David Baay

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.

This is highly unlikely to be directly related to the update in my view. Most likely due to a plugin that induces PDC, but the worst of these will generally cause no more than 1/3 of second latency (16384 samples).

While I would very much like to have the option to lock the duration of a MIDI clip to absolute time, I disagree that Set Measure/Beat At Now is complex or inaccurate. i use it regularly, and find it consistently easy and precise within the limitations of two decimal places for tempos, and notwithstanding that it uses decimal values for fractional beats instead of ticks which is a little unintuitive. The main context in which I would like to lock MIDI to absolute time is for deleting tempo changes that were set incorrectly or were inadvertently left in place while recording a new take without a click. incidentally, I agree that the Ref. Guide in incorrect about the length/duration of a MIDI clip being locked by setting Absolute Timebase; this only affects the start time. I have reported it several times over the years at the same time I requested the option to lock MIDI clip durations.

Did the bounce run the full 3 minutes in real time (required for processing any real time input, including the return from an external insert)? If not, chances are you had an unintended selection set. Selections are not saved when project is closed so shutting down is automatically going to resolve that. I know there have been assorted issues with UAD stuff over the years so I suppose that's also a possibility.

I finally got around to checking this, and am not seeing a problem with saving Peak Hold on bus meters or the old issue with saving RMS+Peak on track meters. I don't know about bus meters, but the RMS+Peak issue existed long before Workspaces were introduced, and I don't use them in any case. +1 I'm not seeing a an issue with this,. either

There must be more to it than that as this is clearly not a problem that everyone using a lot of synths and plugins experiences regularly.- it's likely related to some specific plugin(s) as scook suggested and you could save yourself a lot of work over the long term by testing to find the culprit.

I'm still on board for this, both for my own benefit, and so that anyone considering CbB as a primary DAW is not put off by the lack of a feature that is so widely implemented.

There was a longstanding issue that RMS+Peak on tracks was not saved. I eventually gave up on it and haven't checked whether it was ever fixed.

Yeah. I mentioned earlier that I play a lot ninth chords with the second included and played with the thumb. In fact I do it even on 'shorter' chords where I could easily reach the second with my forefinger, but it's just easier to use the thumb, and usually makes transition to the next chord easier as well. I'm of the 'whatever works' school of fingering. EDIT: It occurs to me that this all goes back to my affinity for the music of Steely Dan and something I read many years ago about Donald Fagan's affinity for "mu" chords. I consciously started using them after that and eventually 'doubled down' by adding both the 2nd and the 9th: https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+fagan+mu+chord

From time immemorial (I'm talking Cakewalk for DOS 2.0!) up until X1, the above shortcuts were bound by default to F9, F10, Ctrl+F9 and Ctrl+F10. I had grown so used to them that I had to restore the defaults and still use them regularly. I like the idea of using the bracket keys for this if you're not already used to something else - easy to reach and logical. By default they work like the +/- keys to increment/decrement values by larger amounts (e,g, by octaves in the key+ widget), but I would guess few people use this.

Open up the Windows Resource monitor from the Performance tab in Task Manager, and watch how the different resources are being used while performing operations that are slow - especially disk access. A couple of things I have encountered in the past that were revealed by the Resource Monitor: - The Real-time Scanning feature of Windows Defender gets enabled spontaneously and causes every resource used by Cakewalk to get scanned, even samples and plugins that aren't in the project. Exclude Cakewalk-related directories from scanning, and disable real-time scanning. - Media Browser is attempting to read a large .zip file on your desktop or in your projects directory. This is related to Windows functionality used by the browser, and can only be avoided by moving the archive file. EDIT: There are some audio options that might be implicated in issues with the RME driver, and you probably should disable/uncheck any I/O that you won't be using regularly like ADAT. - Always Stream Audio Through FX [when the transport is stopped] - Always Open All Devices - Allow Arm Changes During Playback/Record

With tracks for both linked clips selected in the PRV I was able to get some bad behavior, though different from what you described. I did not see problem with editing velocities or disappearing notes. What I saw mostly was: 1. Both individual notes and lasso-selected groups would snap back to their original pitch and/or time and become unselected when released. 2. Sometimes the group would move, but a subset of the group would become unselected on release. 3. Notes were sometime copied when simply dragged with no modifier. The behaviors were very unpredictable, sometimes working or failing alternately with several moves of the same selection. I suspect this might be related to an issue I reported recently that notes on a track that is selected for display in the PRV, but not focused for editing, can be edited even when Autofocus is disabled, contrary to the Ref. Guide and what I would expect. When clips are linked, I think there's a conflict about which clip is following the edit of the other when you make a selection that includes events from both tracks. When I put the clips in separate time ranges where I could avoid selecting events from both when lassoing, I did not see problems.

