msmcleod

Check out HoRNet VHS - it's only €10.99 ( ~ $12 US ). It supports over 280 models of headphones.

I think you're crediting me with far more influence than I actually have!

BandLab Technologies (the company) is owned by Caldecott Music Group. There are currently three companies under its umbrella: BandLab Technologies, NME Networks, and Vista Musical Instruments. Each of these companies has several brands. BandLab Technologies has four brands: BandLab, Cakewalk, Reverb Nation, and Air Bit. They aren't separate companies, only brands within BandLab Technologies. See the Portofolio section here: https://caldecottmusic.com/

First of all, ensure your MIDI output is defined as the Alesis QS7. To do this, 1. Open the Preferences dialog and go to the Instruments page under the MIDI section. 2. Click the Define button 3. Click the Import button, and open "C:\Cakewalk Content\Cakewalk Core\Instruments\Alesis.ins" 4. Select the Alesis QS7 from the dialog. 5. Select channels 1-16 of the MIDI output device you have connected to your Alesis QS7 (click on Ch1, then while holding SHIFT click on Ch16). 6. Select the Alesis QS7 from the list. 7. Click Apply, then close. You can now choose QS7 patches using the Patch Browser button in the inspector. You should also be aware that Cakewalk has a MIDI Channel Override setting. When set to "MIDI Channel = None", then any recorded MIDI data will be transmitted using exactly the same MIDI channel it was recorded on. As your keyboard is most likely transmitting on only one channel (e.g. channel 1), this isn't always desirable - so you can force the MIDI channel to the required one using the dropdown below: This will ensure that both the program change message and the MIDI events themselves will be sent on the required MIDI channel for that part.

There isn't any Theme Editor for the new Sonar at present. We do intend to release one in the future, but it'll have to be written from scratch. When it's available you'll definitely be able to change colours, but whether you'll be able to replace SVG's is still in discussion.

The best advice I can give is to listen to everything on those headphones, especially lots of well mixed songs. You want to do this for several weeks, so you need to get to the point where you instinctively know what a good mix sounds like on your headphones. Pay particular attention to the levels of the bass and the vocals in relation to the rest of the mix. When listening to commercial releases, I've always found the bass to be quieter than I expected, and the vocals far more up-front on headphones. So be aware of this when mixing your own material. There's always the danger that you're ignoring frequencies that can simply not be reproduced by your headphones, so check your mixes on your monitors, home hi-fi and/or car and take note of anything that is overexaggerated in those environments. Again, bass will probably be the area that will give you most trouble. A high pass filter can help to eliminate these frequencies - especially on tracks that don't have anything useful in the low end (e.g. vocals, guitars). Get to the point where you're aware of what you can't hear in your headphones. Also consider getting ARC or Sonarworks for your Rockit speakers - it won't make your room perfect, but it will at least improve things for referencing. Finally, use reference material often. A/B your mix with a similar commercial track and compare the levels / balance of each instrument against your own. Bear in mind that the reference track will be mastered, and your track is only in the mix stage, so turn down the volume of the reference track to match yours.... not the other way around!

@Misha - have you actually asked BandLab your questions? Although us bakers do chip in now and then, this is primarily a user forum. There's very little information we can give short of repeating what is on the website. FYI, the emails to support@cakewalk.com go to the guys at BandLab first.

FWIW - I managed to get my HD201's for around $20 each. AFAIK they're now discontinued, but the HD206's are very similar can be found at a similar price.

The US-2400 uses Mackie Control emulation, so it would have to do it via the config in MackieControl.ini (i.e. it won't support ACT Learn). I wrote a GUI front end to MackieControl.ini to make this much easier/quicker: https://msmcleod.co.uk/cakewalk/C4Mapper.zip You'll need to set the VPot count to 8 to get this to work on the US-2400, as it emulates a MCU + 2 x XT's (i.e. 3 banks of 8). The one thing you can't edit in the C4Mapper is the parameter to VPot mapping of the Pro Channel EQ and Pro Channel Compressor. Those you'll have to edit manually in notepad (or an equivalent text editor). However, there's a couple of gotcha's: 1. The US-2400 doesn't have any scribble-strip display, so you'll not get any visual feedback as to what you're editing, or what the values are. 2. I'm not sure if the US-2400 has the buttons to allow it to enter plugin edit mode. For point 2, the enhancements to allow the Korg nanoKONTROL Studio access to the plugins may work, but I've not got a US-2400 to try it on. It uses either the Cycle ( loop on/off) or Scrub button as a shift key (e.g. Cycle + Mute 1 = Pro Channel EQ, Cycle + Mute 2 = Pro Channel Compressor ) : I'm also not sure where "Mute 1" will be - it'll could either be the first mute button on the far left, or the 1st mute button on the last bank of 8. At some point I'll need to get around to writing a virtual MCU Display....

There is a shortcut - Toggle Track/Clip Gain in the Edit Filter. It's under the Track View area: I've got mine assigned to backslash:

You can't expect all of your cores to be balanced on every project. Some processing need to be done in a specific order, and not all tasks can be split across threads, which means some cores will be busy, and others will be waiting on something finishing. For example, you can't put reverb on a compressed vocal without doing the compression first, then sending it to the reverb - so the reverb part of the process will always be waiting on the compressor to finish. And if you've got another core that has a simple job to do on another track while that is going on, it's going to be sitting there waiting. The larger the buffer size, the more data it has to work on - but is has a longer amount of time to do it. The smaller the buffer size, the less amount of work it has to do, but has a much shorter time to do it. If at any point the time it takes to do the work is greater than the time slot it's got to do it, you'll get drop-outs. Sonar was the first DAW to implement plugin load balancing (most plugins at the time would only ever run on a single thread). If you're using a lot of plugins that do their own load balancing, you might find better performance with plugin load balancing turned off - if they're both trying to load balance, they may be fighting each other. Plugin load balancing should definitely be disabled if you're using a small buffer size, as the overhead of managing the thread scheduling may exceed any benefit of spreading the load. The other thing to experiment with is the ThreadSchedulingModel. You may see an improvement using a different model mode.

