A Tolerable Quietude

This is a weird problem, and it's not the end of the world if I can't resolve it, but I'm curious to understand what's going on. I've got a single project that's somehow developed a midi latency problem. For context, I've got two MIDI keyboards on my system, and normally they are very snappy--hit a key and the VST instrument in Cakewalk sounds instantly. In this one project though, there's a lag of about 1/8th of a second between playing the note, and the vst sounding. This happens with either MIDI keyboard, so it's not a hardware or interface issue (each keyboard uses a different interface into the computer). And besides, if I create a new project (or open any other existing project) the MIDI latency isn't there. It's only a problem for this single project. To make it even weirder: Midi notes on the piano roll play perfectly in time with the music when Cakewalk is playing. But if I use the mouse to manually select a note on the piano roll keyboard (on the left-hand side of the screen), it's got that same 1/8th-ish second delay in this single project. Where should I look to try to troubleshoot this? Have I accidentally changed a setting in this project that would create this behavior? Any insight would be welcome!

Not only that, but in my limited experience, Cakewalk's tech support is really good! I had a ticket open with them recently, and a ticket open with Native Instruments for a paid product. Cakewalk's tech support was prompt, courteous, and helpful. Native Instrument's has been extremely slow, inexpert, and ultimately incorrect. It's astonishing to me that Cakewalk's support team for a free product is leagues better than NI's for a paid one.

This is really, really welcome news to me! I love Cakewalk--I've used it in its various forms for over two decades, and I find the workflow intuitive in ways that other DAWs are not. It's been great what Bandlab has done with it, but it's felt precarious to me because there's no way the increased Bandlab user numbers can possibly pay for the Cakewalk's continued upkeep and development. So I'll personally feel much more comfortable if they're actually selling it, and their revenue stream comes from the actual users of the software, instead of however Bandlab memberships are monetized. That said, I REALLY hate subscription models. They seem so temporary and insecure. I'd hate to have all my previous work and projects held hostage, where I'd lose access to the ability to open the files and work with them if I quit paying a subject-to-change subscription fee. I bet this feeling is very common for Cakewalk users. After all, *continuity* has been one of Cakewalk's distinguishing features over its many years and iterations. I recently opened a .bun file I'd made in the '90s, and it opened just fine in CbB, which is freaking amazing! So I do hope Bandlab has a "buy it" option for the next chapter of Cakewalk/Sonar.

As someone who recently upgraded to a new computer myself, I found this pretty annoying as well. It seems like some plugins couldhandle a version change gracefully, and the project settings would still load in the new version of the plugin. For others, even minor bug-fixing updates would make the plugin present itself to Cakewalk as an entirely new thing. It's made me very hesitant to ever update plugins! If possible, I'd suggest saving all of your original installation files and/or .vst3s or .dlls, so you can swap in the old one where necessary.

He's likely talking about how Cakewalk's default behavior is to scan for new/changed/removed plugins when it loads. There's a toast that pops up briefly to indicate that.

I've been using Cakewalk/Sonar for quite a while, but I love how there's always new functionality to discover. Thought I'd share this little story: I had a mystery today. I was working in a project, and all of a sudden the spacebar began stopping the playback and resetting the now marker to where I was, the behavior normally associated with ctrl+spacebar. And ctrl+spacebar would stop playback and move the playhead back to the now marker. In other words, spacebar and ctrl+spacebar got switched. What had happened? I hadn't changed the keyboard shortcuts to reassign them, and looking at the keyboard shortcut menu I saw that spacebar is reserved and can't be reallocated at all, so I was really confused. It turns out hitting ctrl+w swaps the behavior of spacebar and ctrl+spacebar, as outlined here, without changing any of the key bindings. I routinely hit ctrl+s all the time when I'm working on a project, so I must have hit ctrl+w accidentally at one point. (It wouldn't be the first time I've accidentally hit the wrong key combination. I can't count the number of times I've accidentally switched to screenset 6 when trying to switch to the select tool, for example!) Anyway, I'm delighted to discover ctrl+w. It's really handy and I'll be using it a lot going forward. Makes me wonder how much else there is to still discover?

