Colin Nicholls

Too much?

Sir, I respect your choice of wallpaper. I was envisioning something with cogs but hadn't found the perfect one. Your comments did cause me to have a fevered dream about glowing amber displays.. there may be some scope for improvements in my initial design. Please consider the schematics to be publicly available to approved applicants; apply at the office on the 2nd floor of the Royal Society building on Carlton House Terrace, London. Respectfully, etc etc

I've updated the post to attach the .sth file directly. Sorry about that. I think if I zipped the .sth file it would have downloaded from the web site fine. I don't know why it worked for me when I tested it myself. Enjoy...

I get the 404 error in another browser. I'll investigate. Sorry for the inconvenience, folks. Stand by...

MoShuang, the link works for me. Could there be a setting in your browser that doesn't like downloading .sth files? Try a different browser? Alternatively I could attach the theme file directly, but then it is harder for me to keep updated.

Krupa, my old friend. You have adroitly identified one of the constraints I set for myself with this theme - that is, to avoid the burden of having to update all those blue button images, and instead see how to work around them in a complementary way. The blue itself does fit in with the SteamPunk "leather, bronze, stone" palette if you consider it as the "water" or "glass" component. I realize they pop out visually but the effect is not altogether displeasing. Maybe some adjustment of the other custom colours might ameliorate this effect, somewhat. (My earlier attempt at this theme, called "SteamPink", I confess I abandoned due to eye strain)

Yeah, the link in the top post should remain viable with the most recent version, even though the forum post itself doesn't change its updated time. Maybe this is confusing. I know there's nothing preventing me from just editing the top post directly with an update history or something. Perhaps I'll do that next time.

Tungsten Slate Based on Mercury... psyche! Based on Tungsten, with perhaps a tip of the hat to Blue Aston (seriously, that blue grey is my favorite color) along with a touch of graph paper and the usual eight tweak points of improvement from the House of Colin (spot them all! No prize!) Updated 1/15/2021: Control Bar Select Module for 2021.01 Updated 9/20/2020: Markers view lock indicator (missed from the 2020.04 update, sorry) Tungsten_Slate_2020.zip Updated 4/11/2020: Image items updated for 2020.04 EA release Updated 7/05/2021: Very minor change, Media tab and Track View Menu Bar Background. Hardly worth downloading Here's a screen shot Updated 1/16/2020: I've been using this theme for a while and really enjoy it, so I wanted to share the latest changes. Misc tweaks including NOW time position indicator; record arm button images; selected track color, and probably a few other minor things. Updated 2021.12: refreshed Folder Archive button

Updated to 0.9.4, minor update but fixes a couple of things and updates a couple of images and adds a bit at the end about clip colors.

I've updated the PDF document to the latest version, 0.9.3. It includes several changes including a new section at the end for Case Studies, in which I discuss customizing the Control Bar modules.

I run a 4K monitor (3840 x 2160) at 125% and although Cakewalk is not as "crisp" and pixel perfect as it is at 100%, it is more than just "ok". It is very usable. You're asking the impossible for a non-vector based graphics application to look perfect at anything other than 100% or integer multiples of same.

Steve - Thanks for your comments and observations. I'll respond in one reply Re: Logos - I don't think the ASIO Panel is furnished by the Cakewalk application. At least, my ASIO Panel shows an ECHO logo which isn't one of the ones in Global | About Box. But, good thinking... Re: Input(etc) control icons - Nice graphic! I'll just include your image verbatim in the doc if that's OK with you. Re: Control Bar Background (collapsed) - I just double-checked this. I'm not sure what I used when I tested earlier, but this time I replaced the graphic with an empty rectangle flood-filled with yellow with an alpha transparency value at ~50% and this is what I see: So the customized graphic is overlaying the original. There may be places in the UI where an alpha-channel is respected, or not, and I guess this is a place where it IS respected. I'm not planning on testing this everywhere! Re: "I should probably wait until you are done; would save me some time!" - Well, I had planned to stop working on the doc for a while. As long as I was working on a new custom theme, it seemed reasonable to log my findings, but I think I need to take a break. That said, I'll add your input control icon image as the first change to go into v.0.9.3. Any other updates - from you or anyone, either posted here or as a PM - I will integrate into the document to be included into the next release.

The most recent version of the document is v.0.9.2 and it is available at the URL above. I have paused working on it as of a few days ago, so I expect this is a stable version if you want to download it for easy access.

