases here - such as :

an expanded lyrics view -

a color coded markers  view - allowing markers text to stack when zooming out - 

a better alternative to a timeline select to zoom window region -

as well as the traditional arranger window. 

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4 hours ago, RBH said:

Craig - was this your trick originally?  

I don't know! I'm a great believer in parallel discovery.  I'm sure there were people before me who thought "hey,  I want to be able to identify song sections" and came up with this technique, as well as people after me who thought they came up with the  idea :)

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My other DAW, Mixcraft, has markers with tails that extend down the entire length of the project, making them very useful for lining things up. I proposed this as a feature request a while back. Think of having stationary Aim Assist lines wherever you want them.

They're also color-coded, so you can have arrangement sections easily visible.

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5 hours ago, Billy86 said:

Bump. I’m in for the ability to have color-coded song section markers. We can be like a broken record 😉 til we get it. 😁

I also don' get it. But for another reason. 🤔

How is it a help to rapidly go to a section on a track when you have 30 or more tracks?

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