Thanks, I can use a plugin. Span looks useful! I just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing a setting somewhere.

I'd like to be able to see the RMS as well as the peak in the console. I know that I can set the meters themselves to show both, as outlined here. But that still shows only the peak as a displayed number below the meter. Is it possible to display the RMS as a number as well, or instead of the peak?

Wouldn't a drum map work just as well (or better) for this? I do have a "legacy" hardware synth, and I do have a .ins file for it which lets me change banks and patches, etc. I made this .ins file, believe it or not, over 20 years ago, when I first got the synth, and I think this was before Cakewalk even became Sonar. I remember this being a headache and a half, even though those instructions made a lot more sense back then, and my hardware synth manual made it very clear what the RPNs and NRPNs and whatnot were. So I'm super grateful that this legacy tech is still a working part of Cakewalk. And I'm even more grateful that I'll never have to make another .ins file as long as I live.

I'm not sure I've experienced exactly what you're talking about, but I have noticed that often if there seems to be a communication breakdown between a midi track in Cakewalk and a synth, it's because of the channel being wonky. I've gotten in the habit of loading any synth in "midi omni" mode, which seems to make things work more smoothly. Or, as you say, you can set the output channel of the track to 1. You also might want to look for stray midi sysex, patch change, volume, or other unwanted control codes that may have snuck into the track. The event list is always the first thing I look at if a midi track isn't behaving properly. Just today I was drawing some notes onto a track in the piano roll, and those notes weren't playing. Opening the event list, I saw that the new notes I'd drawn in were set to channel 10, for no reason I could discern. I changed them to channel 1 on the event list, saved the project, closed and reopened Cakewalk, and reloaded the project. Adding notes on the piano roll worked as expected. Was it a bug, or some weird error on my part? I'm not sure, but it was certainly something I could fix/work around. On the general topic of Cakewalk and stability/bugs, maybe I've just been lucky, but I've been using it daily for months now and found it impressively reliable and rock solid.

Francois, thanks for putting in the work and sharing this! If you feel comfortable sharing your code as well, you could include a github link too. It's too bad there isn't an obvious section of the Content forums to post this. I wonder why there isn't a CAL Scripts subforum there...

Along with what bitflipper says, another great reason to install TTS-1 is that as a multitibral General MIDI synth, it will let your friend easily preview GM files from Cakewalk's file browser. I've got it installed, and use it pretty much exclusively for that. As for the other instruments, I personally really like the sound of the bass and the epiano, and I've found them useful in final mixes. But that's down to taste.

Thanks for the replies! The effects were very noticeable in this case, and specifically the automation was much chunkier than the 50 millisecond default. I'm reassured that I'll probably hear problems if they crop up again. I can also make a habit of raising the buffer size for renders, and experiment with a BounceBufSizeMsec value in my config file. I tend to keep my buffer size as low as I can possibly get away with, since I hate latency more than I hate the occasional late/dropped buffer ;)

Happy new year everyone, Recently I noticed that one of the instruments in an audio export of a project just wasn't sounding as good as it did in the project mix--the automations weren't as smooth, the sound was thin, etc. After various troubleshooting, I discovered that this specific instrument (iZotope's Iris 2) does a bad job rendering faster than real-time. I solved the problem by freezing the track, with the freeze options set to "Render in real-time", then exporting the project audio. But this has got me wondering: Maybe there's been a bunch of less-obvious rendering problems in previous projects that I've missed?!! Should I use "Render in real-time" all the time, just to be sure (I see it's an option in the audio export dialog, defaulted to off)? Or is there a way I can tell definitively that a given synth or effect CAN render properly when Cakewalk speeds it up? Thanks!

Thanks Scook! Are you aware of a CAL script that will do what I'm asking as-is, or do it with minimal modification? Thanks for the AZ Lua link. That looks a little daunting, tbh, but it's no doubt less daunting than trying to write a CAL script from scratch.

