John Vere

Thanks @Jim Fogle That’s for sure. Seems only Cubase and Studio One are one the same page. It’s most certainly a different fan club when it comes to GM midi , backing tracks and Band in a box type software.

That surprises me that all of a sudden 500 series are popular. They’ve been around for a long time. I will make a guess that you’ve been sneaking around in Gearspace which is very dangerous! ? Ya I just took about $3,000 worth of analog hardware to our new music store. The owner is super into collecting old gear and his store is now full of very interesting stuff on commission. I think he’s smart. New stuff is easy to purchase on line, but older stuff still sells and he’s got a good thing happening already. He also sells vinyl records and takes them on consignment too. My stuff I has been collecting dust for a long time now. I still had all the original boxes an user manuals. So in a way my hardware is in the box!

Ya don’t blame you there. But I did offer the videos which would answer the initial questions but not sure the op watched them because they started another thread.

Did you look in the controller pane of the PRV? The event list is sort of limited in usefulness. As David said the track inspector settings override any other data. By default if you don’t touch them then they are set to None and don’t have any bearing but the minute you move anything it seems this is stored in the file. But these changes don’t show as events anywhere.

I just am putting vocals to a new original song that was 100% inspired by typing a chord progressions into Jjazzlab and trying different styles. I found one called Happy Reggae. Perfect. The process forced me to learn about how to use the software. But I got far enough in a few hours to be happy with the results and then I exported as midi. I opened it in the New Sonar. The song sounded flat and boring due to TTS-1. It was the drums. I exported the drum track as audio from Jjazz. I Inserted Addictive drums and worked out the missing parts of the important percussion fills that made the drums interesting. I guess the midi wasn’t 100% GM. The bass line was too repetitive so I recorded real bass and converted to midi. I replaced all the other midi tracks with proper VST instruments and deleted TTS-1 I added a couple more tracks and overall it’s sounds excellent. the drums are one of the best drum tracks I’ve ( should say AI've) ever come up with. But this is what made me realize that if Sonar included FluidSynth a lot of folks would see there’s better sound quality available and loosing the TTS-1 was timely and a positive thing. And I imagine that it isn’t actually FluidSynth that is why it sounds good, I think it’s really a matter of choosing good quality SF2 files. And it’s fairly new to the game. All of the players I found in my research a few weeks ago were rooted in the very early days of sound font Tech. So it might be much better up to date code.

Instead of typing out pages of instructions the op was offered my tutorials and obviously didn’t watch them. They clearly explain how midi and Cakewalk work.

In a normal set up for plug ins you should only have 3 or 4 pathways. Cakewalk seems to automatically add the first 3 I then only need to add the Steinberg VST folder which a lot of plug ins will create. If there’s a Program (x86) pathway I remove it. That keeps old 32 bit plug is out of sight. So always pay attention as you install new plug ins and direct them to either the VST folder or the steinberg VST folder. I never direct them to Cakewalks folder. If you do then other DAWs might not find them. VST3 have just the one common folder.

You need Melodyne installed. Then depending on what version you own any audio track can be dragged to a VST instrument or midi track and it will be converted to midi data. Basic versions only do single monophonic conversion. Good for vocals, Bass and lead Guitar lines. The top 2 versions can create Polyphonic data as in guitar chords. This is something any DAW that has ARA can do.

Some of you may have watched my recent video's where I tried a bunch of GM midi players. Another project I was working on which also involves using General midi was trying different software programs that create auto accompaniment. I tried Band in a Box, found out it doesn't really export midi that well, and then I also bought one called Chord Pulse http://www.chordpulse.com/ which does export midi perfectly. Then I stumble on another one called JJazzlab. https://www.jjazzlab.org/en/doc/ Its free and right away one thing I noticed was it seemed to sound more realistic that these other GM players I was testing including the TTS-1. I loaded a song I had created in jjazzLab into Cakewalk and it was noticeably lame played through the TTS-1. I says it uses a player called FluidSynth. I was thinking, is this a VST? If so I want it! Sadly it isn't. A visit to this web page https://www.fluidsynth.org/ and you soon learn is it is an OPEN SOURCE midi player that can (easily?) be embedded in software. Example JJazzlab. So there you go @Noel Borthwick@Jesse Jost just an idea, but it seems if this code is open source it might be possible to add to Sonar in some way to replace the TTS-1 as a default GM player. It doesn't have a GUI I guess you have to create one like they did in jjazzLab. I find the drums and bass are exceptionally good for a sound font rig. This is what they use for the GUI and I posted a quick demo song. Fluidsynth.mp3

This is why you never load a whole track. You work with short sections. You just render it and all the changes you made are saved. Once a Melodyne clip is rendered it is back to normal and removed from computer system. Closing a project with Melodyne still applied to a clip can create issues. You can re apply Melodyne over and over to clips and it theoretically should not degrade the audio. But I wouldn’t count on that. Melodyne is destructive editing anyway.

