abacab

"The Hammond was shiny". Yup. Me too!

You got a point there. On the flip side if you never bought anything because it might eventually be free, you would be wealthier, but would have missed out on using great products. And I'm one of the suckers that paid for lifetime Sonar Platinum. At least I get Cakewalk for free now. ?

Huh? They have a demo to try before buy!

There a couple things to check first. Separately just for troubleshooting the problem. Start with a fresh blank project. 1. Audio - insert an instrument that you can audition with your mouse, like SI Drummer. Tap on the drum kit UI with your mouse. This will bypass any MIDI dependency and trigger the audio engine directly. Any sound? If so, then your audio device is working. Move on to testing the MIDI. If not stop here and get your audio working. 2. MIDI - tap a key on your Akai MIDI keyboard. Does the vertical MIDI meter on the SI Drummer instrument track header flash when you do? If so your keyboard is connected correctly and sending MIDI to Cakewalk. If not, try opening the virtual piano keyboard. MENU > Views > Virtual Controllers > Piano Keyboard. Press some keys on that. Any sound? You can also try opening the Piano Roll View for that track and enter a few notes there. Press play on the transport. Any sound?

I use variant 2. One plus is that you have more data throughput bandwidth by using 2 drives vs. everything on 1 physical drive. I'm still using SATA drives, but M.2 may be much faster, so as not to make as much difference in that regard by using 2 physical drives. Plus I store hundreds of GBs of sampler libraries on my data drive. That would crowd my system drive if I had all that one one drive.

And for reference, I think it's only fair to compare modern DAWs, that are currently supported and developed. These are the top mainstream DAWs in use today. Many will disagree with the rankings in here, but I present it here with the disclaimer that rankings don't really count. If you made this list of their top 12, you're in. Two DAWs that didn't show up on the list that I know some folks around here use, are Samplitude and Tracktion, so consider them added as an honorable mention. I personally have several of these DAWs.. The best DAWs 2020: the best digital audio workstations for PC and Mac https://www.musicradar.com/news/the-best-daws-2020-the-best-music-production-software-for-pc-and-mac

Well, ummm right. But that's generally what they do. ? What kind of music do you make, and how do you plan to use a DAW to produce it?

Although Cakewalk was formerly a full fledged commercial DAW called Sonar that cost hundreds of $$$, 4 days of "screwing around" with it does not qualify as experience. If you are serious about getting help with Cakewalk, then there are plenty of helpful, friendly, experienced folks here that are willing to help get you started, if you let them.

Then I assume that you want something like NI Kontakt?

We should hit the next milestone within the next two weeks. There have been 53 new participants since yesterday morning. Only 528 more to go, and we still have 3 weeks!

Glad to hear that it's working again! @Matthew Sorrelsis a regular CSI detective when it comes to Cakewalk, and @scookis a virtual walking encyclopedia for all things Cakewalk. I'm not even certain he is human. Maybe a bot. Something dreamed up by Greg Hendershott to augment tech support back in the day? In any case it's fun and educational to watch them in action. ?

Will you be using an acoustic piano and recording via microphones, a digital piano with direct in, or will you be using a Virtual Instrument piano in the box? VI's take more CPU than audio tracks. Since you probably won't be using many simultaneous tracks of audio for your piano recording (just L and R for stereo), your needs should be modest. You would probably be fine with any quad core with the fastest clock that you can afford. But if you plan to use heavy mastering plugins, then the same rules would apply as with VI's. It all depends on exactly what you plan to use. Virtual Instruments and FX plugins can be very taxing on the CPU, but again, that depends exactly on which ones that you plan to use. And save some money for a professional audio interface. Good pre-amps will be very important to high quality acoustic recordings.

Then follow @scook's advice to save as MIDI. But then you would need to also follow @bitflipper's advice, because a MIDI file cannot save explicit instrument details, except for MIDI bank/patch info that correspond to your settings. And that only works automatically when played back on a MIDI GM synth, according to the GM instrument set, which happens to define Piano at the first patch slot. The other 127 instrument slots are pre-defined GM Standard instruments that you could work with. Otherwise, when using any other sound banks, you would need to set the MIDI file recipient up with the same sound bank as what you created the MIDI file with. The MIDI file is only going to call up the instrument sound by bank/patch number that you saved in the MIDI file, not by the instrument name. It will only sound the same if the recipient's instrument bank is loaded with the same bank as what you had loaded at the time you created the MIDI file and saved it. Always remember that the MIDI file format is rather quite limited to the types of data that it can store. Maybe you could explain your goal, such as where or how you would want want to use such a saved MIDI file. There might be better suggestions available for what you are trying to accomplish. In any case, you are working with MIDI inside of Cakewalk (the piano roll editor or step sequencer, for example), regardless of how you save the file or project.

If you use TTS-1 as your instrument and save the project as a .cwp (Cakewalk Project), rather than a .mid (MIDI) all of your instrument settings will be saved, as well as a lot of other things that cannot be stored in a MIDI file. And then you won't ever have to struggle with topics like MIDI SysEx or bank/patch change events like us old dinosaurs used to be required to learn. Unless you want to, of course! ?

That's a loaded question, and is all about what you plan to do with the DAW, as well as how big your budget is, LOL! Talk to @Jim Roseberryabout that. He builds custom DAWs for musicians that are well regarded. And don't forget an SSD drive, or two... ?

I have been learning Cakewalk for over 20 years. And I keep learning new stuff about it. I would give it at least 30 days, and try some of the suggested tutorials to get started. It might also be helpful if you indicated what your background is, like have you used any other DAWs, or is this your first? You might get more relevant responses to your request that way, such as setting it up with a bare bones interface that hides the complex stuff. It is very customizable in that way. And what do you want to accomplish with it? Record your voice or real instrument via mic or line in, record a virtual instrument in the box, write a song, make beats, etc? This is a professional recording studio in a box, so it has quite a steep learning curve for a first timer. The getting started videos should be sufficient to get up and running with.

Not overclocking anything should make for a more stable environment, which is desirable for a DAW. Anyway, RAM is not a bottleneck in modern computer performance, unless you don't have enough of it. It is the CPU clock speed and core count that matter most.

Take a look at this free utility. AppCrashView. It may give you some insight to the faulting module. https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/app_crash_view.html

Just 581 more participants until 4 freebies!

Ironically, if you added up everything that Larry talked you into buying in the past, you would most likely find at least $1,399 spent. Just sayin'. ?

All hail the King!!!

Well Eventide just reset my iLok activation for my broken laptop. Just sent the email Saturday morning, so that was very responsive. The funny thing is that AKAI and AIR beat them to it by about 5 hours. AIR even went the extra mile and reset my SONiVOX license for that machine, and I had not even requested that yet. LOL...

That's about as low as it ever goes, except when you can use your virtual cash at Plugin Boutique. But it's not on sale over there at this time.

https://www.cbs46.com/here-comes-taco-bell-s-answer-to-the-chicken-sandwich/article_1126042a-6dd8-5a99-846d-5f990054ea16.html

Very nice Reid! Thank you for the effort! I was particularly interested in the duet you did with the strummed acoustic and the UJAM bass. I can see the potential for that! I was wondering how best to sync up the bass changes with existing tracks, and this looks like an intriguing solution! Can you please provide some details of that setup? I can guess, but it would be nice to know how you routed the MIDI and setup the UJAM bass...