David Baay

If you know the target tempo: - Snap the Now Time to measure = Current Tempo +1 - Shift+M to open Set Measure/Beat At Now - Enter measure = Target Tempo + 1, beat =1 and OK. If you don't know the target tempo: - Slide everything to align the first downbeat at 1:01:000, or 2:01:000 if you need a pick-up measure. - Snap the Now time to that measure, and Shift+M to set the matching measure and beat. - Listen to playback without the metronome running, and count out 8 or 16 measures. - Snap the Now time to the downbeat that should be 9:01 or 17:01, and 'Set' that. - if the original was recorded to a click, and the tempo that CW sets is close to a whole number, you can undo the Set, and do the first procedure for setting a known tempo. - Or you can just keep using SM/BAN to set additional point to lock the timeline to the project as needed.

Shift+M is Set Measure/Beat At Now. It allows you to tell Cakewalk where measures/beats are in your MIDI, and automatically calculates and inserts tempo changes to align the timeline to the MIDI, adjusting start times and durations of MIDI events to preserve the absolute playback timing of the performance. I live by it.

I'm not 100% sure of your routing since the screenshot of the inspector for track 13 is not showing I/O assignments. But I suspect the above is part of the problem. With Input Echo enabled on both tracks and inputs set to respond to the same channel from the controller, both instruments will respond to any input. If you want only the focused track to be heard, you should disable the forced Input Echo on both, and enable 'Always Echo Current MIDI Track' in Preferences > MIDI Playback and Recording.

The way I posted is still valid. Process > Length > 50%. Or drag-stretch to 50%.

Not sure I completely understand the setup. Are you crossfading two different synths/patches using MIDI volume or two audio tracks with volume controlled by MIDI? In the case of synths, the result is going to depend on the response of each synth to MIDI volume, and there's no standard/convention on this in the MIDI spec. And in the case of both audio and synth tracks, the result is going to depend on how you set the MIDI endpoints of the group, the volume of each track at the high endpoint, and how much correlation there is between the signals. With the right tweaks to the grouping end points and max track volumes, you should be able to get pretty close in either case, but it's going to take some fiddling; there's no simple recipe you can apply that's going to work for all sound sources.

Simple procedure for re-setting the project to a a specific whole-number overall tempo: Snap Now Time to Measure = Current Tempo + 1 and 'Set' Measure = Target Tempo +1, Beat 1. I don't usually have a need to achieve a specific tempo. I usually just want to align the timeline to a live performance without altering it, and the tempo is whatever i played. But once the timeline is aligned, the tempos can be altered as needed. I most often just smooth out any excessive/unintended variation, but one could just as easily change the average tempo of the whole piece or sections of it which seems to be your goal. If you're interested, I'd be willing to have a go at 'Setting' the piece you're working with. I might be able to give you some pointers on how to get what you want without too much brain strain.

Missed your response until now. As you have apparently figured out, with SM/BAN you tell CW what measure beat an event should fall on, and it calculates and adjusts the tempo from the previous 'Set' point (or time zero if nothing has yet been set) to make that happen. It's the keyboard equivalent of dragging the bars/beats to align with a note/transient in a track. In the case of MIDI, CW recalculates note start times and durations to preserve the absolute playback timing at the new tempo. And it sets a matching tempo node at the now time to act as an 'anchor' for the next 'Set'.

You have MIDI being passed Thru a soft synth or by some hardware path back to the track input when it's accepting everything and new Note Ons are cutting off sounding notes (some synths would use a new 'voice' to play the duplicate note but some cannot), You might need to disable MIDI Out from the soft synth and/or check for some hardware MIDI loopback since the input was set to "All External Inputs". In any case it's always a best practice to set the track input specifically to the port and channel that you want to record/echo to avoid problems like this.

So is Cakewalk set to WDM driver mode? Normally I would recommend ASIO mode for a MOTU interface, but ASIO does not natively support driver sharing and the Cakewalk audio engine would need to be suspended to hear another application. If you've recently changed to ASIO driver mode, that would explain sudden appearance of a problem.

I'm down with these two, and have specifically requested the first one in the past. I also brought this up in a discussion about editing tempo envelopes recently that instantaneous changes should always be done with jump segments for simplicity and consistency. Mark's video showing four nodes being used for two changes is not a desirable default behavior in my view. My OCD self says. "Yeah, that would be nice", but my rational self says, "Don't bother, few people can reliably discern anything less than a 1dB change anyway"

Possibly the option to have CW release the driver when not in focus has become unchecked....? Preferences > Audio Playback and Recording > Suspend Audio Engine When Cakewalk is Not in Focus FWIW, I don't let Windows use my MOTU drivers. I leave onboard sound enabled for use by Windows and generic multimedia apps and route the soundcard audio to my studio monitors using an external mixer. I have found this to be the least problematic setup over the years.

