John Vere

Yes and No. The key word you used is the "SUM" as long as no tracks or busses are clipping this is correct. The master is where you set your ultimate output level. At that point it becomes a personal preference of how you want your mix to sound and most importantly the overall loudness or LUFS. as that is a common standard for pop music on the internet. Peak is only a small part of mastering. In this screen shot you can see how I set up my Master bus and use these 4 tools to figure out visually what is going on. You can't always trust your ears or monitoring system. Looking at this I see I need to adjust my bass as it is pushing the Multi band Low MId band too much. I also see my true peak level is past my -0.8 which is what I set the limiter for. My goal is to only see random action on the compressors. My LUFS is just a little more than my goal of -14 as a result. So I start here and will work my way back first to the sub busses and then to the tracks to fine tune the mix and the balance of frequencies. In other words just using peak level is not going to result in a good mix. Peak is just what you need to keep an eye on track by track, bus by bus to make sure there is no RED showing. The trick with compressors and limiters is learning how to not over use them. You might want that compressed sound for vocals, drums and guitars, but generally that's a bad idea on a whole mix. I can simply turn down the input gain of the Multi band which is the same as turning down my master, but as you see the other frequencies would then become too quiet. The multi band is only 5 bands so that is why I use Span to pin point hot frequencies. You can really see the hump in the low end getting flattened which verifies why the multi band is working hard on that band. My bass is being over compressed and hogging the loudness. I can move Span to the top of the stack or even put a second instance there to investigate further. But these tools to me are indispensable and I've had real good results since I adopted this a year ago. My stack is LP Multi Band ( came with Sonar but there are lots of these around) The BT Brickwall set at -1.0 Also a Sonar freebie but the LoudMax might work. Mike of Creative Sauce videos fame seems to like it a lot. You lean Loudness meter- free to use but has a few features disabled so I paid for it. https://youlean.co/youlean-loudness-meter/ Span this is free. https://www.voxengo.com/product/span/

That won’t work unless the op has very low Round Trip Latency. They will hear a delay which is annoying

Better yet you just need to put a limiter on the master and set it at the desired max level. The Loud Max is free and works well for this. https://plugins4free.com/plugin/2060/

Your audio interface needs to have direct monitoring I don’t think those do. So then you will need a mixer with a headphones jack. I’m surprised a Delta card would even have a driver for W10

Ok if you both have USB mikes you could try that. Try WASAPI mode to show your inputs But you need to realize how much latency there will be on his mike and adjust that track. You won’t be able to sing at the same time either

Are you working in the Piano Roll View? You right click a note to delete or hold right mouse Lasso a group of notes and let go and right click on one of the highlighted notes. You should really take some time to watch tutorials as you asking a very basic question which is fine, but it's best to teach yourself as much as possible first and then ask questions when truly stuck. There's a Tutorial sub forum and I have dozens of midi tutorial as well. See my signature for links. https://sites.google.com/view/cactus-studios/cakewalk-videos

What you could have done to reduce the file size is to just copy the project to make a new version using "save as " with copy audio checked, and cut out all but about 10 seconds where the problem was. If you don't know how to do these it's easy as pie- set the now time 6 seconds before the issue spot, Crtl A to select all. "S" key to split. This by default will leave everything to the left highlighted. Delete. Now move the now time just past the problem spot and hit CTRL A and S again but now highlight all the material to the right buy holding down CRTL while you click on each track and delete. Either that or go into Preferences and change to select right of split as in my screen shot. Of note is this is also where you can adjust how splitting a clips crossfade can be altered. And I like to use the blend old with new so I can slip edit splices to get rid of artifacts which probably was all you really needed to do.

Cakewalk or any DAW will not create a distorted clip unless there is a reason. I have no clue why your had an issue but as said most of us when we encounter this assume it is something we have created in audio of the DAW and it needs to be eliminated. As @bdickens said you proved user error, not software, when you eliminated the track that was causing the clipping. End of story.

If you had Sonar and the Blue tube stuff the BT Brickwall is the only limiter I've used for a long time now and it works solid. If I set it to -0.8 all measuring tools will report that that is exactly what I got, The Loudmax is also a great limiter for free, I use that on the output of my Movies in Vegas.

OK Cubase- this means you also probably ended up with the Steinberg Generic ASIO driver as your Recording Latency adjustment. see last picture at bottom where it say's device this should say Zoom. Look at your settings and make sure they look just like mine, only difference will be instead of Motu your will say Zoom.

Yes there's lots of ways to do that, I'm just assuming the OP has diddly squat for audio gear, but as I said... the latency would make all this pointless. Much better to just share the project like everyone else does. I think it can be done but it would involve very low latency audio devices and A/D - D/A

https://www.voxengo.com/product/span/ Span is free and 1,000's of people use it on the master bus. If you solo a track then you can also use it for troubleshooting or just put it in that tracks effect bin. I also use the Youlean meter https://youlean.co/youlean-loudness-meter/ which is free to try but was well worth the $30 ( on sale) as you can drag and drop any audio file and it will analyze it. A must have tool for working with audio that is going to end up on a delivery system be that a CD or the internet. I can drag and drop finished songs or any tracks even movies.

You would need to use the theme editor which allows custom colours. https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Introduction.27.html I'm not sure where you get it from as it was part of Sonar for me. @scook will know.

Pray tell how are you planning on transmitting his signal to your computers sound cards input jack?

