John Vere

I used to fall under the “ gotta have two monitors” camp because how else could I have the console and PVR views full screen? Making the tutorials I had to stick with one monitor and that forced me to learn the easy shortcuts that allow the multi dock to quickly go full screen and back to its tabs.

Glad you got it figured but in your screen shot you have the input set to none. It should be set to the interface midi. Also you don’t seem to have an instrument track. You are sending it back out to the piano. guess you figured that out

Actually listening to the Ozone mix I can't even hear the drums when you get to that loud part as they are downed out buy the excessively loud guitars. And I'm not sure what the reference songs are but I had to actually turn your song down when it got to that end part,,. I had been watching a You Tube prior to that and I had my system level at 12'0 clock which is 90% of where it should be. Possibly the song is out of whack because of the long intro part which is defiantly not as loud as that last part. You're ( hopefully) learning. Just keep at it and try different mixes. You can use Mix Recall to do this easily. That's what it's for. Nobody became a Mastering Engineer overnight. I'm still learning after 30+ years. I wouldn't advise trying to match your composition with any commercial releases out of the starting gate. It's a great idea to compare but your using a very basic set of tools. Those guys have $$$$ worth of tools as well as years of experience using them. Be happy with what you create and move along to the next song. You will keep learning and you can always come back in 3 years and fix what you didn't like.

Here's one a lot of people use. https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/samplers/kontakt-6-player/ Your midi file looks like it is associated with Cakewalk which is correct. So you can double click and it will open and play in Cakewalk using the TTS-1 VST instrument. If it doesn't automatically load the TTS-1 then make sure there are no outputs selected in Preferences/Midi/ Devices. If you just drag and drop a midi file to a blank project the midi data will create a midi track. But a midi track doesn't make any sound. It has to be output to a VST instrument. If you don't understand these basic things it would be a good idea to start watching the many tutorial videos before wasting a lot time guessing how things might work.

What sample player are you using? Samples need to load into a player VST instrument.

Same thing. Workspaces save your settings. The issue I have with the system is cakewalk defaults to a basic set up. They say this is so new users are not confused by all the features. This has the opposite effect in my opinion because new users can’t find the stuff that shows in the tutorials and if we show screen shots. I always advise to select the Advanced workspace.

Cakewalk comes with enough VST instruments and plug ins to keep you busy for a long time. Make sure to install the Studio instrument collection. You should spend some time watching the tutorials as Cakewalk is not something you can use by fumbling around blind

I just installed Cakewalk on my daughters brand new HP laptop. Whole process from web site to opening Cakewalk might have taken less than 10 minutes. I was busy on the other computer so I let her do it herself. I just told her the web site name and instructions to download the assistant etc. I would assume this is exactly what 99% of the people experience. So blaming the installers seems out of line to me. The op has weird stuff happening in their computer. Can be no other explanation

My cheap one broke right away. Just one switch doesn’t work. Could probably take it apart and solder something. But since then it’s worked great. I use it to scroll up and down a PowerPoint presentation that has my lyrics. It’s on a second laptop that is also my back up player and I play background music from it. That way I’m not changing the levels on my main playback during breaks. All this has not seen use since New year 2020.

This is obvious, but did you select the UMC404HD as the midi input for the track? You didn't really say. If your using a Simple instrument track ( combination of midi and instrument ) it will be that input. If your using a midi track pointed at an Instrument track then select it in the midi track, The input echo should come on by default when you click on the midi or simple instrument track to put in focus.

This system has saved butt many times so I won't complain. An example would be to comp a single guitar track out of a dozen lanes. You "think" you're happy so to clean stuff up you bounce this to a fresh track and delete all the originals. Of course best practices would dictate a back up project on a separate drive, but sometimes that doesn't happen. During mixdown you discover a nasty guitar mistake! You know that this would have been easily fixed if you still had those lanes, right. Ah! they are still there in the audio folder so no problem. It would have totally sucked if Cakewalk had deleted them just to save 50 MB on your 4 TB hard drive. I stopped worrying about unwanted audio files the day they invented the external hard drive. Sure a Laptop with a 240 GB drive as your only storage sucks, but that's were external drives or a large internal data drive(s) shine.

That's great news. Which footswitch did you end up getting?

Did you open the event list? That’s where you can see what is going on an even edit stuff. But you can also use the PVR. I like the event list for troubleshooting

Probably they removed it in the registry It takes over your timing master sometimes so not a good one to have if you don’t need it

This seems dumb but you are saving the change before you leave preferences?

