David Baay

The concepts of clips and groove clips hadn't yet been implemented when CAL was developed; it can only operate on individual events. CAL could be made to do it by Copy-Paste with the known From and Thru values of the selected clip. Groove Clip Looping is sort of aimed at users who prefer to edit with the mouse. If you prefer to use keyboard shortcuts, there is already Duplicate and Copy-Paste with Repetitions that will get the job done in short order. Or you could go to clip properties and change the length of the Groove Clip - e.g. if you quaduple the length, you get 4 repetitions.

Only if the transport is restarted in between takes. With loop-recording, it works more like Comping; try it. I just checked back to the last release of Sonar Platinum, and it behaved the same.

Yes, it's still included and that's the only way to apply swing to MIDI non-destructively. To my mind it doesn't really make sense to apply some fixed amount of swing to a whole project as swing is only really meaningful in the context of an even (or at least closer to even) rhythm in some other part.

Overwrite only applies when you restart the transport in between takes. Loop-recording in Overwrite mode is similar to Comp recording - each pass gets a new lane, and the clip in the last pass is left unmuted while all others are muted. The main difference is that the penultimate take will be entirely muted in Overwrite mode even if the final pass is only partial; in Comping mode, the un-overlapped part of the penultimate take will be split off and left unmuted so you have something sounding throughout the looped region on playback. In either case you can unmute any clip by selecting it and hitting K on your PC keyboard. Or, if you only want to hear one at a time, you can click in the bottom half of any take where the Comp tool is active which will automatically unmute that take and mute all others.

In my 35 years I have encountered this issue many times, and it's come up on the forum many more times. As a result, I've always advocated selecting a specific channel of a specific port for Input to avoid duplicate/truncated notes and related issues.

Personally, I prefer having Velocity Offset (a.k.a MIDI Gain) widget in the track header, and use it frequently, because it essentially gives the ability to "tell the performer to play more aggressively" with the resultant change in attack/loudness/timbre/etc. response programmed by the synth developer. To me it's more useful to have ready access to a control that does something very different to the sound than audio gain/volume. Conversely, I seldom have a need to alter audio Gain on an Instrument track. I prefer to control the input level to the track by MIDI Volume (CC7) controlling the output level of the synth. This is an old habit based on the the fact that you can't control audio Gain on a live input from a hardware synth, but I see no reason to treat soft synths differently just because I can. I think it could be argued that Velocity Offset should never have been conflated with 'Gain' in the first place, and it might be useful to have ready access to both controls in Instrument track header as you suggested. But if I can only have one, I'll take Vel+. Ulitmately, I'm satisfied with having access to all the controls via the Inspector.

I do this all the time: - Create at track named Master Bounce, set the ouput direct to Main Outs, mute it and and group its mute in opposition with the Master bus mute. - Tracks > Bounce to Tracks - Set Destination to Master Bounce, Source = Buses, and check only the Master bus. - OK - Toggle the mute to choose whether you hear the bounced master or the live master bus.

Is keyboard is using USB MIDI or a DIN connection to the Scarlett? In either case, I second Promidi's suggestion to check for incorrect assignment of a port as a Control Surface.

What exactly are the symptoms of "not working"; what's the source and what's the target? Does the interface have MIDI activity lights to verify it's receiving input from a keyboard or output from the PC? How about CbB's MIDI activity indicator in the system tray? How about the health status of the driver in Device Manager? Try unchecking/re-checking the ports in MIDI Devices and saving changes.

As noted, CbB has a simple tick-based offset in each track via the Time+ widget that affects the whole track. Sonar additionally allows setting an absolute time offset via Articulation maps to accomodate changing tempos and applying different offsets in different parts of a track if necessary.

A USB mic is essentially a rudimentary audio interface with a transducer attached. Although it might be made to work with the right configuration settings, you should really just get a decent analog mic for the MOTU so you don't have two interafaces using different drivers, driver modes and possibly different sample rates and latencies competing for resources and having to be synced.

Comp recording automatically splits and mutes sections of clips wherever a newer take overlaps an older one. You can select muted clips and hit keyboard shortcut 'K' to unmute them. If you're intending to get layered takes, use Sound on Sound record mode.

I hadn't really registered how long the gap is. A gap that big seems more like some sort of unreported file-writing error. DPC spikes or anything else causing the buffer to run dry would usually cause a full dropout with the transport stopping long before that. I'm pretty sure the DropoutMsec parameter applies only to playback and that the tolerance for recording is much smaller or even zero (i.e. even a single empty buffer will cause an instantaneous recording dropout). FWIW, I have a Dell laptop with Win11 that's prone to DPC spikes but have not encountered anything like that. One thought: If you've enabled Write Caching at some point in your attempts to gain reliability you might actually want to disable that; it's not always helpful in my experience.