This has nothing to do with Cakewalk. What your asking is more to do with the capture of live streaming audio by your sound card. The problem is this audio is from the output of the system and you need an input. Cakewalk can record inputs but not output unless it is looped back somehow My Motu M4 has loop back so I could do this but it’s rare an on board sound card would have this option The other issue is the latency will be unusable even if you got it to work. Your playback will take about 20 ms to get to your friends house and then their voice will take another 20 ms to return not to mention the real bad fidelity. Best to just use a cloud storage to share the project on line. Cakewalk is free so you can have identical set ups

I see on the support page that it has a driver which no doubt is ASIO make sure you install and choose that in preferences/ audio The zoom should show in all the preferences dialogue boxes Open all the audio settings and check

You had my curiosity. So I tried this and I do not have the resetting issue. The Gain defiantly jumps to 0 after the freeze, but it returns to 4.1 when I un freeze. Set Gain to 4.1 Freeze Synth- note gain is now 0 as you reported Now unfreeze synth and the gain returned to 4.1- it did have to think for about 10 seconds first. Make sure you are using the most updated version of Cakewalk etc. And possibly this only happens with certain VST instruments. So not a Cakewalk issue as far as I can tell. And just so you know, I also froze an Audio track and same results. I also tried 6 different VST instruments including a 32 bit. I even tried adding Automation to a track.

Not free but you might have this one if you own Sonar. It's an odd one because it shows by default on the excluded Plug in list. You have to opene the Plug in Manager and check the Excluded plug in list and enable it. But this is a powerful little processor.

I just re read the OP and I noticed this- "At that location, the CW meters show the audio to be more than 10 db below 0 dbFS (so the distortion is NOT due to audio clipping)." This is a mistake. The meters will not always show things that happen that fast. Put Span on the track and see what it's true peak level reads. If this is OK then we have a zero crossing issue.

This gets even weirder. . I tried Google but all returns are for Mac users. According to the manual the library should be installed along side the VST in the Steinberg VST folder. Nope. I was thinking maybe if I open Halion on my main DAW which has Cubase installed I could figure out were the heck the sound library is. I opened Cubase for the first time in probably 3 years. Man, there's all this On line crud and all sorts of junk to wade through just to load a basic template which includes the Halion and a piano. No sound, No piano file found? So even Cubase can't sort out how to use it even though I had used it a long time ago and it seemed to have a lot of sounds. @JoeGBradford Nothing really wrong with Asio4all if that's what working for your on board. My 3 computers were a no go when I tried to use it. My old Sony Laptop ran fine with asio4all and W7. I used Home Studio on that one just to mess around. I also would hook my interface up and I never had the conflict some people reported. People should try WASAPI Shared before they try Asio4all as this is much more simple to use.

If it was a bug it would have been reported 20 years ago. And to clarify- do you really mean to say " a glitch" . In other words there is a short burst of nasty sound at this point on the track. I think Greg has it nailed. Those normally show up at edit points. Try zooming way in on the wave form at that point.

Thanks for the heads up on the Free version of Halion VST3. I have Cubase 7 Elements and it came with a Older SE version, this one might be an update so I thought I'd follow through. I also thought this might be a good replacement for TTS-1 because it too is a GM player. OK- you gotta register, no big deal this is expected from some freebies. I'm already registered but Steinberg didn't like my password so had to go through all that BS which seems like every time I log in to my account. It took a long time to download due to large library. ( which doesn't seems to exist?) WARNING- On install it has the list of items to be installed and one of them is that pesky Steinberg Generic ASIO driver. Knowing this is a real nasty takeover of my ASIO system for Cakewalk I did the smart thing and unchecked this. Otherwise it becomes your Timing master in Sync and Caching, not a good thing. If you only have on board audio then you will have to install this as there will be no other choices. It won't work in stand alone with on board sound cards without that stupid driver. Now first thing you have to do is activate it. This is were Steinberg sort of sucks big time. Years ago I got so fed up with the software licenser I had to fork over $35 for a USB dongle. The good thing is it sort of work 99% of the time and I can move between computers easily. Ya, 99% of the time, today was that 1% day. Took 15 minutes to get that working and I managed to add the license to the manager. I opened the stand alone version and this is were I found out I couldn't use it with on board audio. I don't use an ASIO interface on this computer right now because I don't record, just edit and TRY NEW VST's. I then open Cakewalk and had to add the Halion sub folder to the scan path to get it scanned. The scan took about 3 minutes. But there it was, So I opened a GM midi file to test and inserted it and deleted TTS_1. This seemed to work except the Halion had no sounds loaded. Digging around it seems there's nothing? All the menus are empty. I used the default pathways ( there was no choices) There's a Library Manager I opened and it said there are no licensed Libraries found? I looked in all likely locations and found no libraries. And it is odd that it doesn't warn you or something when it loads? OK that's my 2 hours wasted on a VST. This is basically one of those pointless exercises in frustration EVERY step of the way. So Welcome to Steinberg folks- enjoy the ride. I got off at the last stop. Oh, this is #1 reason I never switched over to Cubase when Cakewalk died. I do use Wave Lab a Lot but I am slowly finding other ways to do those tasks- for free- and more intuitive software that doesn't drive you nuts.

ALL my and many other tutorials about midi cover this. You won't get far just guessing how things work.

In my signature is a link to my tutorials. I recommend you watch the video called On board sound it will get you up and running.