Noel Borthwick

I believe that was an intentional change. It was too confusing for many people to have one layout per section. It was done in 2016 or so. Generally layouts are too much work for most people so we switched to the tag based built in plugin categories which is quick and easier to use.

Note that to edit categories inside the plugin browser you must set your filter (dropdown on plugins tab) to "Sort by category" or it wont work. That is likely why its not showing up for you. Some important distinctions between the plugin manager, layouts and the built in plugin browser. The plugin browser stores all the scanned plugins in a database and the categories are like tags so you can group things under multiple categories. As you found you can make your own categories as well. (These are not to be confused with the category in the plugin manager which specifies the plugin type) Any changes in categorization in the plugin browser only apply when the "Sort by category" filter is selected. i.e. it is completely distinct from plugin layouts which are authored in the plugin manager. If you want to utilize the plugin browser categories in other plugin menus or as layouts you can simply choose "Manage Layouts" from the plugins tab dropdown and it will automatically populate a layout with all your custom categories and even honor multiple categories. Once you save a new layout with that you can use that as a layout in the plugin browser from then on. Basically plugin layouts can be thought of as user categorized sets of plugins. The plugin browser categories are "built in" - it initially builds its categories from categories advertised by the plugin vendors for VST3 and there are also some factory authored ones for common VST2 plugins that we did. You are free to save these as plugin layouts and keep different sets of them or use the simpler built in browser categories. I suspect most users would find the latter approach simpler than maintaining plugin layouts.

We already have mechanics to store it in a database since the last two years. Its also in the registry for backwards compatibility with other versions of SONAR.

So even better - I fixed the slow loading of the categories ? I now cache the data that was causing the really slow registry lookups when the plugin manager starts up. The startup of the app will be slower but now switching categories is just a fraction of a second to refresh.

Ultimately it will. When layout management is rolled into the buolt in browser we'll deprecate the external plugin manager app.

Exactly. The only extra functionality in the external utility is layout management and excluding plugins.

The time taken has nothing to do with the listbox population. Its reading the registry that is slow. Though you see it slow for 7 VSTi's behind the scenes it has to go through the entire inventory to find them. If you have a few hundred VST's a lot of registry reads. The DX effects enumeration is much more efficient than the registry enumeration hence its fast. The logic can of course be improved by using caching (like CbB does) and this was a todo item back in the day. This wouldn't improve the first load time of the plugin box but subsequent loads would be quick.

Sure thats fine but I assume thats that's something you do very occasionally right? Once you make a layout you don't need plugin manager anymore.

Sure but that shouldn't be something you need to do on a daily basis.

Plugin Manager is not really being maintained these days and it hasn't been updated in a very long time. We plan to ultimately depreciate it from Cakewalk. Its only provided for legacy reasons. The only reason you need to ever use it today is for creating plugin layouts. Everything else and more can be done much more efficiently directly within the Cakewalk plugin browser tab, including scanning from preferences. What is the reason you still use plugin manager?

@Starship KrupaSome more things to troubleshoot: 1. Do you see the same delay on starting playback on a new project with a single audio track? 2. Go into preferences | playback and recording, and ensure "always open all devices" is off. 3. Go into preferences | project record, and ensure "allow arm changes during playback and record" is off. 4. Go into audio device setup and disable all inputs and outputs except the ones you need. Start with one in and one out. You can also try resetting the config file. Go to preferences config file and click "reset config to defaults". this will back up your current settings and reset to defaults. See if any of these improve the lag on playback start. You can also try a different audio device if you have one available to troubleshoot. The only possibilities for delay on playback start are audio driver or disk related typically. You could also have some service that is slowing down file open operation on playback startup.

When you choose the edit filter to edit an envelope it will add clip envelopes for ALL clips on that lane. You can still right click the clip you want an add an envelope manually. It will. When you copied it to the new lane the envelope is not "active" so you cant edit it. You can still shift click the envelope to activate it or set the edit filter on the new lane to allow editing. This sounds like a bug. I tried to repro it but couldn't unfortunately.

