David Baay

Well-known free ones; there may be others: https://www.tx16wx.com/ https://www.magix.com/ca/music-editing/free-download/independence-free-sampler-software/

https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk

Sounds like you are playing with the Velocity control in the Arpeggiator section of the Track Inspector. What you want to do is hover your mouse near the top of one of the selected notes until you see the velocity ajdustment tool (looks like a miniature histogram) and drag down with that. To better see what you are doing, I recommend you show the Controller Pane in the PRV which will display velocity 'tails' by default. You can also drag the 'tail' of one of the selected notes in that pane to adjust them all. Another option probably referenced in Scook's earlier post is to go to the Event Inspector in the Control Bar, and enter a percentage in the Velocity field (e.g. '75%' to reduce all velocities by 25%). Note that if you enter just 75 with no % sign, you will set them all to Vel=75. Then there's Edit > Find/Change... Lots of ways to skin this cat.

Have been tempted to try the DSF Proteus library for Kontakt since my hardware UltraProteus went belly up, but am afraid I will be disappointed by the usual 'static' nature of sampled hardware even if it's been dressed up with Kontakt features. Watched for it to go on sale, but it never has. Anybody have it?

If your Drag and Drop mode is Blend Old and New, you can just drag one set of MIDI clips into the other track, right click, and choose Bounce to Clip(s) (hold shift to constrain to a verticle drag to preseve the timing). A safer way in case your Drag and Drop mode is not Blend would be to show lanes in one of the tracks, add a lane, drag the clips from the other track into that lane, and then bounce to clip(s) and delete the empty lane. Personally I often keep separate 'voice' lines of the same instrument in separate lanes of the track just for clarity and flexibility in selection and editing.

AS 905133 indicated, it depends on the synth. Most dedicated drum synths offer multiple audio outputs that can be routed to separate tracks for mixing outside the synth. The included SI Drums is an exception. In that case, you can get rudimentary level mixing by adjusting MIDI Velocity, either directly or using the MIDI Gain (a.k.a Velocity Offset or Vel+) control in the track. But to apply different panning or FX you would have to render the MIDI tracks to audio one at a time by solong them and bouncing (or freezing and dragging) to separate tracks.

Yes, exporting Entire Mix wil include rendering soft synth output with all relevant track and bus FX and mix settings applied just like audio tracks. There is no need to freeze in advance. Incidentally, I recommend exporting with Source = Buses, and exporting just the Master bus. This avoids including any signals that might be routed to other ouputs on your interface (like a headphone mix or external insert output). Entire Mix merges all hardware outputs.

Every track and bus can 'Output' and/or 'Send' to another Bus (or Aux track). Using Output is normal routing, and Sends provide an alternate routing when you want to route a track or bus to a second (or third or more) destination - usually a bus with FX on it. Probably the most common use case is Sending to a 'Reverb' bus with a Reverb FX on it. So all your tracks Output to Master and Send to the Reverb bus which also ouputs to Master. Or, in your case, Vocal and Drum tracks Output to the Vocal and Drums buses, and you would put Sends on the those buses to one or more FX buses with all the buses Outputting to Master.

Global Snap, PRV Snap or both? What options do you see when you right-click the resolution button?

Proteus VX will show a UI with JBridge but it's extremely unstable. I gave up on it.

Cakewalk only has Touch mode for writing automation envelopes. If you use automation envelopes for MIDI controllers, you'll be able to overwrite in touch mode, but there is no equivalent for actual controller (or note) 'events' in a MIDI track. EDIT: Comp record mode could help achieve the desired result, but you would likely have to do some editing with the Comp tool in lanes and/or in the PRV after recording the overdub.

Your Console view shows the I/O Module is hidden. Normally the ouput of each bus would be shown immediately above the bus name; enable 'In/Out' in the Modules tab of the Console view to see that. But the top of each strip shows you're 'Sending' the Vocal and Drums buses to Master, and 'Sending' the Master to Speakers in addition to having the Ouputs assigned, That's creating duplicate signal paths; you just need to delete the Sends and you'll be good to go.

