John Vere

Too bad I had a whole tutorial on exactly this topic. I use Cakewalk as a host for live keyboards all last winter. It was easy. I just assigned channels to each of the instruments and all I did was change my keyboards output channel. I also assigned the knobs to things like Volume and Chorus using Midi learn.

Right on! Cubase is a great program= $749.00 for the equivalent version to Cakewalk. Go for it. You'll never regret it.

Not sure what you mean by Mobile? For sure the best thing I ever bought was a hand held Recorder. You cell Phone is a Mobil recording device too. If by Mobile you are refering to using a Laptop then any Wave editor or DAW will work. Use the one you find easiest to work with. Audacity, Gold Wave, Sound Forge are all free wave editors. Problem is you still need a portable audio interface, that's why I like my hand held recorder. Hi quality audio at the press of a button. Zoom and Tascam are the most used brands but there's some cheepo ones too but those are probably like using a cell phone.

@Lord Tim Yes Word clock sync is important but I guess I should have been more clear. I was refering to overdubbed audio tracks being out of sync not word clock. Below is a screens shot of a Loopback test I did a few years ago. It was a long thread in the old Cakewalk forum and many of us tested our audio interfaces. We used ASIO and then any of the other modes that were available. A lot of us had more than one audio interface. The unscientific conclusion was the same for most everyone. ASIO was always within a few samples of being perfectly in sync. Notice the Blue track. All other Modes drifted and were usually late by very noticeable amounts. Those amounts varied from Interface to interface. The unscientific reason for that is those driver modes do not report latency to Cakewalk correctly. Cakewalk has to guess. Take note that the drift amount did not change with Buffer settings. This particular one is a Card Deluxe PCI interface ( still working) performed the least favorable under WDM mode. ( the Green track) Take note that a few people tested asio4all and it seemed to always match WDM mode, which makes perfect sense. Asio4all is really WDM mode. WASAPI mode ( Purple track) most certainly tried hard to be acceptable. This was WASAPI shared mode as the interfaces I tried do not support WASAPI Exclusive Mode. WASAPI exclusive only seems to work with On Board audio. That's why it's a total waist of money to purchase an audio interface that doesn't use ASIO. You might have even worse performance than using a Realtek card. All you are getting is a overpriced audio adaptor box. I can probably get better results using a small mixer, the 1/8" green jack and WASAPI Exclusive driver Mode. For those who are curious here's how you perform a loopback test. Using a short patch cable take an output and patch it back to an input. Like the project shown insert SI drums and a few midi kick or snare hits. Freeze it to create the audio track. Now create a few audio tracks and select the input correctly. DO NOT TURN ON INPUT ECHO. and record the loopback. Now if you what to you can switch to different modes like I did here. Change the time ruler to Samples or Milliseconds and zoom way in. You can use Aim Assist too. This is a way to calculate offset if you do not have an ASIO interface. You can then apply the amount it was out in sync and caching in the offset box. While you have the Loopback connected download and run this RTL Utility app which will test your Audio interfaces accuracy for reported latency. It's lot's of fun. You can quickly try different settings and see what's up. https://oblique-audio.com/rtl-utility.php

Just to be clear for others that read this thread. Ctrl+W = Toggles space bar behaviour between the now time stopping were it is / or rewinding to where you started. I don’t see that it matters if you forget which behaviour is set. If it stops where you are and you wanted rewind you simply press Ctrl W. You’ll have to manually rewind the first time but next time you stop it will rewind.

I didn’t use the start screen for probably the fist few years it came out. I just carried on using the file menu. When I started making tutorials I thought it best to use it as it’s simple for new people to understand. I quickly got the hang of it and especially the way you can have customized icons by placing a picture in the notes of the Browser. So i generally I use it to return to any recent projects I’m working on. I also access my templates that way. If I start my day wanting to open an old project I just go to the folder and open it there by double clicking.

That’s a feature I’ve used for a long long time. I am constantly switching between the 2 modes as I work. I can’t see not having that feature. I noticed in Movie maker the space bar always returns to where you started but the Enter key stops where you are.

Best you watch a few tutorials as you seem to need to learn the basics.

No, you cannot overdub audio with non ASIO drivers. WASAPI is great for people who only use VST instruments and loops. It sucks for recording audio. It will be out of sync.

It doesn't have ASIO drivers, it's basically 1/2 step up from using On board audio. and I've mentioned this in at least 3 other threads. The above mentioned M track solo apparently does not have an ASIO driver either so another pointless purchase. Looking on Sweetwater It seems the ASIO drivers will start with models at around $100. The Focusrite Solo and the Tascam 1x2HR would be my first choices knowing the quality of those products and drivers. They are on sale right now. Can you not return the useless interface in exchange? we are talking about $20-$40 difference to get you running smoothly, you've been bashing your head against the wall for a long time now.

It’s always a plug in . There’s been no change to export for a long while. Even the warning tells me it was probably a plug in. Did it generate a crash dump. Send it to Cakewalk.

Which just reminds me they better get that update out there pretty soon or a million people will get the above message for the first time in a long while.

It’s a typical widow action screen where you either execute an action or close it. Just about the most common feature in most software. It’s identical to the little window that will pop up when you try and close any program with out saving. Some have a box that says “ don’t show me this again “. Or like in this case you can disable it forever in preferences. But the thing is they all open automatically for a reason that is et in the software to trigger it and requires action on your part to close it

Thanks, forgot about that annoying feature I disabled it long ago.