Thanks Kevin! I think I can use the Velocity MFX to randomize the velocity to a value that could go down to zero, but that's not really what I'm looking for. Unless I use it with a patch that simply cuts off altogether at a certain velocity threshold. That's an interesting strategy to think about... Thanks Jon! I'm looking for something that can be applied to notes already on the track, not generated by the sequencer. If there's a way of converting a preexisting track into a Cakewalk sequencer pattern (a single pattern as long as the whole track, with varying note lengths, timings, polyphony, etc.), then what you're suggesting could potentially work.

I realize this is a pretty niche question, but I've been searching for a while and can't seem to find a solution. Is there any way in Cakewalk to set the probability that individual MIDI notes in a track will play or not? This is a built in feature of some DAWS (like Ableton's "Note Chance" and Bitwig's "Randomness Operator"). It's not built in to Cakewalk, but is there a MIDI FX plugin, CAL script, or some other way to do this in Cakewalk? I'm already aware of sequencer plugins (for example, Stochas) which let you set probabilities for notes in the sequencer. I'm looking for something that can be applied to a preexisting MIDI track in Cakewalk. Thanks!

Definitely not! If I want to do this again, I'll export and reimport the audio. Thanks again!

Thanks Skook! I think I've done this before (with Cakewalk closed) and it's worked, but I guess I've just been lucky. And thanks for the link to your CbB Tools utility! Very generous of you to make that available!

I think it's still possible to add an external audio editor like Audacity to Cakewalk. But it seems to involve messing with the Windows Registry. Here's a link to an old forum topic on how to do this. Caveat: I haven't done this myself yet with CbB, although I do remember doing this "back in the day" with Cakewalk and CoolEdit (anyone remember that?) and it worked as expected. These days if I want to use Audacity for some audio in a CbB project, I just edit the audio file in Audacity outside of Cakewalk. It would be really nice if CbB had an easy way in the UI to add an external audio editor, so that audio clips could be right clicked and edited without leaving Cakewalk. But I guess there isn't much call for this functionality.

A long buffer definitely makes it hard to record to time! What's going on here is that you have the whole section selected, so when you try to move a single note, all the selected notes move also. I've gotten in the habit of hitting Ctl-Shift-A on my keyboard every time I go to manipulate a single note on the piano roll, if I think there might be other stuff selected. Ctl-Shift-A is the shortcut to deselect everything.

This is exactly what compressors/limiters are made to do, tame and constrain the dynamic range of a signal. Since you're talking about live recording, you might consider a compressor/limiter on the mics of the worst offenders, so that the signal is reasonably constrained before it even gets to the DAW. Although there's nothing wrong with doing it "by hand" either, with automation envelopes on the volume of the tracks that need adjusting. If you've got the time and patience for it, this is arguably the best way, because you can change the dyanamics artistically as it suits the song. I would definitely not do it this way, for the reason you mention--the abrupt changes will be audible and make clicks and pops. If you want to do it by hand, automation envelopes are the way to go, so you can fade the volume up and down.

If it's a loop, you can drag it to the audio track like msmcleod suggests, then highlight the clip and press CTL-L to turn the clip into a loop. It should automatically snap to fit your project tempo when you do this.

Aaah, that seems to be it! Thanks so much to both of you for taking the time to find the solution! I was trying to recreate this behavior with Cakewalk's stock plugins, and I couldn't. But it was happening consistently with my Native Instruments plugins. The difference is, NI plugins default to enabling MIDI out. For anyone else experiencing this, I found this thread to be helpful. The solution is to pull up the Synth Rack View (Alt-9), right click the synths that are doing this, and deselect "Enable MIDI Output".

Good guess, but it's not that. I learned not to set track input to Omni the hard way early on, so I don't use that ever. I always set to a specific external input and channel. I do use drum maps however, so a common routing I use for drums is: Physical keyboard--> Midi track (sound-on-sound loop recording enabled, input echo = auto thru) --> Drum Map --> soft synth --> Audio track (record not enabled, input only coming from the audio send of the soft synth) Maybe something about using the drum map is causing this? (Edit: Probably not. I just tested the same project, but I removed the drum map from the routing and went right from the midi track to the soft synth, and it still doubled and redoubled on each pass through.) When it happens, all the doubled/tripled/etc notes go away when I stop recording. On playback, it sounds as expected, and there are no extra notes in the track's event view.