This isn't likely to happen because there would be no point in recording controllers that don't overlap a clip with notes in it and CbB will not split the events of a single take across lanes. That said, I've encountered issues in the past with take lanes getting out of order or clips being layered in the same lane when using the Re-Use option so I just have it set to Create New and do the housekeeping as necessary - not that much i my workflow. I don't really have any insight into why arming a track also effectively solos that lane. I just know that it does it for both MIDI and Audio tracks and that it's not the kind of thing that would happen incidentally without being deliberately programmed so I've always presumed it was deliberate.

If the 'existing beat' is an audio clip, try Drum Replacer (included with CbB but installed separately). If the 'existing beat' is MIDI, you can use the Matrix to host the sample. Otherwise you'll need a 3rd-party sampler (assuming you don't have legacy CW synths like Session Drummer 3).

A couple other thoughts in case this is project-specific. - Having MIDI FX in a project can mess with buffering, even if the FX is not on the track that's mis-behaving. Improvments to the MIDI buffering implementation some years ago eliminated some issues from Pre-Bandlab versions but some may persist. - In the past I have also seen issues with a particular note being consistently dropped that would resolve when the note was moved a single tick or the tempo was changed by a single point. I believe this is more common when all MIDI start times and durations are quantized 100% to the grid so that many notes are starting/ending at the same time on different instruments. This isn't as likely to happen if you record MIDI in real time and don't hard-quantize.

Arming at the lane level is causing this (intended behavior I think). Just arm at the track level and let "Sound on Sound" and "Re-use Except When Takes Overlap" do its thing (personally I prefer to force 'Create New Lane' for every new take for total predictability).

I assume you mean Buffer Size in samples...? ASIO buffer size shouldn't really have a bearing on soft-synth rendering so long as you're not actually getting audio engine dropouts. It takes a fairly well-tuned machine (low and stable DPC latency with reputable ASIO interface and drivers) to run cleanly at buffer sizes below 128, but I do it all the time on my desktop DAW and do not encounter soft synth rendering issues. But I have seen/heard dropped MIDI notes on laptops using WASAPI with not the greatest DPC latency, especially if the MIDI Prepare Using buffer is too low.

Try increasing the MIDI "Prepare Using" Buffer under Preferences > MIDI > Playback and Recording. I believe the default is 50ms. My desktop DAW with ASIO runs fine at 20, but my slowest laptop with WASAPI needs 100.

So no limitations/exclusions other than track count? Might be interesting to see what all the fuss is about after all these years.

Maybe have them install CbB and drag-drop to the track view. Or is it a Mac? If it's a Mac, that might explain the file incompatibility as well.

Per the documentation, creating a new group that includes existing and added clips is the expected behavior. You aren't actually creating multiple goups, just incrementing the group number every time you add to it. https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Arranging.34.html To add clips to an existing selection group 1. Click on any clip in the existing group. All clips in the group are selected. 2. Hold down the CTRL key and click the clips that you want to add to the group. 3. Right-click any selected clip and choose Create selection group from selected clips from the pop-up menu. All selected clips are placed in a new selection group. Note: A clip may only belong to one selection group at a time. If any of the selected clips already belong to another clip group, they will be removed from the other group and placed in the new group. P.S. If i were you, I'd definitely be looking for a free or low-cost De-esser!

Yes, we had a number of conversations about this back around 2013/2014 (!) when this actually broke in X3b. It was fixed in X3c but you continued to report it not working. Possibly we never figured out that it was because you had changed the default binding but I thought we had.

Yes, show the PRV track pane. Tracks with numbers seelected will be displayed in the PRV, and the one with the name higlighted will be focused and show notes with colors while the other track(s) will be grayed out. Depending on the setting of Auto Focus/Auto Lock at the top of the PRV track pane, you can enable chanigng track focus by clicking on a grayed note or have unfocused tracks locked against accidentally being edited

Yes, the grid should continue to show because youre just disabling snap without disabling the PRV snap grid.

Cool. Glad to help.