I find the cheaper Sennheiser headphones work well for tracking (I use the older HD-201's) - they're very light and don't sound too bad. Sonarworks also has a profile for them too.

Select your tracks, then choose "Bounce to Track(s)" from the Track View "Tracks" menu. If you want a single track containing the bounce of all the tracks, select "Entire Mix" as the Source Category. If you want a separate track for each of the tracks selected (i.e. just a bounced version of them with the effects baked in), either select "Tracks" (which will contain only the track/clip effects on that track), or "Tracks through Entire Mix" which will also include any additional sends / fx in buses. In most cases, you want the destination to be "New Track", and the Channel Format "Stereo" (which are both the default). Then just click OK on the dialog.

This has been happening to me for the past couple of months. Sometimes it's constantly failing to authenticate, sometimes it gets stuck on "Loading Products", sometimes it fails to download. I've uninstalled/re-installed (including deleting all the stuff uninstall doesn't remove), turned off all firewalls / AV etc.. and nothing helps. Constantly restarting the app will eventually get there, but it's incredibly frustrating.

MIDI event data is always in musical time. Changing the clip's time base to absolute only affects the start time of the clip. The only way to do what you're suggesting is to stretch the clip by the reverse percentage you changed the tempo by. For example, if the original tempo was 120bpm, and you change the tempo to 130bpm: 100% / 120bpm = 0.833333333 0.833333333 x 130bpm = 108.33 % So you'd stretch the MIDI clip by 108.33% to get it to play at the original tempo.

It depends on how the controls are mapped. If the controls are mapped directly to the VST parameters (as is the case with the Mackie protocol), then you should be able to record the VST parameter. If however you're doing it via a MIDI CC mapping, you need to create a new automation lane for that MIDI CC, then arm that. You should be able to re-assign the CC envelope to the VST parameter afterwards if necessary.

Normally ASIO would be the first choice every time. Have you checked that the Behringer UMC1820 driver actually supports more than one device plugged in at the same time? Most interfaces don't, the notable exception being RME - and even then, I think it's limited to two devices. You may find you need to disconnect the USB from one of them and essentially use it as an ADAT expander, as I doubt the Behringer drivers will support both being used as full audio interfaces simultaneously. In essence, you'd be using one of the UMC1820's as a ADA8200.

The most common reason for this happening to me is Windows downloading updates in the background.

Here's my recommendations: 1. Always use the same USB port for your keyboard - same for any other MIDI devices. Choose your ports once, and make sure you always use the same ones. If you change ports, Windows will think its a different device from the last time you plugged it in. 2. Always make sure the keyboard and any other MIDI devices are plugged in, preferably on PC boot, but definitely before starting Cakewalk. 3. Make sure USB sleep options are turned off across the board in Windows, otherwise the MIDI port can come and go. Windows enumerates the MIDI devices giving them nothing but a number for their port. Using different USB ports, or not having them all plugged in on start up can cause their device ID to change. Although Cakewalk does use the device name to try to match if the device ID does change, it's reliant on Windows notifications coming through (which in my experience can take up to a minute, if at all). So you can get into a situation where either the wrong device ID is picked, or none is picked for the control surface.

Correct. To be clear though, the issue with ASIO4ALL specifically is, once opened, it then opens ALL of the audio devices in WDM mode and keeps hold of them, which can cause issues if you then try to either open or use the native ASIO driver. Cakewalk evaluates the available ASIO devices on start up, so if it happens to open ASIO4ALL first, then it causes problems with some devices when trying to open the native ASIO driver. Too may noobs were installing ASIO4ALL just because some YouTuber suggested it, then blamed Cakewalk for it performing badly and/or causing issues. The Realtek ASIO driver is just plain broken and definitely WILL cause issues in Cakewalk - constant hanging / freezing up is typical with that driver.

Used one of those when I upgraded my laptop drive... they slide open and you fit the NVM drive inside:

As I said, I used a USB to SATA adapter: Once Clonezilla has started up, I just plug the new drive into a spare USB-3 slot. One reason for going for Clonezilla, is: 1. It's Linux based, so it doesn't care (unlike Windows) that at the end of the copy, you have two drives with identical partition ID's and two identical copies of Windows. 2. It actually copies the partition ID's too. I've used a couple of OS transfer apps in the past, and they didn't do this - the OS worked, but I ended up having to re-auth a bunch of software because it thought it was now installed on a different machine.

I've done this several times... 500GB to 1TB, to 2TB then finally to 4TB. I use CloneZilla to clone the old drive to a new one (using a USB to SATA converter for the new drive), then replace the old drive with the new one. Then I use PartitionWizard to resize the partitions afterwards to make use of the extra space.

I've got the bottom one... I use it for a raspberry pi when I need keyboard access - they work pretty well. However, I've just got a new fanless PC which is 13cm x 8cm x 1.75cm (just slightly larger than the size of an old cassette case), along with a 10" 1920 x 1200 touch screen. They both sit nicely on top of one of my controller keyboards as a host for soft-synths. I intend to get another one of these keyboards just in case I need keyboard access for something. I guess they'd also be useful if you were say recording vocals and were out of reach of your main keyboard.

Another thing to rule out... some custom mouse drivers can cause issues. I use a Kensington trackball, and their driver was causing no end of issues for me. Uninstalling it and sticking to the default Windows mouse driver solved that issue.