Change the track input to the specific port and channel your keyboard is on.

I'm afraid you got the terminology backwards here. 'Focus' is indicated by the highlighted track name.

No, there's no mechanism available to 'nudge' a loop. The closest you will come is using keyboard shortcuts to set From and Thru selection points, and then using Shift+L to set the loop to the selection.

I misunderstood the problem. I thought it was that the volume widget wasn't staying at a new position, not that it wasn't having any affect. Glad you got it figured.

Sounds like the mixer is echoing its output back to its input which is more commonly a default setup with onboard soundcards but can happen with any interface that has internal mixing/routing capabilities. In any case, routing of audio in the Mackie would be the first place to look.

What's the timing reference and routing of MIDI and audio? Are you saying the sound from an external hardware synth is sounding ahead of the Cakewalk's audio metronome when enabled on playback with the synth output monitored through Cakewalk? And is the MIDI quantized to the grid in Cakewalk? If you're direct-monitoring the synth and your audio buffer is high, you might conceivably hear the synth a bit ahead of Cakewalk's audio metronome and/or audio tracks playing back, but usually MIDI transmission and synth response delays would mostly cancel out any output latency, and the typical 2-3ms discrepancies would be pretty hard to hear in any case. Cakewalk has a Timing Offset setting to sync MIDI-driven hardware synths with audio, but usually it's used to do the opposite - delay audio to sync with the delayed synth response. In any case, you'll want to understand exactly where the sync error is being introduced before you go tweaking anything. Timing Offset can have undesirable effects in other contexts, so I'd start be making sure it's 0ms. Preferences > Audio > Sync and Caching > Timing Offset (msec) If we're talking about soft synths the above is all irrelevant.

Step 1; Verify there's signal at the output of the mixer by connecting it to a standalone recording/monitoring/metering device.

Checked this out and found that once an automation envelope exists, it's not possible to alter the level with a snapshot at a position before the first node in the envelope; the new node takes on the value of that first node, regardless of what you set. This looks like a bug. But creating a snapshot of the level at time zero before any automation envelope exists worked as expected.

Pure audio track, not MIDI, Synth or Instrument? Automation?

You can click and drag a loop by the bar between the markers in the timeline with or without snap enabled.

+1 I don't think I've ever re-installed an O/S or any flavor of Cakewalk on the same drive twice in my entire life, going back to Cakewalk 2.0 for DOS on an 80286. No problem I've ever encountered could not be resolved with a targeted fix (sometimes to hardware - bad RAM/HDD sectors, improperly seated cards/cables, over-heating CPU, failing/over-taxed power supply, etc.).

I'll be interested to hear back how it's going on day 365. Sincerely wishing you good luck.

I do all of what you're describing with almost every piece I record now., and have done for years.. I've seen the timeline-dragging technique (and have Studio One myself), and while it's a logical way to implement a mouse-driven solution, it would not work well for CW where the M:B:T timeline is the fixed visual reference, and the Now cursor travels faster or slower with changing tempo. Moreover, I generally find that anything I can do with keyboard shortcuts is faster than with a mouse. With S bound to Set measure/Beat At Now in place of Shift+M as I have it, the process in that video would essentially be just repeatedly hitting Tab, S, Enter as fast as you can. But more importantly for my purposes, Set Measure/Beat At Now can set any fraction of a measure, not just quarter-note beats. A lot of my piano compositions have the most distinct transient somewhere other than the 1 and 3 beats, and may not even have a note on every downbeat so I need to be able to 'Set', for example, the last 8th note of a measure or maybe even some triplet value. And in a rubato piece, it's usually necessary to set several points in a measure to capture a rit. precisely. It's certainly a little more labor-intensive to set a project to a freeform piano composition like that than to set it to a kick drum track (tutorial videos often show the least challenging scenario), but it can still be done pretty efficiently using a combination of Spacebar to start/stop playback, Pg Up/Down to measures (I eliminated having to use Ctrl) and Tab/Shift+Tab to navigate to the transient/note you want to set. Entering fractional beats requires some typing since CW will only guess to the nearest beat which can get a little more awkward, but given that other implementations may not allow it at all, I'm okay with that. I guess the bottom line is that you shouldn't hold your breath for timeline-dragging or absolute MIDI duration-locking; SM/BAN can do it all pretty easily already once you get the technique down, and can do things I'll wager some of those other implementations can't.

So you're selecting between markers to set the length of the cut/copy? Check to see that the From and Thru values are as-expected, and when setting the target time for the paste make sure your Now time is snapping to the Measure/Beat and not to Zero-crossings or Landmarks. Beyond that, I can only suggest zooming in on the discontinuities to see what's out of place. It should be evident.