Helios.G

Don't feel too bad, AI is coming for all of our ideas anyway.

I can't help you with your specific project, but I'll give you this. Think about your most common workflows, whatever that may be, and set up a template with the tools and tracks you know you'll need. I personally have a few templates ready to go at all times for my projects. I have a folder, with several sub-folders split into 5. 1. pre-production 2. production 3. vox 4. mix 5. master Each one of those has the exact tools and layout for the specific task at hand. In pre-production I have basic keys, drums and chord instruments set up, and this is where I write song lyrics and figure out structure, before I commit to any specific sounds. In production, I go about choosing sounds and fleshing out the direction of the arrangement sonically. Vox I lay down tracks for vocals, etc you get the point. If you have projects that went well for you flow wise, I'd start there, and just delete all audio and leave behind the project setup and call it what you want.

If you put your'e configuration setup in your signature, we can see what else you got and maybe help point you in the right direction.

I'll tell you what I do. I make a folder for 3 songs that are in the vein of what my project is going to be. Look for similarities in tone and production. Then I find them on amazon and buy them from there for about a dollar and change. Once imported to cakewalk, I compare and contrast and pick the one that I think is the closest tonally to my song. After that I use a program I have called UVR 5 (ultimate vocal remover) that is free and open source. This program splits songs into different parts, bass, drums, music and vocals. Once I do that, I import the split stems, and the orginal into a folder in cakewalk which I call reference. Make sure to route the output of these 5 tracks to the main output of your interface and not your master bus. Lower the level of all the reference tracks so that they roughly match the song you're working on. Once I start my mix, I work the static mix first to sound roughly level with the individual stems of my reference. Once that's done, I do some light eq on the master to match the tone (brighten, darken, whatever) of my track to the reference, then add some bus compression to glue everything together lightly, one to two db of compression should do. Once that's done, I work down my busses and compare and contrast by section, using the split stems of the reference to measure how far off or not I am tonally. I work this way for about 75% of the way, then I mute the reference and finish the mix on my own. By this point you should have a reasonable enough facsimile of your reference tonaly, but still have enough wiggle room to give it your own flair. The idea is to get it in the ballpark, so that it sounds professional, not identical. Good luck!

Good catch John, I delete all audio drivers that aren't going to be used for my work. That would definitely interfere, especially if you don't choose asio off the bat.

I think it has more to do with cpu, motherboard, storage, ram combo than people realize. Everyone thinks that high ram and cores is always better, but you have to know if your components work together. I recently got rid of my previous rig, that had 64gb of ram. In theory, it should have handled whatever I threw at it, but it couldn't. Now my system, like yours, has 32gb of ram, and it breezes through everything, even though my core count is the same (4) and the ram is half as much. Most of it though has to do that I did my research on what I needed and tried to pair everything so it worked well together. I'm happy with my current setup.

I'm still running a quad core over here, no latency clicks and pops, knock on wood.

If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can hit the control key and scroll left and right with the mouse scroll wheel pretty easily.

Oh wow, He was always so helpful to me, and everyone else here too. Thanks for replying. I hope he's ok.

👍

Hey T, if you don't mind my asking... what happened to @Scook?

I think you're seriously overthinking this. They're a corporation. A corporation wants to make money. They want to monetize all of their user base, not just the "kiddo's" or the "old timers", but everyone that uses their services. They made Next bandlab adjacent, but with some similar functionality to Sonar, so as to introduce young creators to more robust tools. That clearly is in the hope to have them "graduate" to Sonar eventually as their careers progress. All that said, I repeat, you're seriously overthinking this. I make "kiddo" music (pop). I'm not young, I'm not geriatric either. I'm not being catered to in either scenario. In the end it doesn't matter. Make music. That's what all of these tools are for. You don't want to pay? Don't, find another tool, and make music. You're ok with paying? Cool. Stick around, and make music. At the end of the day if you're on here daily fretting about what a company that doesn't know any of us personally is going to do next, you're not making music. I choose to make music, and I come on here once or twice a day to get out of a technical jam or to maybe help someone get out of theirs. Nothing more, nothing less. Make music. That's it.

Hey Max, you're probably right, but since I had to keep working, I found another workaround and decided to move on. Thanks for trying to help though, I appreciate it.

No effects were on the project at the time of the problem, and they were tracked clean, I tracked them myself. Thanks for trying to help.

Whelp, that didn't work either, but it did give me an idea. I bounced down, and then ran izotope rx de-click on it. That worked great. So I'm considering my issue fixed, but in case anyone has better solutions than my workaround, I'm leaving the thread open for a bit. Thanks Jonesey and everyone else who chimed in to help. You guys are the best.