John Vere

It’s always a plug in. And just today TTS-1 froze Cakewalk again for me. I didn’t loose anything, I was just re mixing a finished project. The minute I tried to change the volume of the TTS-1 track Cakewalk froze. I re opened the project and immediately replaced TTS-1 with Xpand which is better sound quality anyway. It’s always a plug in if Cakewalk freezes or crashes. I wonder if they will stop including TTS-1 in the new versions?

That’s weird mine is just white. Possibly you are using a customized theme that makes it harder to see.

Good to know. I guess I better get on it and try the trial version.

And everyone poo pooed me about 2 years ago when I predicted this. I said I thought giving it away for a few years, build up a much bigger user base and then start charging for it was a smart business plan. The ultimate free Demo. I wonder if the last release of Cakewalk by Bandlab will continue to be the most popular and continue to require re activation periodically. Sound like Sonar will not really be Sonar but a brand new DAW. Not sure I need that myself.

They say you need to install CbB last but on one machine I have I installed 8.5 and X3 much later on and nothing happened. I think it’s something like personal preferences get overwritten. I Unchecked everything but the plug ins I wanted during the install using the custom install option. And Command Center can most certainly be installed later and run. I have all the goodies from that backed up in a dozen places so no need to re download.

There are a lot of options so here is what I have done. Export all audio you think will survive the tempo change without noticeable artifacts. You won’t get away with that much of a change in tempo with important tracks like bass and vocals. Even 5BPM change can trash audio. But what you can do is plan on redoing everything but at least give it a try first. The big trick is that all the audio has to be a complete clean track from start to finish. No edits etc so that’s why we create the stems. Export as stems using Tracks. You can include what you want at this point like processing and automation. I use. 48/32 no dithering. Delete all audio from the tracks but leave the track itself. This leaves you with only midi which you can safely change the tempo. So now bring the stems back to the project and drop them in the original tracks. Now apply Audio snap to them audio follows tempo. Now change the project tempo and assess the damage. Carry on from there.

That’s what I’ve just decided to do myself. I’ve been working on 35 of my originals for a last 20 years Some started life on 8 tracks an had real drums and bass etc. When I tried to blend those with my newer songs it was impossible. So l created a band using the VST’s I liked best and used that band on almost all the 35 songs. I used presets and velocities etc to have a very consistent sound. But each song is still different and after a year of mixing and re mixing and listening on as many playback systems as possible there was one song that turned out better than the rest. So I looked at that songs mix under the microscope and applied what it had as best I could to the rest. This has gotten me very close to the songs sounding like what I wanted which is what you would hear at a live concert of the music. Most of the success of this was due to using a balance of listening as well as good analyzing tools. I’m almost done but I put it aside about a month ago due to having to focus on playing gigs. Some of the gigs I play my originals at so I made backing tracks. This involves muting the vocal and guitar buses. This became yet another eye opener for the analyzing a song and mix. I thought I was done with recording and editing. Nope. I promised my family that I will get them in the can and move on soon. What I do with them doesn’t matter to me. I wrote them to play live.

What is cool about track templates is that they also add the associated buses. I actually use track templates more than project templates. Open a blank project and populate it with the track templates you’ll use. Done.

https://www.steinberg.net/promotion/ This is a heck of a good deal for Wave Lab Elements that’s the version I’ve always used. Solid as a rock for over 20 years for me. And once installed it never asks me anything about updating. I’m still on version 7 and I’m going to upgrade which is only $36 sort of a no brainer for software I definitely need and use almost daily. My workflow is 10x faster than if I use Cakewalk or anything else because it’s just a better design for working with audio files.

There’s also a way to use tool copy to open an audio clip in a wave editor directly from Cakewalk.

Reading this I wonder if a wave editor would be a better tool for the job. There’s lots of Wave editors and a few free ones. Wave lab is what I use and I think they have a demo version you could try. Gold Wave and Audacity are free Sound Forge is very good too and they also have a demo.

I'll agree that they are small but I can read them and let me tell you I have pretty bad eyesight. I have a special pair of Computer glasses that are at the correct focus and have blue blocker.

In my humble opinion if it’s a brickwall limiter you need the Loud Max and Boost11 do the job with out colouring the sound at all. Limiters should not colour. Boost11 is included with cakewalk. Loudmax is free. The above mentioned limiter# 6 colours the sound. That is important and is the big difference in all compressors and limiters that you need to be aware of. Some add saturation some don’t and some have an option of both. I found 90 different free compressors and limiters and I tested them all. Cakewalks PC 2A leveling amp is actually the CA-2A with out side chaining option. It doesn’t get any better than that for a coloured compressor. A very good all round none coloured compressor is the Melda which is part of the free bundle.

No ! don’t do that I lie a lot! I tell people to use asio4all ?

