Bass Guitar

Funny how brushes are so hard to find good quality samples for. Years ago I gave up looking and ordered a set of VicFirth wire brushes. I have a Ludwig Vistalite snare. It has a Remo Fiberskin head. Those are the modern day version of a Calfskin. So I recorded this and have about 10 different samples. I play them using Session Drummer with the snare and Octapad thing. The hardest sample to find is a good drag across the head sound. Im glad to see the return of Session Drums. It’s the only drum VST Im aware of that allows you to play your own samples.

I think the OP is confusing replacing a Synth with the concept of what drum replacer is for. If you don’t like the sound of any VST instruments you can choose “Replace “ and swap it for something else. As said Drum Replacer was designed to augment real drum recordings with midi drum sounds. By default it uses some pretty lame sounding drum sounds. But you can use any other drum VST by dragging the drum replacer track to a drum vst track . It takes a lot of screwing around to actually make it play even the kick drum. I sort of don’t think it gets used much by anyone. When it first came out I played around with it on some multi track acoustic drum tracks and after a few hours of tweaking managed to get the kick drum extracted and converted it to a midi track. Yahoo. It would have been faster to use Melodyne. The snare was way harder and it totally misses things like rim shots and other important parts. Then you can totally forget any cymbals.

Im not sure I follow this? I have about 12 track templates that are for different VST instruments. They all load up no problem including the instrument. It doesn’t seem to matter if they are stereo or multi track. They all do as expected and even create the proper buses. I actually don’t use project templates anymore. I only use the track templates starting from scratch with a Blank Template.

What Im learning is that a lot of Daw’s like Next and Mixcraft, Waveform etc are designed with audio loops in mind. So it’s part of the plan to allow for a zillion different loops and a zillion different tempos. Sonar and a few other old school Daw’s are sort of designed based on the old tape machine and mixing board concept. Im not a loop person as I actually play all my instruments. But I’m slowly learning how having solid tempo management is something that even I need from time to time. it totally blew me away the day I discovered that out of the 4 Daw’s I currently use that Mixcraft had the changing the tempo thing down solid like that. Trouble with Sonar is it is a beast. It’s become way overly complex and therefore just about everything you try to do is super complicated. Im a big fan of simple! I hope Cakewalk Next gets enough development time to grow. I really like the idea and the simplicity of what it does so far. It needs ARA!!

Yes definitely. The Cakewalk staff have said that this is to be expected and best to totally remove the Real tel Asio driver from your computer. What might have happened is W11 re- installed the Realtek driver. Remove it using the Register Editor. Look under Software/ AsIO

First you don't mention is you are using ASIO? It looks like you have the latest driver Version 4 which Tascam claims supports W11 24H2 But the message is implying either a bad connection or that a USB port has gone to sleep. Sometimes if that happens while Sonar is running then you get that message and you might have to restart Sonar or even your computer. This is confusing because it is not clear what you mean? Normally we use our Audio interface for all sound and the studio monitors are connected to the interface. Are you using both? Most people totally disable the on board audio card when using a proper interface. You don't need it. You interface will connect with Windows audio system and play all sound. In the case of Sonar you have to be carful about setting everything to use the same sample rate. I use only 48 because Videos are 48. Every audio interface is a little different when it comes to handling multiple apps playing audio. I've never had an issue with Sonar if I use 48. But other Daw's I have barf on that and stop running.

In Mixcraft I first set the audio tracks to " Use Project Tempo" and then just change the master tempo. I'm pretty sure you can also do this in Cakewalk Next. I don't think I ever got this to work smoothly in Sonar. It's a complicated procedure. Here's the answer from Googles friendly AI To change the tempo of an audio track in Sonar, you can either change the project's global tempo using the Control Bar ( Note :this is wrong) or use the Audio Snap palette to synchronize individual clips to the project's tempo. For more advanced control, you can automate tempo changes in the Tempo track or insert tempo changes using the Project menu. Select the audio clip(s) you want to change. Enable Groove Clip Looping on the clip by right-clicking it and choosing "Groove > Clip Looping" from the menu. Open the AudioSnap palette by pressing ALT+A. In the palette, select "Set Clip Tempo From Project" from the "Average Tempo" drop-down menu. This will make the clip follow the project's tempo map. You may need to manually adjust the clip's beat markers in the Tempo view for the best results.

Ah that might be it. It's an old Laptop from my wife's office. It came with Windows 7 and after she retired they gave it to her. I installed W10 during the free upgrade deal. I am not signed in on the Microsoft account. I think the office IT guy is. No problem as it is never on line these days. It's just a fancy media player. I'll add it to my collection - 2003 Dell Inspiron 1100 W Xp, Still runs like new! weighs 7.6 lbs! Used only to run same vintage Epson CD printer. 2008 Sony Vaio PCG-7133 originally Vista now W7 also still runs like new. Was used for live performance last 12 years. 2011 Lenova Think Pad T420 originally W7pro now W10 home Replaced the Sony for live performance. 2013 Acer Aspire VC 731 originally W7Pro now W10 home used as back up and demoing stuff. Key bed is screwed.