You don’t use it that way. You have to render the track first then re do it . You can’t edit clips that are open in Melodyne outside of Melodyne. They are locked. You will want the spend a few hours watching their most excellent tutorials. It works best if you open Melodyne in short clips. I normally open one line of a lyric. Then I render immediately. If I feel the clip is not working properly with Melodyne (it really sucks) then I usually just delete that clip and redo it.

I’m Dyslexic. And my excuse is I am also an old railway guy. So GNR , CPR, CNR, BNR. It just rolls off the tongue ?

Please carefully read my post. I said the Bandlab Assistant was removed months ago. So of course it doesn’t work. You log in to the Bandlab/ Cakewalk web site using the log in window that should automatically open when you click on activate. I think the reason a few people seem to have issues is due to the log in window doesn’t appear for some reason. So you just go to the web site and log in. What is broken is we should be logged in permanently due to the fact we are on this forum. I myself don’t understand why we need to keep re logging in.

Definitely if you have Air or some Izotope stuff.

I actually only have that one request and it’s a white PRV. It’s impossible for me to work with black because I count on being able to open 2 or more midi tracks at once and adjust notes. In white you can see the colour of the notes but in black this is very difficult to see the ghosted colours. So I get stuck with Mercury which sucks for everything else. I don’t mind dark in the track view but please can someone put some red on the track record button! Or at least make PVR lighter in the lighter colour choices.

I took the bait and gave them my credit card numbers. It’s just the way it is I don’t think about it. I’m on a monthly pension so paying monthly works for me. That’s how most of my bills are paid. They are all on automatic payment so when I go crazy my kids won’t inherit a bunch of unpaid bills. They can cancel Sonar then. What I actually hated was all the phoney Bandlab culture of promotion bs that was offered after I joined the club. If you follow the coffee house you would have read more about how people are having their music stolen via some of Bandlabs associated businesses. I think Lander was one of them. I see that’s still imbedded in Sonar. Our developers are awesome people who care but the owners are not on the same page and I hope they don’t screw this up.

I guess the way things happen is they have to decide what they spend time on. So if a lot of users are asking for a feature then they listen. Then it also is depending on how easy/ hard ( how much time) it will be to code in the requested feature. The easier ones are often added quickly. The hard ones take much longer and if there’s only a few people requesting it it will never happen. So my guess that this one is both hard to implement as well as very few people are asking for it. My observation is real studios that use a lot of hardware would probably never use Cakewalk anyhow. Sure the developers could make an attempt to win those people over but software gets a reputation and it never goes away. Those people actually are also a small part of today’s market share. By making Cakewalk free they have created a giant user base of new users of which the majority are not professional audio engineers or even musicians. Don’t give up on your hardware. Personally I would be looking for the DAW that suits your workflow. You can always work with 2 lots of people do. The old studio workflow involved different rooms and equipment.

I noticed in the release notes for Sonar something about fixing Inserts. Have you downloaded it yet?

Please don’t throw rocks at me but my list of “bugs “ were 100% pilots error. Rule #1. Don’t expect things to work the way you THINK they should work! Learn how they are designed to work. But it’s good to know about the built in reporting system. I imagine I’ll never have to use it. One of my “bugs” was the arranger track seemed totally messed up. Good old Ripple Edit was still on. I will go on record as saying the new graphics actually suck. I find myself having trouble locating items that are right were they always were but are unfamiliar now. Like the track record button is indistinguishable from the solo button and so far I’ve made that mistake a dozen time already. Is this all better on a new monitor? Mines a 24”. So nothing to see here folks, keep moving. Thank you.

I installed it on my main DAW a started a new project to run it through some simple tasks using my typical workflow for creating a song. Right away I ran into a few issues. ( Bugs/Pilot error? ) My list gets longer every minute! But I'm not sure where I should post them? The feedback Loop? And boy do they ever need to get our custom themes happening! I'm stuck with Mercury as it's the only one with a white PVR. And now everything is ssssoooo tiny I am defiantly in squint mode! Took me a little while to spot the arranger inspector icon even though I knew it must still me there! What's with this trend in designing icons that are so obscure you need a cheat sheet on your desk to decipher? like someone else said< "you mean we have to pay to be beta testers?? "

I referring to the forum and what happens when we get anything news worthy. Multiple threads discussing the same topic. It all good. It’s either going to be one ten page thread or ten one page threads.

Why did you start a new thread?

Jeeze we have 6 threads now on this topic! its 2017 all over again !

Just to cap this off I ended up making 2 videos on the topic

It was always a gentleman’s agreement. But don’t forget. Now they will be using a product manager and that might make things different.