David Baay

The MIDI Prepare Using buffer has no bearing on MIDI sent to hardware ouputs. Its purpose is to pre-render audio from soft synths. For bes behavior when starting/stopping playback, changing loop points or editing MIDI during playback, it's best to keep it low. The primary symptom of an insufficient buffer is dropped notes. If you're not hearing that, you probalby don't need to change it from the default of 50ms.

Yes, but the Vel+ fader can add or subtract up to 127, so it goes from -127 to +127 and resets to 0 (no offset).

I'm afraid you're out of luck. The only way to create a non-contiguous selection of audio is by manually Ctrl-clicking segments. I tried some workarounds but had no success.

I think you must mean MIDI Volume faders. Vel+ runs from -127 to +127 and resets to 0. It's MIDI Volume that resets to 101. That said, do you use a hardware control surface or possibly have Remote Control set up on your MIDI Volume controls?

The controller sends MIDI messages to instruct a synth what to play. The meter is showing the velocity of MIDI Note On/Off messages, not audio volume level. What you need to do is right-click in the tracks pane below your existing MIDI track (which you can just delete), choose Insert Instrument, and pick TTS-1 (a multitimbral General MIDI synth) or one of the "SI" synths that comes bundled with CbB (assuming you haven't yet installed any 3rd-party instruments). An instrument track combines a MIDI track and a synth Audio track. To understand how it works, you should right-click the new track and choose Split Instrument Track which will separate the MIDI and Audio parts of it into separate tracks so you can easily examine and play with the controls and I/O assignments of each.

What driver mode? Some ASIO drivers cannot be shared regardless of App settings; I don't know about Focusrite. If that's the issue, it should be sufficient just to shut down Finale and re-launch CbB. If Finale supports WASAPI, changing them both to WASAPI Shared should do the trick. Or Rewire Finale into CbB as a client if Finale supports Rewire (some developers dropped it when it became unsupported).

Hey William, good to see you on the new forum (David Baay = brundlefly). You probably know that hard crashes like that are usually driver-related. I would guess this issue is related to your audio driver being invoked to audition pitch changes. You might try turning off audition (or toggling the audio engine off altogether) and see if gets more stable. If it does, changing ASIO buffer size might help. Otherwise you might need to try a different interface or experiment with WDM/WASAPI to further confirm it's the ASIO driver.

Having only listened on headphones at this point. I much prefer the meatier V2 drums, especially the snare.

In that case, I'm sure you know the preferred approach would be to record the MIDI from the Alesis, quantize it as needed, and then record audio from the Alesis being driven by MIDI played back from CbB. But if you only have access to the audio, quantizing tracks separately is fine in this case. Beyond that, I really can't advise further without seeing an example, preferably as a minimal project file that demonstrates the issue.

This indicates the problem is with the interface or monitoring. A quick Google found several other references to "fade in" problems with the UMC 404HD, but no solutions offered. Seems it's got some sort of built-in gate or speaker-protection circuit in the analog section that's malfunctioning. You should return it if you can and get something with a proven reputation for quality hardware and drivers.

Can you share a sample project with a single track that goes out of sync with the metronome when not frozen? Quality of the interface/drivers should not have any bearing on this scenario, but the Soundcraft seems like a reasonable piece of kit with ASIO drivers so should not be a problem in any case. Quantizing tracks individually should not be a problem in terms of basic timing sync, but to avoid phase issues due to mic bleed across tracks, you really should look into one of the suggested approaches that uses a common set of transient markers applied to all tracks before quantizing.

The best manual tool is Set Measure/Beat at Now. Set the Now time at a transient, Shift+M, and enter the measure and beat (or fraction of a beat) that transient should be hitting. CbB will modify the previous tempo to make it happen and enter matching one at that point to act as an "anchor" for the next Set. If the first downbeat isn't at 1:01:000, more steps are required to get started. I have a single key bound to it since I use it a lot and Shift+M is awkward. Take advantage of Tab/Shift+Tab to transient and other keyboard shortcuts for navigating the timeline, and you can move through a piece pretty quickly. I recommend snapping downbeats every 4-8 measures to start. Then you can go back and Set more points as necessary to tighten things up further.

Is this a new installation of CbB with no changes to default settings? Does it happen if you freeze the synth? The symptoms sound like you have a non-zero Fade On Start set in Preferences > Audio > Playback and Recording.

True if you want to bounce to a different track, but the OP's question implied he wants to render a section of audio "in-situ" in which case you need to split the instrument track to make the synth audio side of it available as a target for the bounce. And assuming you don't want track Volume/Pan "baked in" to the rendered audio, you have to record the synth in real time to capture the raw output, and then mute the rendered part of the MIDI so it doesn't get doubled on playback.

I'm afraid you are near the first if not THE first to report this. Is this something that just showed up recently or you're just starting to use CbB and encountered it right away? In any case, I'd suggest you try getting as clean a boot as possible using msconfig or Task Manager > Startup Apps, depending on your Windows version, and/or use LatencyMon to see what might be spiking your DPC latency: https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

"To play the virtual steel tongues use your MIDI keyboard from the note C3, C#3, D3, D#3, E3, F3, F#3, G3" Disappointing they sampled an instrument with only 8 pitches (13-15 is not uncommon), and a very weird choice not to map them to their corresponding positions on a keyboard.

Had a look at some posts on the old forum to refresh my memory. Good to hear from you , but I have to agree "doomed product" and "hanging in, trying to make it all work" doesn't really capture the lived experience of those of us who have continued to make lots of good music using CW without any significant issues over years and decades. There has never been any actual disruption in CW's serviceability through all the ownership transitions or even the Gibson "shutdown", just a lot of needless hand-wringing as there is now with the transition from free to paid product. The king is dead! Long live the king! Cheers, Dave (the user formerly known as brundlefly)

Hmmm... sounds odd, not sure what could cause that. I'd probably need to get hands on with a copy of the project to see if the problem reproduces on my system and investigate further if it did. FWIW here's a process you might want to try if this isn't close that what you did:

Quantizing multi-tracked drums properly is a pretty involved process. Trial and error is not likely to get a good result. Are you sure it was good from start to finish at some point or possibly you hadn't listened to the whole track previously and are just discovering problems that were there all along?

The usual cause of a synth UI not opening would be that it's disconnected. Are there parentheses around Sitala in the Rack? If so, open the Settings menu at the top of the Rack with Sitala selected, and choose Synth Connected to re-connect it.

That wouldn't surprise me, but for me the last time was just the the second time I re-booted after disabling it. I only got one clean start-up without it.

Yeah, that's a good bet. Also along the lines of connections getting oxidized, you may find some ribbon cables inside that should be unplugged/re-plugged.

"Exercising" analog volume knob(s)/fader(s) on the keyboard while playing back some dense, sustained MIDI chords so there's a strong signal level might help clean up the ozidized contacts which can cause distortion in neglected hardware. If you can get the distortion issue resolved, standard operating procedure for using a keyboard synth with any DAW is to route its audio outputs into your audio interface and set up an audio track to echo it out to your monitors. Then disable Local Control so the onboard sound module doesn't respond directly to its keyboard (or pedal input), but only to MIDI echoed from the keyboard through a MIDI track in CbB and back to the keyboard synth. Basically you're treating the keyboard synth as a separate controller keyboard and sound module.

A quick search found an ancient (2014) post on KVR that said "The audio effect "tool" does this. The phase buttons for left and right are above the amplitude knob." Other hits also mentioned "Tool", so it seems that's the only way.

If you bind Tracks | Wipe Track(s) in Track View section of Shortcuts to a single key, you can simplify the process of clearing the track for a new take.