I have some essential tremor in my hands and pretty significant macular degeneration in my right eye, but have no issues with clicking in the timeline to set the Now time even on my 15" laptop display with the scaling set to show the same real esate as on my 24" desktop monitor (also small by current standards). I wonder if you might just need a higher-quality mouse with the right mousepad, responsiveness settings, weight, friction and an ergonomic position that keeps your arm and hand relaxed and stable to achieve the necessary control to click precisely without dragging. All that said, I can see some value in having more control over the multiple functions that the timeline supports and being able to disable some of them (I almost never use its zoom function, myself).

I'm guessing this means you have a send from the Master bus to an Aux track that's recording. In that case, you just need to route the Metronome bus direct to Main Outs instead of to the Master bus. I generally do this so that the click isn't affecting my metering; you just have to keep in mind that it may cause clipping at the D/A converters, but ideally you won't be running your Master bus that hot while still tracking. I also usually run a "Pre-Master" bus ahead of the Master to sum all tracks with no mastering FX applied and a "--> Main Outs" bus between the Master and the interface to get the most flexibility in metering, mastering and A/Bing bounced Master tracks against the live mix.

Oops. First instance was wrong; second was right. Fixed it.

Yes, disk I/O buffers can be set independently. I've frequently raised my playback buffer to accomodate high track counts (mostly in 3rd-party projects as my own aren't generally that dense), but I'm seldom recording more than a couple tracks at a time in my own use so don't need a large record buffer. The disk side of things has all become less critical with the advent of SSDs, and it's usally pretty clear whether a dropout was due to a CPU or disk shortfall. I've never personally had occasion to mess with dropout tolerance so can't really say what's ideal in a given situation, and this stuff tends to be very system-specific so you might just have to experiment.

I've rarely encountered a dropped buffer while recording but when it does happen, that buffer will simply be missing from the file, and the next successfully processed buffer will effectively be butted up against the last buffer with no gap. This generally creates a disconuity in the waveform that will manifest as a pop unless the sample level at end of the previous buffer and the start of the next just happens to be very close to the same and trending in the same direction. But if there's a noticeable sync issue with other tracks, that would suggest that it's more than a single, small buffer getting lost. If you're running an exceptionally high buffer like 1024-2048 samples for reliability and/or recording more than one track, you might actually get better results with a smaller buffer size or you might need to increase your Record (disk) I/O bufferin Preferences to accomodate that. Depending on the criticality of the recording, you might also conseder lowering the dropout tolerance so that recording just stops rather than continuing on with no indication of a problem. See this post of more info:

Good on you for doing so. Many issues get posted with no mention of the plugins involved even though plugins are at the root of most unexpected behaviors. Good point. Mod wheels aren't usually spring-loaded, but they can become jittery and send spurious messages due to vibration. I've dealt with this in the past by adding a flatline automation envelope to the track to hold it at a fixed level.

Group the controls, then go into Group Manager, select Custom, and swap the Start and End values of one of them to get them moving in opposition. Write-enable both, and move the control on one of them (either in the UI or from a control surface) in real time during playback to write automation on both.

Both CbB and the new Sonar (no longer all-caps) install independently of SONAR Platinum (except for shared folder content in the Cakewalk directory that is compatible with and used by all of them), and will not affect its operation. They are both fully backward-compatible with project files created in SONAR, and you'll be prompted to let them inherit your hardware setup and other settings from Preferences.

Disable 'Zero Controllers When Play Stops' under Preferences > Project > MIDI. Aria uses CC1 (Modulation) for volume control and CC11 for Expression so zeroing controllers will silence it when the transport is not running. And if these controllers aren't used during recording a live performance, you should insert an initial controller event for each of them at the beginning of the track to ensure they get set consistenty by MIDI Event Chase every time you start playback.

Be aware this is a per-plugin setting. Disabling it for Kontakt 7 will not affect plugins for which it's enabled and giving the desired result.

Other than by unstalling, no, I don't think so. Even Excluding plugins ony hides them from the 'regular' plugin list, not the Region FX list (e.g. Drum Replacer is Excluded by default because it should only be used as a Region FX).

I jumped in the way back machine and verified Q was clip mute toggle in Sonar 8 and K activated the Mute Tool. I won't ask why you're still using Sonar 8 (!).