Thanks for posting this. I had read a few things about it but don't often turn on my 2 W10 ( Home version) laptops as well as my wife's office machine. Yep, takes all of 1/2 a minutes. But I only got that Enroll Now option on 2 of them. But my old Lenova T420 Think Pad which hadn't been fired up for a few months the option to Enroll wasn't showing. All it showed was the Red "This PC doesn't currently meet the min system requirements to run W11" No surprise there, This laptop was originally W7 It showed 2 pending updates so I ran those. one was " 2025 9 cumulative update preview for W 10 22H2 KB5066198 it finally said it was up to date but the "Enroll Now" was still missing. So possibly I got lucky with the first 2 being as it is after the deadline. Not to worried about the Lenova as it's only purpose is to play backing tracks. I was still using a W7 Laptop for that up until last spring.

Might be true come to think about it. For me it was only certain projects that showed the preview arrow on the start screen. I think I used Sonar for 5 months before I even noticed this feature. It was the day I went to open a project and it scared the heck out me when the unexpected music started playing full blast!! I quickly learned how to disable it. I did about 150 projects last fall where all I did was open them and save as midi and then export stems of all tracks including vst instruments. These are my future proofs and none of them ever got the preview arrow. But that’s when I started finding all the weird audio files in the audio folder.

It’s not a bug but it’s a badly executed feature. I also found it very annoying.

I have lots of options 1-TTS-1 2- SynthFont 3- Coyote 4-MSWavetable 5-Korg r5/rw 6-Roland SC 55 7-Yamaha DTX

I was going to recommend that. Best practices to keep everything in one folder, is to use Save As. Always remember to check the Save audio with project box. This creates the project folder and only saves the audio files used. Deleted tracks are left behind. This is the preferred method of creating backups as well. Especially to a different drive. To avoid stuff going to C drive open Preferences and go to Files and change the default drive locations for everything like audio and video. This is not just a Sonar thing it’s also true for all software. Not that it matters now that most of us have at least 1TB OS drives. But it makes it easier to find stuff if it isn’t hidden somewhere 6 layers deep.

The brief history of Cakewalk Pro audio and Cakewalk etc were owned by the original developers way back 80’s and 90’s. 12 Tone Systems. That’s why the DX synth was called TTS-1. Roland bought it and in those days it was Sonar. Example Sonar 1 to Sonar 8. Gibsonn bought it around that time and we had Sonar X1 thru X3 lastly Sonar Platinum. Gibson went broke and discontinued the development and support for Sonar. Bandlab bought just the software not the company, and renamed it Cakewalk or often called CbB for Cakewalk by Bandlab. It was free but that ended last month. Two years ago they announced the upcoming release of 2 new products Cakewalk Sonar and Cakewalk Next. This is where we are. They returned to calling it Sonar. Yes that’s a bit confusing when you search Google for that title. Sonar is based on the Cakewalk legacy but Next is a totally new design that is also cross platform. Sonar has always been PC only and will remain as such. Sonar is a very powerful and complex Daw with a very steep learning curve. Cakewalk Next is at this point in development very simple so very easy to learn and use. They are by subscription only which includes both. There are free version also available.

I have both Sound Forge and Wave Lab. They both have very professional tools for album assembly and burning CD. Wave lab elements I’ve owned since version 4. It goes on sale for around $75. Definitely the most popular with the professionals. Sound Forge I have scored free because it was always included with Sony hardware like Mini disk players and turntables. Latest version was included with Vegas Pro. But I was curious about my other two that are free. Audacity and Gold Wave. Neither of those have album assemblies or CD burning features. I still use Nero 7 for CD burning. I might have bought it 15 years ago and it still installed to W11. Wave editors can all use the same plug in folders you use for Sonar. But I would recommend using Sonar to split into tracks for each song and add effects if that’s what you’re used to using. Then export using Tracks through entire mix. That way if you name each track it will be added to the exported files.

You need to split the track at the end of each song and drag it down to a new track Say the cassette has 10 songs. You recorded them to one track. add 9 more audio tracks. Start splitting and dragging the each song to its own track. Personally I would have started by recording each song to its own track to save having to do that. That way you can have different processing if necessary for each song. Globally you would add the processing to the Master bus. Actually for this stuff I would have used a Wave editor. Most have CD assembly tools. Im pretty sure Audacity has.

