David Baay

The rule of thumb is to have the 'pre-master' peaking at no more than -6dB. But if you're going to master the mix on the Master bus in the same project, you'll want to use the input Gain to pull down the level ahead of the FX bus where you'll be putting mastering plugins. If you're going to export the mix for someone else to master or to do mastering in another project or another application yourself, you can use Volume to bring the level of the exported file down. I do it all in one project by basically renaming the Master bus to 'Pre-Master' and putting another 'Master' bus between that bus and the hardware outs. I can get away with doing it all in one project because my projects tend to be pretty lightweight to begin with in terms of plugin load. Another trick I use for doing it all in one project is to put a third 'Main Outs' bus between the Master and the hardware outs. This can be used to control output volume to the monitoring system without affecting metering on the Master. This is also where my metronome bus outputs so I can keep it from clipping the output when the Master is maxed out. Also, when I like how the Master is sounding, I can bounce that to a 'Master' track that outputs directly to that 'Main Outs' bus, and group the mute on that track in opposition with the Master bus mute to A/B between them as I make more tweaks to the live Master. Additional bounces can be made to new lanes of the 'Master' track, and the lane solo muttons used to A/B/C/D... between all the different mixes/masters. I started doing this long before the Mix Recall function came along. Using Mix Recall on top of this gives me the best of all words - superfast and easy A/B switching with 'hard copies' of everything plus and the ability to recall the settings of whichever mix/master I finally settle on as the best... so far ;^). And finally, the trick of bouncing the master bus to a track means your final, mastered mix is saved with the project, and you can easily tell whether the rendered file is a faithful representation of the live mix. You can even invert the phase on the Master track and play it back in parallel with the live mix on the Master bus to check for nulling (just remove the mute grouping first, and keep in mind that some synth and FX plugins may behave slightly differently from one playback to the next, causing less-than-perfect nulling, unless the tracks are frozen). Hmmm... that got longer than intended... Hope it helps.

If the PRV is also displaying incorrectly, then the MIDI file from BiaB likely had issues baked in. You might try 'Opening' the MIDI file as a new project rather than 'Importing' it into an existing project to understand what was in the file. There are probably a number of ways to fix this, but I'd need to see the project file to understand exactly what's going on and whether a global change can fix it or it needs to be done measure by measure.

Scroll lock enabled? Clicking with the mouse can also lock scrolling, depending on settings in Track View > Options > Click Behavior. If this is enabled, clicking in an open area of the Track view (i.e. where no clips exist) will re-enable scrolling. The two scroll locks are independent, and it is possible to double-lock scrolling by enabling both.

You need to unfreeze the track to get access to the MIDI without splitting the Instrument track. Even if you split the track to separate MIDI and Synth audio tracks, you still need to unfreeze in order to re-enable the synth and re-render the modified MIDI, so you might as well unfreeze. .

The feature referenced by scook applies only to clip automation and fades. Cakewalk does not change the waveform display with changes to a track's Gain control. If that's what your talking about, I presume the videos you've seen are showing some other DAW.

Had not gotten around to actually listening to anything other than the click track. ;^)

Soloing by muting only audio outputs and not MIDI works better because the synths driven by those other MIDI tracks are still rendering audio so that when you unsolo the soloed track, the rest of the audio comes back in fully intact without dropped notes from note-ons or controllers that got 'muted'. MIDI event 'chasing' can address that to an extent, but not as well as just leaving the rendering process running, and muting the audio output. But nothing has changed with regard to these other 'odd' behaviors as far as I can tell. Muting a MIDI track still allows live-input to pass to the output though the MIDI meter doesn't show it.

I think my issue was due to Melodyne (Editor) having become deactivated since I last used it. I was subsequently able to get a tempo by dragging the clip, but only one average for the whole section. I then trimmed it, duplicated it a couple times, and bounced the three copies together, and got a more typical result with multiple chnages over several measures. But I still prefer Set Measure/Beat At Now for its precision, control and flexibility at the cost of a bit more time and effort. I have been wondering why you break up the clips and process sections separately. Though I don't like the way Melodyne places tempo changes in general, I've not found that it has any particular trouble with long clips with variable tempos.

If Kontakt is inserted in the FX bin of the audio track, try moving it to the Synth Rack. Using the FX bin to host a synth is a legacy configuration that is still supported for backward compatibility, but is not the preferred configuration and has been known to cause stuck notes. If that's not it, I dunno... When I first saw the post, I suspected Zero Controllers When Play Stops was not enabled to zero CC64 (Sustain) which is a pretty common issue with piano synths, I know you've already checked that, but it might still be worth pressing/releasing your sustain pedal to see if it stops the notes.

