Starship Krupa

This forum is probably the best way to get in touch with the developers. They participate here regularly. And the best way to pitch in and be part of the development process is probably to become a beta tester. Won't hurt to ask. I suspect there have been calls to extend the functionality of the Matrix View since the day it was introduced, but I've been around for 3 1/2 years now and not seen it get any attention. I'm not (yet) familiar with that kind of workflow, but as I get more into creating electronic music ITB, I should explore it. The suggestions that more people respond to on the forum are the ones that are most likely to come to fruition, so don't give up if there's something you'd really like to see.

As a generally darker theme person, I'd probably choose this look most of the time anyway, but I suspect that my lighter theme-loving brethren and sistern will be looking forward to such time as we can lighten it up. Otherwise, I think it looks pretty spiffy, especially compared to what we had just 6 months ago:

If someone's calling it an "interface," I'll bet it's an external one. WASAPI usually works great with the Realtek hardware CODEC, but for 95% of external interfaces, they ship with an ASIO driver designed to work with the interface. Even my cheap gimmicky Behringer USB guitar has its own ASIO driver. The only one I've heard of that doesn't is the absolute bottom-of-the-line Behringer, and that may be old information.

I just spotted that Track Icons are also used in the Synth Rack. I wondered where those came from.

I am always all in favor of having as many colors and images available for customization, but here's the Synth Rack with my own EVA 01 Theme and as you can see it uses the same bizarre colors as my track headers (who knew that lavender-on-purple would be legible?): The text color for an unfocused track in the Synth Rack follows whatever color you set for Track view/Audio Track Name Text. The highlight color is Track view/Focused Track Background. So the text color does follow what's set for Track View, it's just that it follows the audio track name color rather than the instrument name color. I like the highlight, it's always nice to know which track has focus. The only color that's not customizable is the unfocused track background color, which is always black. The restriction that this puts on us is (as you point out) that we have to make sure that we use a darkish color for Track view/Unfocused Track Background, but I do that with all of my themes anyway. (For anyone who's wondering what we're talking about, it's all documented in The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to Creating Cakewalk Themes. I'm not sure how he manages to keep....uh....track of all this.)

This was remedied in the last release, wasn't it?

Hey, don't get me going right now on the chutney that results from recording MIDI in Comp mode while looping. Start and stop a couple of times and you'll be lost in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

Okay, I think I've figured this out. I can't call it "pilot error" because I don't think it's an "error" as such. It's probably as designed, and now that I know that, at least the bafflement is done. Call it as designed, but the default behavior is confusing. It happens when you use copying both in the Track View and Piano Roll View. Of course, the copying in the TV will create a new clip each time it's copied. That is as it should be, and I had forgotten that I had done that and this is where things start to get messed up. If the user then enters new notes in PRV in the original clip's location, they will, properly, be a part of the original clip. However, if those new notes are copied from the original clip and pasted to the newer clip's location in the PRV, they'll be seen as part of the original clip (which will get extended) and the newer clip will be bumped down into a new lane. Then you'll wind up with a double-length original clip that overlaps with the newer clip. Any subsequent notes entered manually or pasted into that overlapping region will go into the original clip. Earlier clips take priority when they overlap. I thought that because I had "Blend Old and New" selected in Preferences/Editing that it would work the other way, that events pasted into the newer clip (in PRV) would become part of the newer clip. There are a couple of ways around this. First, obviously, confine your copying and pasting in the PRV if you want to have everything go into a single clip. Duh. Second, if you do somehow have overlapping clips and want newly-entered notes to go into the new clip, make sure Hide Muted Clips is turned on in PRV and mute the older, overlapping clip. All this is definitely not to say that I agree with the default behavior. I think that there should at least be a selectable mode where copying and pasting notes from one clip to another in PRV puts the notes in the target clip rather than extending the source clip to overlap it.

Nickel Mint has been updated to make Aim Assist more visible in Piano Roll View. Enjoy!

The screenshot below is the result of a few minutes work in the Piano Roll. I'm writing something that starts with an ostinato (pattern of notes repeated), then adds other notes atop the ostinato. Kind of a Steve Reich Brian Eno minimalist thing. So I entered the notes of my ostinato, drag copied them a couple of times to get 4 measures, and then started entering the other notes. There's some editing in there to get the timing right, etc., but not anything really fancy. Why do I now have a total of 3 lanes with 4 clips? What logic is Cakewalk following to interpret my manual entry, copying, and addition of notes to split it up this way? Is it that I had the transport running in a loop? This is one of the prime examples of "things that I don't want it to do" when I say that I have spent more time trying to get Cakewalk not to do things (and cleaning up after it) than I have figuring out how to do things. All I can do with this flotsam is select everything (heaven knows how many clips and lanes it will create before I'm done) and Bounce to Clips and hope that goes smoothly. Do I have some setting set up in the wrong way? Is there a "knock yourself out with the lanes and clips" box that I need to uncheck to have the program put my entered notes into one single clip unless I say otherwise? I will probably wind up cutting this into smaller clips at some point, but I want to be the one that decides that. How does it decide when to make a new clip, add a new lane, etc? Why does it do it at all? How do I make it stop?