It’s still hilarious how people do Google searches for anything about Sonar and then they end up with the legacy version. I had to laugh when a year ago someone announced that Sonar was available for purchase and posted a link to Platinum.

Yes I should have clarified that. The example is that if you had a section named Verse you can reuse it over and over but it will maintain the tempo of that section from where it was first placed on the timeline.

On a new build after you get all the audio and stuff sorted out I open the VST tab in preferences and add all the none default pathways. I tell it to scan and then set it to manual. Using just a blank project I open the Browser and then open the FX list. There will mostly be just included plugins listed correctly. The rest will be in the “Uncategorized” folder . I Move them as well as I create a few custom folders. I repeat this process for the instruments. I’ve heard of plugins that get mixed up with if they are effects or instruments but I’ve personally never had that happen. Sonars plug in manager is very overly complicated and outdated. After I saw that they fixed that in Next I was surprised to see that it’s still not updated.

What you need to understand is that the Arranger just mostly labels parts of the song. It then creates the list from which you can drag and drop them to a new list to make a new arrangement. Your concept is asking for a feature that is not part of using the Arranger track but of using the tempo track. Arranger sections only manipulate the playback head they don’t contain tempo information. You can use the Arranger to create a typical song by just creating just one of each of the basic parts, intro, verse, chorus and so on. You then build the song using those parts and drag them down to the Arrangement window in the inspector. once happy you can commit to the project and save it. To make verse 2 faster you use the tempo track. It’s all pretty simple for basic music.

Then you have lost a lot of the data from the file. Like tempo and so on. It is important to OPEN a download midi file for it to play correctly. As I tested around 17 Daw’s back over a year ago that was one of my first tests. Will this Daw open and play a GM file. The majority do. Each had its quirks. But many do this with one click. Some you drag and drop but they ask you about GM as well as the other data. Smart!

Ya very clunky. And you need to be an experienced user before you can get that far. Try Cakewalk Next and then you will see how it should work. Very user friendly for newcomers.

My problem started when I first bought the M4 possibly 5 or 6 years ago. I always avoided buss power but the M4 had exactly the right features so I let that one go. But right away it was acting up and I contacted Motu. They said I needed to use a USB 3 port with a C connection. This is is when you learn that the product was designed for a Mac and not a PC So I installed a PCi card with that and all seemed fine. This was my old W10 PC. Time for a new PC and at first I installed W10. I made sure it had the proper USB C ports. But that’s when I started finding that newly recorded audio was distorted. I have to completely restart the computer to fix it. It seems like if the computer had been turned on for a few hours this will happen. Playback was fine. In the meantime I bought the SSL2 which never has this issue but compared to the Motu I don’t really like it much. I also use a Zoom L8. Never any problems with both of those. So so it’s not a computer issue. Last March I had all those issues with Sonar and decided that I would wipe the computer clean and start over with W11. Now the issue has become worse and even playback gets garbled. It’s only happening after the computer has ran for a few hours. But it’s annoying so I just put it on the shelf for now and hopefully they will update the drivers some day. I tried to sell it but got no response here locally. Same problem with the SSL-2.. You can’t even give stuff away around here. Thank goodness for the Zoom.

Most of the other Daw’s will open a midi file and ask you if you want to assign GM instruments. In 4 seconds you’ll be playing the file. If you desire to use the song you drag and drop better instruments and replace them. Example this is how Cakewalk Next will work. Fast, no need to understand why. Sonars first problem is that it creates only midi tracks , not instrument tracks. So it’s a lot of extra moves to insert instruments and now drag the midi data there or re assign outputs. Actually Cubase is the only other Daw I know of that also does that. A 16 track project can become 32 tracks. Messy and clunky. I even prefer Waveform which opens a midi file just like Sonar with no instruments but you can quickly drag them to the track because the track will become an instrument track automatically. Fast and tidy. But you do need some knowledge of what midi instruments to use. It’s pretty easy to get the TTS-1 back. All you need is a n older CbB download of the full installer from before the Fall of 2023. That or any old version of Sonar going back like 20 years ago. The TTS-1 was never updated because it is DX. I think what seemed to happen was Roland totally forgot about it until Bandlab decided to now charge money. It wouldn’t have been included with the code from Gibson.

Sonar is possibly one of the only Daw’s that no longer supports GM playback. Funny thing is that Cakewalk Next does. Next has a way better system of handling midi files. Go figure. When you open a midi file in the new Sonar it will only populate the project with midi tracks but there is no GM instrument included anymore. I replace that with SynthFont A fully supported GM player available for around $20. Synth font.com The just released a ton of updates This is what use to play download midi files synthmaster.com But you can also replace some stuff like the bass Drums and electric piano and strings with the SI instruments. It’s a total PITA however what is involved to actually do this in a tidy way when other Daw’s do this That’s why I often use the synth master player.