David Baay

Both Drum Replacer and Audiosnap allow extracting transient locations as MIDI, but the resulting note events will all have the same pitch (MIDI note number) and duration. So right away you've lost two of the most essential and difficult-to-reproduce elements of a bass part. So I really don't think either of those tools will be very useful for the purpose. If you have some flavor of Melodyne installed, dragging an audio clip directly to a MIDI track will automatically use Melodyne to extract the notes as MIDI data (including pitch and duration information if the trial hasn't expired as Steve mentioned). One issue to beware of with reinforcing a bass part using a MIDI-driven synth is that you will tend to get undesirable phasing effects from the interaction of the harmonics unless you only reinforce the fundamental with a simple sine wave, as is more commonly done.

No, it's not possible to limit the scope of Flatten Comp to certain lanes or time ranges. Functionally, there's really no need to flatten a comp at all, unless you plan to move the resulting clip - or parts of it - to another track or section of the comped track or you just want to have it 'set in stone' to protect it against possible editing mishaps later. The alternative is to do it manually: - Select the comped section and bounce it to a new track. If desired, you can then drag that clip into a new lane of the original track and manually mute and lock the clips that contributed as Flatten Comp would. - Split the clips as needed before comping, select and drag the relevant sections (e.g. Choruses) as a group to lanes of a new track, holding Shift to preserve the start times, and comp them there. When using Bounce to Tracks, you'll need to beware of track Gain, Volume and FX getting baked into the bounces.

The limitation of both those options is that they won't extract the pitch information. Ideally you would want to use at least Melodyne Essential for this purpose. I believe it's still available as a free add-on to CbB via the Bandlab Assistant. Beyond that, if you are okay with finding the pitches yourself, and just want the rhythm extracted, I would suggest you just try the other options and see which works best. Audiosnap is more flexible in terms of controlling the transient detection, and i would be inclined to go that way. Drum Replacer is optimized for detecting drum transients so I suspect it might not do as well with bass, especially if the part has a lot of sustained notes. And it won't be able to do direct replacement due to the lack of pitch detection.

Fiddle-farting? I wager I'll have my MIDI track recorded before you can find your car keys. ;^) But, seriously, I can see where the advice to 'just record a real one' is sort of an extension of my 'just play it in real time' advice often given to those asking how to humanize their MIDI sequences, and I'm inclined to second it. The one caveat I would add in this case is that, in my experience, 'playing' a shaker well and consistently can be a more challenging musical endeavor than one might imagine.

GM synths like the TTS-1 have a Cabasa on note #69 (A above middle C), and Maraca on note #70. I've been using these sounds from a Roland D-110 for decades (!) to do 'shaker' patterns. Some years ago I created an SFZ instrument of the D-110's drum kit that I can share on request. PM me an e-mail address if you want to give it a whirl.

I don't think so. Could be a handy feature.

I assume you mean the position indicator for Aim Assist. Others have complained about that. Not currently possible to get rid of them other than toggling off Aim Assist (X). Personally I almost never use Aim Assist; having the line following my mouse pointer everywhere in the clips pane makes me nervous.

After adding the track at the bottom, you can drag it to the desired position. There are several hotspots on the track where you get the 'move' tool; I usually hover just to the right of the track name field. Routing to a drum map is determined by the Output assignment of the MIDI track. Copying a MIDI clip to a new track can't bring a drum map assignment with it. It sounds like maybe focus is still on the original track in the PRV...?

Just to minimize the number of possible variables, I would start by disabling 'Always Echo Current MIDI Track in Preferences', and set all the MIDI track inputs to None. Then make sure you have a forced output Channel assigned on each MIDI Track, and that the MIDI clips themselves contain no Pan or Volume controllers (CC10 and CC7, respectively). Incidentally, why not update to the latest 19.10 release?

Your wish is the Bakers' command. That was just 'fixed' in 19.10. It's now an option in Preferences > Editing to have Paste Special settings persist, and they don't by default.

View > Show Multiple Lanes

The one mistake I still find myself making in the PRV is expecting right-click to bring up note properties. But when I need to delete many individual notes, I find right-click to be very handy. On the other hand, I adapted to lasso by dragging the right-click so easily that I soon found myself trying to do it in other applications or Windows Explorer, and getting unexpected results.