Another 'trick' I recommend is to bounce the Master bus to a track (I name mine 'Master Bounce' that routes directly to Main Outs and group its Mute button in opposition with the Mute on the Master bus. This allows you to A/B the bounce with the 'live' mix on the Master bus to verify the mix is a complete and accurate representation of what you've been hearing. Then you can just export that track to different WAV or MP3 formats and not have to wait for Cakewalk to render all the instruments and FX every time when the mix is unchanged. This also automatically embeds a copy of the Master in the project for future reference and you can bounce different mixes to different lanes of the Master Bounce track, and use the lane solo buttons to A/B them and determine which version gets exported when you export the track. You can also invert the phase of the Master Bounce track and undo the mute grouping to check how the bounce 'nulls' against the live mix. But keep in mind that some instruments and FX don't render the same way from one playback to the next or in real time vs. offline (a.k.a. Fast Bounce), so nulling may be imperfect if the tracks aren't frozen.

If you're hearing a velocity response from SI, then variable velocity is being generated by the guitar controller, and CbB will record it as a parameter of each Note On MIDI message. As John noted, though velocity is not technically a 'Controller', CbB displays velocities in the Controllers pane of the PRV. You can also see numeric velocity values in the Event List view. The easy way to get a single MIDI track out of CbB is simply to drag or copy-paste a clip to a destination folder or application in Windows. Since velocity is embedded in the Note On message it will always be automatically included in a MIDI file, but the effect may not be as clear in another context if the instrument playing back that MIDI file does not have the same response to velocity which is a characteristic of the instrument's programming. I have not used SI drums, but most drum synths have a facility for dragging patterns from the UI to the clips pane in the track view to bring the MIDI into the project. EDIT: Just did a quick check, and patterns can be dragged and dropped from the SI pattern selector directly to the tracks pane where they can be copied, pasted, groove-clipped, re-arranged and edited in the PRV giving you more flexibility/variation in your arrangement.

Selection determines what is included in the mixdown, and Source determines where in the signal chain the mix is captured for writing to file. If you want everything in the mixdown, you should select nothing, and CW will include everything by default. If you're getting silence, you must have a partial selection of the project (either tracks or time range) that does not contain any audio content. 'Entire Mix' is All hardware audio ports combined. This can be problematic if you have a headphone mix or something going to a second output pair. I recommend always choosing Buses as the source, and selecting just the Master bus.

I've done a ton of MIDI editing in the last week, including dragging/nudging large selections of notes and editing velocities, and have not seen any unexpected behavior. But all clips were independent. I just did some quick testing with linked clips and could not reproduce any error. Seems something is missing from the recipe or it's project specific or possibly dependent on some particular setting like having Non-Destructive MIDI Editing enabled (I generally don't). I also use the Blend Old and New setting for Drag and Drop. I would also suggest restarting Cakewalk and/or rebooting as it sounds like something might have become corrupted in RAM. But if you reproduced the issue with SONAR, maybe not. To me that also suggests it might be project-specific. If this dated back to SONAR and was a common problem, I would expect to have seem more reports of it,

So it was recorded from a real-time performance with a MIDI guitar controller or a pitch-to-MIDI convertor? If it really sounds that 'mechanical', I would expect more than just quantization of start times was done. In any case, the answer is "not really", especially if strumming was involved. As has been discussed many times, 'humanization' of hard-quantized (or even worse, mouse-entered) MIDI takes a lot of work and the results are unlikely to be fully satisfactory. I almost always keep unquantized archives of tracks/projects to avoid unrecoverable problems like this; shame on the producer for not preserving the raw performance somehow.

Only thing I know of that can definitely cause that is attempting export to MP3 in real time; real time streaming and encoding to MP3 have not been compatible in the past but I haven't re-tried it for a long time. Related to that, I can imagine that having too low or high an ASIO buffer might also cause problems with MP3 encoding since that is used as the default 'chunk' size for processing. If you've made changes ASIO buffer, that might explain variable results. If that's the case, setting an appropriate value for BounceBufSizeMsec could address it. Some interoperability issue with a particular plugin is always a possibility as well. And in any case of distorted output I always try disabling the 64-bit Double Precision Engine.

It probably doesn't "have"' to be, but it provides a way to open Arranger/Tempo/Video views by dragging with a mouse. I could wish for some narrow dividing lines and/or labels to make it clear where to drag to get which view and I do more often use keyboard shortcuts than dragging to open views. I wouldn't be against having an option to hide if completely.

I have kind of a mental block against spending more than $200 on any single transaction for music software... her name is Andrea.