I have not used the drag-to-timeline feature for a while - certainly not since the new tempo track feature was introduced. I'm finding that it's not working in the current release at all with any audio file - no errors or hangs, but no tempo changes are generated. Possibly the last time you used it successfully was in an earlier release...?

The Melodyne component used to extract the tempo info may be having trouble with that - insufficient data - and the algorithm might be stuck in a loop if that condition wasn't anticipated. Or, similarly, Cakewalk may be having trouble with the limited set of data it's getting from Melodyne. I'll check out the bundle in a bit.

You might try Bounce to Clip(s) each of the split clips so you have a separate audio file for each instead of a slip-edited copy referencing the original file. It may be there is some issue with processing the slip-edited clips.

Check the Track Inspector for the Battery 4 track for sends.

The PRV shows some CC1 - Modulation event(s) have been entered/recorded. I'm not sure how SI Drums responds to CC1, but CC1=0 might be silencing the synth. If the Mod events weren't added intentionally, try deleting them.

Of course not, but it is in this case.

And make sure the To/By switch is on 'To'.

I have seen artifacts like this in the past, but your case may be a side-effect of the new waveform outlining feature. I've been noticing some added 'noise' in near-flatline audio that I think is related to this. You can try turning it off: View > Display > Show Waveform Outlines.

New projects will use the pan law set in the template from which they're created. It is possible to set a pan law with no project or template open, but that will only be the default if you start the new project using the 'No Tracks or Buses' (used to be called [Blank]) 'template'.

With Groove Clips, you don't set the tempo of the clip directly; you set the 'Beats in Clip' value, and Cakewalk calculates the original tempo based on the absolute length of the clip and that number of beats you specify. Cakewalk guesses the number of beats in the clip when you import it, but may get it wrong.

This is not correct. It's always been a quirk of Pan Law that it's not in the Project section of Preferences but it is, in fact, a per-project/template setting,

Hmmm... your screenshot shows Auto-echo enabled on the MIDI track labeled Vocal, and the output is TTS-1, but there's no forced output Channel set. It's not necessary to set this if you're changing output channels channels on your keyboard to play and record the parts for different instruments, but it's easier to just leave the keyboard set to a fixed output channel (usually 1), and use the track's output channel to determine which channel of TTS-1 responds to each track. If recorded MIDI is playing back on the track that has input echo enabled, real-time echoed MIDI should also be heard, so I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but I recommend you set appropriate output channels on all tracks pointing to TTS-1. I would also recommend you set the Input on MIDI tracks to the specific port and channel of your keyboard rather than Omni - All. I wouldn't expect this to solve the immediate problem, but it's a best practice, and will prevent confusion later if and when you have other sources of MIDI coming in (from external hardware or MIDI-generating plugins).

To clarify this a bit, the fixed visual time reference in Cakewalk is the MBT scale, and the Now cursor travels faster or slower across the bars and beats according to the tempo. If audio is not deliberately enabled to follow tempo changes, the visual length of the clip will change such that it takes the same amount of time for the Now cursor to traverse the clip at the new tempo. The behavior is actually the opposite of what Mark said - audio clips shrink when the project tempo is lowered and stretch when it's raised.

Notwithstanding that MIDI-OX shows Note Offs being received, I suspect the combination of a generic MIDI-USB cable, generic Windows MIDI driver, and ancient (c. 1988) keyboard is resulting in malformatted/mis-timed MIDI messages that Cakewalk is not able to process properly. If the MIDI-USB cable has a dedicated driver available, you can try installing that. Otherwise, I would recommend upgrading to a 'real' MIDI interface, and or finding a newer used keyboard with built-in USB interface.

Ctrl+Alt+V to bring up the Paste Special dialog. Start time is part of the default dialog; click the Advanced button to see more options. You might also want to see the documentation on 'Use Paste Special Options on Paste' under Preferences > Editing to get the default behavior you prefer (i.e. whether changes to Paste Special options persist as the default for regular pasting or are applied only when using Paste Special).

Based on your last update, and that the issue seems Kontakt-specific, this probably isn't applicable, but FWIW: Time+ is a control in MIDI and Instrument tracks that allows you to offset the rendering of MIDI earlier or later by a specified number of ticks to tweak the timing. I have previously reported that Freeze will fail to process events at the beginning of a track that has a negative Time+ offset is in place. I haven't checked to see if it was ever fixed. The workaround is to destructively apply the offset by zeroing the Time+ control and sliding the MIDI earlier by the same amount before freezing.