At this point, there are so many useful new features and improvements (dozens of major ones, and hundreds of little ones) that it's hard to say what, if anything, is indispensible. But, off the top of my head, some of the biggies are : - Overall Stability and Performance - Plugin Support and Management - Navigation and View Management (Control Bar, Multidock, Inspector, Browser, Screensets, Lenses, Auto-zoom, Plugin Window Recycling, etc.) - ProChannel - Mix Recall - Patch Points/Aux Tracks - Take Lanes/Comping - PRV Track/Controller Pane Improvements - Ripple Editing - ARA and Region FX

Three tips to help avoid problems with dropped/stuck MIDI notes: - Insert soft synths in the Synth Rack rather than in audio track FX bins - Increase the 'Prepare Using' buffer value to the old default of 500ms under Preferences > MIDI > Playback and Recording; the newer default of 250ms is too low in a lot of cases, especially if the project includes PDC-inducing plugins. - Make sure MIDI track inputs are assigned to a specific port and channel, and not All Inputs - Omni. Some MIDI FX plugins can also cause problems like this.

Dragging and hearing the note replay sounds like you're getting the Velocity adjustment tool which activates when hovering at the upper edge of a note., and replays the note as you raise or lower the velocity so you can hear the result. Sizing and zooming the PRV view to make the notes a little taller will help distinguish the hotspots. The second part about superimposed notes isn't clear to me. Normally it's not necessary to have a new event start at the same pitch before the previous one ends. That musical effect is usually accomplished by using Sustain or Sostenuto on plucked/hammered string instruments or using legato samples/modes on bowed sting instruments. But maybe I misunderstood...?

I generally resist the urge to comment on posts here, but sometimes the rest of the forum is so quiet, it's hard to resist. ;^) Ultimately these suggestions are intended primarily for the Bakers' eyes, but that doesn't mean other users aren't welcome to weigh in with their opinions about the value, necessity or implementation details of a suggested feature/change. It can happen (and has happened) that a suggestion gets accepted and implemented in a way that really screws up the workflow of long-time users, so they have right to register their concerns in advance. And, as you say, there appear to be many cases where a user isn't aware of an existing feature that offers most or all of what they want.

Right-click deletes. Also not previously mentioned, I believe, is that left-click and drag draws a note of any desired length, and a very short drag before release draws another note of the last-used duration - effectively giving you a note with a single-click, no modifier, and no tool-swapping. Since it's difficult to make music of any interest using only a single duration (one-shot drum sample triggering excepted, of course), I would think a lot of note entry would involve this click-and-drag gesture.

Just say "no" to My $.02: If you're writing enough music in the PRV to get a repetitive stress injury, it's time to start recording the old fashioned way... using a MIDI keyboard. Even if you have to use Step Record mode rather than real time recording, it should be significantly more efficient and ergonomically friendly than drawing notes with a mouse. And if you can manage even a rough real time performance, correcting the mistakes will probably require less clicking. And the more you do it, the fewer mistakes you'll have to correct.

That was my first thought as well, but the screenshot shows that track with the active audio meter is not focused, and not echoing.

A tick equals a millisecond only at exactly at 62.5 bpm. Your first post indicated you know the required offset in milliseconds, so nudging it by milliseconds would be the easiest way to do it. If you want to know how many ticks that's going to be, the formula is: Ticks = Milliseconds/1000/60 x Tempo x 960 (assuming default 960 PPQ Clock setting)

Hard to tell without being able to see the inputs of the synth audio parts of the Instrument tracks. My first guess would be that an instrument track was cloned which creates linked tracks associated with the same synth . Split the instrument tracks, show the I/O widgets, and let us see that along with the synth rack if you can't see the problem immediately. EDIT: Actually, a quick double-check shows that issue with duplicating instrment tracks was fixed some timte ago as I thought it might have been. Nevertheless, you'll need to check the routing, and let us know how what steps were used to create the tracks.

I don't actually work much with 'looped' audio . So far as I know, just having looping enabled makes a clip follow project tempo. I'm not sure why there's a separate 'Stretch to Tempo' option. If you imported the clip into an existing project, it should have taken on the project tempo, but as long as it is, there may have been an error when the tempo was set on export from FL Studio. Loops typically aren't that long. If you just want to work with this audio in Cakewalk at the original tempo, I suggest you go back to the source, and make sure it exports as an ordinary .WAV file. If it's not a loop, it won't matter whether you set the Cakewalk project to 160bpm before or after importing it

The Groove Clip section of the Clip tab in the Inspector has an 'Original Tempo' field.

Then I would go with Mike's suggestion that they were already REX/Groove-enabled before you imported them, and need to be bounced. But they'll automatically take on the project tempo when imported, which could already be different from the native tempo of the clip(s).

Have you confirmed the audio actually plays at a different tempo? The M:B:T timeline is the fixed reference in Cakewalk, and the Now cursor just travels faster or slower at different tempos. As a result, when you change tempo, the displayed length of audio clips will change, but they aren't actually being 'stretched'.