If this is the same track as in your other post this is most likely because you have hard panned the guitars. So as each of these parts changes level so will the balance. To test just mute your guitar buss and see what happens.

Just to clarify, audio drivers have no impact on midi data. That is handled by the midi driver which is either MS generic or supplied with your controller. Example Roland and Yamaha supply a midi driver. The only time you will notice midi latency is because the soft synth you are triggering is affected by the audio system. So you can be using low quality on board audio and have almost zero latency when you play a vst from a controller. The only latency would be the delay from the output of the VST to your monitoring system. Basically half the RTL. On my system at a 256 buffer that shows as 10ms. But start adding effects that requires more processing and that latency will increase. And if you lower your buffers too much, your audio will cut out or crackle. This is your computer, not the audio interface doing this. Good ASIO drivers allow lower buffer settings by design but then your computer needs to be fast enough to optimize the available performance. My Motu is a good performer, but my computer is not capable of much under 128 without crackles. As far as recording goes it is best practices to bypass all effects while tracking to avoid timing issues. Midi or audio. If your interface has direct monitoring, use it, and audio latency won't matter. Do not use input echo while recording audio. The only exception is when you what to monitor something like a Guitar sim.

Your best bet is to watch a few tutorials on Mastering in Cakewalk. It's to complicated to explain properly in a paragraph as Dave just found out There is a tutorial sub form here or quicker is just do a google search for Mastering in Cakewalk. Creative Sauce are my go to videos. He's easy to follow and uses mostly free plug ins.

I see what I have is Ozone 9 Elements and I got it from same deal at Plug in Boutique last fall. But as I said it is gathering dust as I didn't like what it did. As Bitflipper said lots of free plug ins including what comes with CbB, can do the same but just not automatically. That said it's this automatic thing that trashed the OP's song. It even LOOKs bad. No dynamics just 50% slammed to the roof. And yes my screenshots above were from this same spot in the song. As said it has quiet spots too. That does make it that much more tricky to master.

I happily paid for the pro version for the drag and drop feature. I have used it hundreds of times on just about every track I record as well as my masters, my videos and testing old files. It’s a tool I couldn’t work with out now. The paid version also can be set using presets or your own custom peak levels. Those red lines tell you when both the peak or the LUFS exceeds your settings. It all adjustable in the settings. I bought Ozone on Black Friday sale and it made my mixes sound worse than if I do it myself. It is a good starting point for beginners but takes more work for me to get it to sound right. Collecting dust now

I agree with Bit. The Lander master is sort of what I'd expect they slam it to a limiter make it overly compressed and punters will think this is good because now they are loud! You can do this yourself with things like the free Loud Max or Boost11. What a waste of money if you ask me. No doubt your left /fright balance will not be even when you hard pan guitars like that. If that's the mix you wanted don't worry about it. Oh, I can't really hear much of the drums at all. And Span confirms my theory. See all the low end in the Lander version, right around 150. And look at all the low mid that's missing which on most playback systems is the most important.. your version was much better but looks a little peaky in the higher end. You're better off to use these tools and master yourself using the compression/ limiter and EQ of your choice. I'm always experimenting with different plug ins. Last go round was the Loud Max for limiting and the LP Multiband to dial in a frequency balance looking at span and the LP meters. Your version Lander Version

And right away there is information needs updating as you say you need the Bandlab assistant updated before your can update Cakewalk. See how fast stuff becomes outdated

From the download page: Note: After this amp simulator, you need to put the cabinet simulator (IR). Well I can't find any cabinets on the web page ,, and that seems odd that its a second vst you run. @reginaldStjohnThey are both 32, 64 and Mac stuff. http://nalexsoft.blogspot.com/ I downloaded Amplex. I had same issue as you. no sound when enabled. It says to click on information line,, nothing there, looked back in the zip folder and found the documentation folder so put it in the folder that seems to open. Clicked on one of the txt files and got sound,,, but real quiet, I turned it up full and its not loud and the tone seems boring. Not sure its worth the bother. Lots of interesting stuff. Sort of free but asking for a donation. Mabey it's louder if you pay for it Edit- I found this in the J800 folder: You can use the PowerEnd plugin as poweramp: https://nalexsoft.blogspot.com/2019/03/powerend.html Edit #2 -- I just installed the C2 compressor and it seems to work just fine. A new toy.

Probably master bus was set to the digital output. By default Cakewalk uses what is at the top of the output list and that is usually the Digital out. Other common problem is on board audio and not using WASAPI mode.

Sounds like a hard drive issue. Full? Cakewalk takes at the most 2 minutes to install. One trick is don't install the additional content at the same time you install core program. Do that afterwards.