No. Read my reply in your other thread. I find if you open a project and close it with out saving it might not show on the start screen list. But you say you were working on it. A confusing thing you said was during scanning and loading? That doesn’t happen until you choose a project. Otherwise You open Cakewalk and the start screen will appear unless you disable it I don’t think Cakewalk scans anything other than phone home to check for updates during loading and there’s no visible signs of that.

Absolutely. When I was testing stuff I’d often have 10 in a bin. Beyond that is sort of unreasonable. I think there’s a limit due to the console view but in track view the track can basically fill the horizontal height of your screen

Workspaces don’t set or save ins and outs. Those are per project settings. Workspaces are global to all projects and if set to none can be totally ignored. They are used to save you screen layout including what features are showing their widgets like the control bar stuff. I only have 2. One for using one monitor and one for using two. But you can get fancy and have saved layouts for anything possible. The dumb thing is instead of none or advanced they set the default to Basic which sucks because it hides a lot of features. Back to the OP midi inputs will reset if any changes are made to which devices are connected. I make sure to always have devices connected before starting.

I made some screenshots of how I make a backing track from a song that has vocals and guitar. You see the routing. The vocals had an effects send so the effects bus need to be mutes as well. This is what my export dialog looks like.

A screenshot of the export dialogue would tell us more. I’m not even sure what the one above includes. It seems only part of your console view. You obviously are not understanding your signal path to the master bus. Another possibility is a hidden track.

I think you covered it well. I actually have very, very rarely automated an effect. Reverb it is taught should be a global effect shared by the mix. This puts your song in a space, like a room or a concert hall. They say using a different reverb on multiple tracks creates a muddy mix. It’s sort of like having each musician in a different location. So I always use a reverb bus and use the send from the tracks I need in that space. But as said above there’s no right or wrong and I often will use a touch of built in reverb if a VST has it like True Pianos and Addictive Drums. Chorus if often included in a VST interface and if it isn’t I have a few options from my freebie collection that go in the effect rack. Pan? That’s built in to the channel strip.

There’s many free meters available which you can add to the effects bin. The Cakewalk meter is strictly peak just like all mixing consoles have. Span has RMS and LUFS as example.

Exactly but sometimes you come up with adding a new track or like in this case are still editing midi. I always bypass all effects before proceeding. Most effects are more or less harmless but especially mastering effects and well known CPU hogs live Waves and Isotope will cause lagging.

The audio interface has nothing to do with this behaviour. It’s is always plug in delay. Easy to test and easy to resolve. Have you not tried it yet?

Yes there are many of us old farts still here much to the annoyance of the younger folks. To bad the guy who made the video wasn't actually a long time Cakewalk user. It would have be much better. He really didn't dig that deep. There's more missing that shown but I actually pulled a few things from it I was unaware of, like the short bit about the Apple version. Now I know why I remember trying out Cakewalk in the late 80's. In my town we were all Atari users because the only computer store ( K& B Computers) sold them as well as they had a Roland dealership. There was this group of 5 of us who all used Atari's for live performance. One of us was Jeff Koftinoff http://www.jdkoftinoff.com/main/Information/About_Jeff_Koftinoff/ He learned how to program and that was his life's work. I on his web site he has removed all the links to his software. He later worked Roland in the MT 32 days. The software used to be available free on Tim's Atari midi world and I see that web site is now gone too. I'm going to have to learn how to use the Wayback machine. But anyhow, the software was called the Pro Midi Player ( I found a link https://exxosforum.co.uk/atari/mirror/tamw/promid.htm ) and it was brilliant. You could drag and drop midi 0 sequence files to create set lists, it displayed Lyrics as TXT file if the names matched, remember 8 digit names= LTMYFIRE ( name that song and win a prize) And at my request he made use of the joystick port and we invented a foot controller with 5 buttons. Start, Stop. Up, down and of course PANIC. We all used Dr T KCS ( Keyboard Controlled Sequencer) and then learned how to hack/Copy software floppy's so we would share programs we chipped in on. Yep, that stuff was expensive in those days. All of this showed up free on Tims Atari world so no regrets about being a pioneer software pirate. That's where the video triggered a vague memory of trying Cakewalk on an Atari. We had an Apple emulator and I remember having possibly used the first releases of both Cubase and Cakewalk. I could never figure out why I might have tried Cakewalk because I never bought a PC computer until 2003 so that would explain it, it was the Apple version. When K&B computers closed down in 1992 I took over the Atari and Roland dealerships. Cactus Music had it's perks in that during that decade I got my gear at cost. I still have a lot of it! Later on in the 90's The Roland sales Rep gave me a Copy of Cakewalk Guitar Studio. I didn't have a PC to run it on but I kept it and that's about when I joined the old forum in 2004. I still hate PC's.....

There will always be system latency. A/D converter, Audio Buffer and so on. With a real good ASIO audio interface you can use a lower buffer setting that can help but sometimes low buffers can cause audio glitches if your computer is not up to the task. So best way to record digital drums is to send Cakewalks output to an Aux input of the drum module plug your headphones in there as well and play along with that to record the midi track.That way there will be no latency heard. There’s also the option of connecting the audio output of the drums to your interface if you have one and use direct monitoring. Trying to use VST drums when recording will most always result in hearing a echo which is annoying. Under optimized conditions you can make the echo shorter but it will always be there. So as said above turn off input echo for the midi track so the VST is not playing live.