Thanks, guys. The title is a riff on Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" which is a pretty cool SF book; recommended. It seemed to be a good time to prepare the document, as it is clear that the Theme Editor is pretty stable in the development cycle. The bugs and inconsistencies aren't going to be worth the time the skeleton dev group would need to spend, so documenting seems reasonable. I'm not expecting anyone to go through this line by line looking for errors; and there's definitely more useful stuff that could be added. All suggestions welcome! If you have any theme-ing tips or tricks that you know of, let me know and I'll add them in. I'd like to make this a community effort and of course I'll adjust the credits to suit.

Here is the URL of the latest version of my Visual Guide to creating Cakewalk Themes. (The title is a reference to Neal Stephenson's excellent SCI-FI Novel "The Diamond Age".) The document is a work-in-progress, and will contain areas where incomplete information is provided. If you identify an area that could use additional content to help your Theme creation, please let me know and I'll look at enhancing those sections. Have at it! A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to Theming Cakewalk.pdf

STEAMPUNK Slate. Bronze. Oiled Leather, amber, and hints of turquoise.... Clarity, consistency, medium-brightness. A smooth mouth-feel. You don't have to be a Victorian Gentleman of Learning to appreciate... SteamPunk. Update April 2020: I've validated that this theme works fine in the new 2020.04 EA release. Feel free to use. Update September 2020: Includes Markers view Lock indicator icon. Update January 2021: Control Bar Select Module Update April 2021: No actual image changes but theme was re-saved to eliminate the erroneous "theme compatibility warning" in release 2021.04. Update July 2021: Very minor change, Browser Media Tab and Track View Menu Bar Background. Hardly worth updating Update December 2021: No actual image changes but theme was re-saved to eliminate the erroneous "theme compatibility warning" in release 2021.12. GET IT HERE: SteamPunk.zip

Scroll down to "The editions compared", review the chart, and decide for yourself. https://www.celemony.com/en/melodyne/editions-and-technical-matters

I'm working on a comprehensive visual reference for color items in the Theme Editor. Would some kind Theme Author like to review it? It's not complete (yet) and I'm not looking for comments on style or content at this stage. - I have a number of entries for which I can only put "Not yet identified in UI" and although I suspect they are obsolete or unused, I would like to make sure I haven't missed anything obvious. Let me know and I'll PM you a work-in-progress copy.

Christian, you can swipe to select them just like any other CC value - then use Shift- to lock the mouse drag the selected values into a horizontal or vertical movement. It takes some practice. Zooming in horizontally may help with this process. Also, for simple On-Off, note that you can get the value anywhere above or below the center line to act as an on or off. < 64 is UP/SUSTAIN OFF, >64 is DOWN/SUSTAIN ON.

Totally can do this. Go into the PRV and add a controller lane for Control: 64-Pedal (sustain). Then you can edit them like any other CC value.

Both. Audio and VSTi's. Fairly big project. Despite my best efforts, I could not reproduce it, today. I'll post back with more info if it happens.

I'm experiencing a problem with playback (and recording). When I start the transport (either playback or record) I hear a sharp transient and then nothing. Stopping and restarting just produces the same transient, followed by no sound. The current song position increments steadily as though it were playing back, but no sound is heard. The only way to recover from this is to go into the ASIO panel and change the buffer size, either up or down. Then it works as expected for a few minutes more. Note that "recycling the audio engine" by clicking on the icons in the transport module in Cakewalk is not sufficient. I need to change buffer size in the ASIO panel. Here's the kicker: This has happened with both my ECHO Layla 3G PCI and also my Focusrite 6i6 (2nd Gen) USB. I realize that I need to repro this behavior with the Focusrite exclusively, and demonstrate that it worked better in 2019.09 than in 2019.11, before I have a legit claim that some change in .11 has been detrimental, but I thought I'd post here. I'll be running more tests today.

Just watched this all the way through. Nice work!

I'm an ardent user of V-Vocal, going the extra mile to ensure it is installed in my DAW environments. The version of Melodyne Essential included with SONAR Platinum and CWBB was not usable, in my view. (The opposite of "essential"). However, I took advantage of the recent Black Friday deal to upgrade to Melodyne Assistant (MA), which according to the feature comparison, seems to be a more 1:1 match with V-Vocal. My first impression is that MA is much, much slower that V-Vocal to bring up the editor. I think there may be a bug in that the editor comes up with no content (no "blobs" visible) and I had to exit and re-open the editor to see the clip contents. So I thought I'd start this thread as a place for us V-Vocal fans to share our experiences evaluating Melodyne Assistant. Any tips or tricks that will help us V-Vocal die-hards to enjoy and leverage MA ?

I've been running the hotfix since Friday and haven't noticed any problems. That said, my audio interface runs great until it doesn't, so perhaps this is premature, but add the data point anyway.