Cakewalk is weird because they keep old dialogue boxes that are scattered all over the place. Making the tutorials forced me to explore every possible nook and cranny and you'd find things you would otherwise have never known about. Just recently while doing a Control bar tutorial I found that you can change the performance module to show different things. It's probably been there since X1. I think it's pretty normal to learn enough about your software to get things done, but what this process taught me is that software becomes way more easy and quicker to use once you fully understand the features and all of their options. You have to take an occasional break from creating music and start poking around at all those little menus. Or actually pick a random page of the PDF users guide and read what's there. I'll guarantee that if you do this you will learn something new, and it might be something important to your workflow. I had been using Sonar and Cakewalk since 2004. I learned a lot just from reading this and the old forum. 3 years ago I think I had about a 30% understanding after all that time. That was plenty for me to make a zillion recordings. Now after going thought the software with a different goal in mind, teaching people how to use it, I'm just might be at over 80% understanding. It is amazing how that has increased my productivity and how quickly I can finish any projects now. And a Biggy is not being stumped when something goes wrong. I now know where to look for the solution. So that's my workflow tip- Take a little time out to learn about the software. Everything is in that PDF and it's posted right at the top of this page.

Did you save it to a different location, like an external drive? I sort of doubt that changing the name would fix a corrupted project but you never know! If it created a crash dump file you can report this to the staff and they will look into it for you.

Can't say I ever created anything with more than 6 midi tracks in my life so I was unaware of the 16 track limitation. I guess it saves by the Channel. SOmeone else here must have experience with this. Then seems your best route would be a fresh project. It will be a lot of work but it is possible to do. Just an Idea, but what about saving the originals track by track as track templates? Create an empty project then populate it with the track templates. I think if you put a midi event at ground zero in each track then you can drag those from project to project and they will be in sync. And I think You would need any Banks and Patch changes stored in the track header and not the Instrument.

A common way to deal with a corrupted project is to start a new project and copy the data over. There’s a few options available you can try. First save the project as a template. Now open the template and see it it is also acting up. If it is, then the issue is with in the project file itself and not you audio or midi. This is not something you can fix so you need to abandon the project file and rebuild. If it seems fine then you can use it to rebuild by copying the data from the corrupted project. I would test each track as I go. Second method: You say this is all midi. Save the project as a midi file. Now open that and replace the instruments. This is especially preferable because the midi clips will be in the correct places on the time line. I am not dead sure about automation but I would hope it is saved as midi events. Any instruments or effects used you would save a preset and name it. When inserted into the fresh project then recall the pre set.

If all you are doing is putting ideas down you can’t go wrong with a Zoom or Tascam hand held recorder . My partner has a stereo Zoom recorder he paid about $100 for. I have the 4 channel Tascam DR 40. It was more cash but I’ve had it for 10 years or more and used it for a zillion things. We both keep them in our guitar cases and lots of great jams and song ideas were recorded at the press of a button. Amazing sound quality.

I'm still not sure why they haven't removed those pages. I actually got messed up by it the other day while researching something. And I find it strange that people don't notice the links that are at the top of this page that take you to the Proper support pages. https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us

This could not have been the issue other than possibly you were monitoring the output instead of the input. Audio is recorded directly from your interface to the Hard drive. The input level of the recording are 100% controlled by your audio interface. You can turn all the levels right off in Cakewalk and the audio will stay the same level set at the input of the interface. You should be using your interfaces direct monitoring so you will be able to critically hear what is being recorded. You do not turn on input echo while recording most audio. The exception is using a Guitar Sim where you want to hear the results. You said you didn't have input echo on but there's no way you can hear any Reverb or Compression in the headphones while recording unless you do. All you should hear is the playback from already recorded material and the direct/ dry sound of your mike. Which brings up the question which audio interface are you using and does it have a software mixer?

Being someone who just had a Samsung SSD drive that was only 2 years old suddenly became slow I would look at the external. Simple test I did was save my project to my C drive and the issue went away. Drives are dirt cheap now.

Just an update for the benefit of future reading. I used Samsung Magician to Migrate C drive to the other new drive. Took about 30 minutes. Done. Only XLN had an issue with the change which was something I already new how to fix by going to the web site etc. So the old girl now has 32 GB of ram and 2 x 500 GB SSD drives which I will now be swapping out on a more regular basis. Cakewalk is now running better that it ever did all for around $150. I will now see how it goes with my other issues in Movie Maker. It has been freezing up when editing. I can now see why this might happen. I’m going to purchase a 3 drive for Video editing and storage as well as using it for Cakewalk internal backup.

Ok I see what you are doing. I might be still a mile off base but if you change the midi tracks output to the instrument and choose the Channel in the channel box of the track header doesn't that globally change that tracks output to the instrument and the channel desired? I just took a downloaded midi file with 9 tracks and channels and it opened with the TTS-1. I took a track that was assigned Channel 1 and changed it to Channel 15 in the dialogue shown in the screen shot.. TTS-1 1 played the correct instrument in channel 15 now instead of 1. The event list still listed it as Channel 1. Cakewalks Track header overrules all other parameters. It took me a long time to sort this out as like most of us old school hardware users I always wanted the channel changed in the event list. I thought the Cakewalk event list sucked compared to any other sequencers I had used. Seems that's not how Cakewalk works. It's event list is not really for editing I guess.

There's a very simple solution. There's no need for channels. Channels are only used for Hardware and the TTS-1. All modern VST don;t care what channel you use. Insert the synth(s) you will use as a Simple instrument track. This is the instrument track default if you don't select split instrument track. It's Icon is as below B. Holding down SHIFT drag the midi data from the original track to the new instrument track. Done. Repeat for all tracks and when done delete the TTS-1 and the now empty midi tracks tracks.