Yeah it brings back a lot of memories from a different era. At the time I mixed the tracks via MIDI CC7 and then used a mackie 1202 to mix the outputs of the hardware synths to stereo and record it to cassette tape It would be nice to have a real drummer instead of the cheesy MIDI drums and a bass player as well. I might try and modernize it and try and actually perform it someday. Never actually did anything with that tune other than this scratch track although we were looking for a recording opportunity to do this and a bunch of other tunes. It never materialized though...

That's an artifact of the early guitar synth pitch to MIDI stuff. It could be difficult to control. I was tempted to strip out the pitch wheel but I think it had a kind of organic sound so I left it there. But I did goof on the synth assignment - I think I have one instance of fabfilter playing two parts simultaneously on different channels. It doesn't appear to respect the MIDI channel properly so the wheel events are getting interpreted incorrectly when they are playing together. I should split it into different instances...

They were moved because CbB has different plugins and the templates with Platinum have different branding. We didn't want to overwrite those

BTW this tune was uploaded to BandLab directly from CbB using the new export toolbar. I exported the buses as stems. Try it out - its very convenient. All the song info text from the project info tab in the browser should also populate in BandLab.

They should work on multiple instances. If you have a project that exhibits this please share it so we can take a look at why its not working there. Just the cwp file should be sufficient to replicate the issue.

Yes I forgot to mention the shift modifier to constrain. That can be used whenever you copy data between tracks to retain position.

What was cool was that I was able to get that project to play with softsynths since I'd originally used a hardware synth. There is a ton of pitch bend info on the synth tracks because it was all tracked with a guitar controller. The Roland controllers generate pitch wheel events to do slurs, hammer on's and even vibrato. So you can literally get hundreds of pitch events in the space of a measure depending on your articulation when you play. I don't use guitar synths these days but that was one thing I actually liked about the them, since they made guitar synth sound more organic than keyboard parts. However most soft synths don't properly track wheel events like this so they sound weird or glitchy. I found both the FabFilter Twin and TTS1 handle them perfectly though so I was able to fairly closely get a patch that was like the original GR-50 sound I had used then. I remember Cakewalk professional had a lot of issues rendering the pitch wheel events in this same project back in the day. When I was a beta tester in '93-94, I reported bugs where some events were being rendered incorrectly on playback. I remember Ron pulling out his hair trying to fix them since they hadn't seen many projects from MIDI guitar controllers.

Its generally horizontal but yeah I like things to move around a bit even in this genre. There is some interesting symmetric motion in between the sys chords. I think I have the changes somewhere if you're interested...

This is a jazz fusion composition of mine that I originally recorded and mixed in Cakewalk Professional 1.0 This was an all MIDI project at the time - no audio sequencers were around! I used the GR-50 synth to record all the MIDI and it was mixed using MIDI CC's alone. It's amazing that Cakewalk still loads the project file from back then without any problems. I just added a few virtual instruments and did a rough mix. Nothing fancy in the mix. I left it vintage sounding Noel Borthwick: Guitar Synth (GR-50) Ramona Borthwick: Electric piano Synths used: Fabfilter Twin 2 TTS1 Session Drummer SI-Bass SI_Strings Lounge Lizard

Why not just Select and control drag the clips on to a blank space below other tracks? This will create a new track with the selected clips.

Clip envelopes are per clip and have no relationship to lanes. As Keni mentioned only track envelopes are displayed in lanes not clip envelopes. If you move a clip its clip envelope is completely independent from any envelope on the track.

Can you try and describe the exact workflow you accomplish with the old layers that you cannot do with take lanes? Maybe there is something we're missing here.

Yes a clean install means it will reinstall Windows from scratch and all plugins etc will need to be reinstalled. That said, you also get a choice when doing a clean install to reformat the main system drive or not. In my case I did not and it retained a bunch of other folders other than the Windows folders, user documents etc. This can be useful but to be completely clean I think its better to reformat the system drive and let it install from scratch. Yes its a pita to reinstall your stuff from scratch but if you have an aging system doing this will potentially make things launch faster etc since your registry is clean. Also a good time to do some housecleaning and get rid of stuff you don't use. Before I reinstalled I made a copy of my application files and documents folder and took screenshots of all installed programs so I could see what I had earlier. Getting back wasn't as bad as i thought it would be.