The main colors are pretty easy to change, once you know which ones. There are basically two. Global/View Border and Global/Toolbar Background. If you want to get fancier, then Global / Menus / MenuBar Gradient Start, Global / Menus / MenuBar Gradient End, and if menu text needs to change to be legible with the Gradient color, Global/Menus/Menu View Text. Pick your color of choice, start with Tungsten if it's a dark color, Mercury if it's lighter, and you're on your way. Here's a blue one that took me about a minute just now while I was typing this reply (it's actually not half bad now that I look at it): Mercury Blue.sth I could have sampled the blue of the button color and used that for better coherence, but that would take another minute or two.

In Track View, Current Control Outline is a color selection for the little highlight corners that appear around the last control the user clicks on. Console View has the same highlight system, but doesn't seem to allow us to change them, leaving them always "refrigerator white." I thought that at one point I had them set to a different color and wanted to change them back, but am not 100% sure, and if I did, I don't remember how I finally did it. I've done the obvious thing, which is to look under "Console view" in TE and see which colors are set to white, but there are none in Racing Green and yet the control outliners are bright white. It seems odd that we would be granted control of them in one view but not the other, but oddness abounds in the world of theming.

Okey doke, blokes and gals, she's in the wild for you to download and try!

Apologies, I assumed from your use of spellings (and taste in literature and sense of humour) that you were a Brit. ?

Right. Remember, a drum kit doesn't have "octaves," it has kick, snare, hat, toms, crash, and ride. Those are mapped to MIDI numbers. It's only when people use the "C1, C2, C3" designation that we run into confusion, because that is not properly standardized. @Colin Nicholls describes it pretty well: http://prodigalsounds.com/blog/2020/11/03/midi-notes-names-and-numbers/

I do when I'm talking about British guys. I guess I'm one of those American "anglophiles" who likes to drop in British slang and proper UK spellings when conversing with people who get them. I watch a lot of British TV shows, so I pick it up. The bloke in question has spent hours tirelessly documenting colours in Theme Editor whilst having to refer to them as "colors," so it's the least I can do. ?

I gave Music Maker itself a try. It has the basic features of a DAW, too rudimentary for me. There was nothing about it that compelled me to continue.

I did not mean to suggest otherwise. Humble Bundle is an outlet where Magix software has been sold at deep discount from time to time. I've acquired several Magix products there myself, including a version of Acid, albeit not the version that you use. They may in the future offer more deeply discounted Magix software, which might include an updated version of the program you want. The products they offer are usually a revision behind whatever the current release is.

Your description makes me want it, as a fairly rabid Unfiltered Audio and Glitchmachines fanboy, but as you say, they put stuff on deeep discount all the time, usually through PB.

Keep your eye on the Bundle that is Humble. I scored Studio 11 in a Magix Bumble Hundle a while back.

Well, they're at least similar in that if you get weird noises while it's in operation, a good thing to do is go over the maintenance records!

Before you do this, be sure to check and make sure that the Windows update that rolled out around the same time isn't responsible. I just went through a system reset, and was getting a nasty latency spike in my network card driver, which Microsoft loves to "update." The one that Dell puts up on their website cures the problem. Samesies for video drivers, etc. And they love to reset Defender anti-malware to scan everything at all times. So make sure that any optimizations you did to your system didn't get reset by Microsoft.

Nickel Mint Theme Notes: I decided to go in almost the opposite direction of my previous themes. It follows the light paradigm, starting from Mercury rather than Tungsten, it's not based on a pop culture reference, and has 3-D buttons. This theme is supposed to fade into the background rather than grab the eye. The only similarities are the green highlights and use of the same panel show and hide buttons as my other themes, as well as Explorer/Finder turny triangles for opening and closing folders and ProChannel. Since I think that the Control Bar is the most important element as far as making a theme really different, my goal with this one was to "unify" the Control Bar. In locked state it looks like one big Control Bar rather than a collection of modules. I also wanted to make my Control Bar actually light, unlike Mercury (and most of its derivations) that have dark Control Bar modules. This was inspired by the old Retro Hi-Fi theme. Also lightened up the Cakewalk logo so that it's not dark-on-dark. Default clip colors are stock from Mercury, but the track backgrounds have been shifted to a subdued green. If you use the custom .CLR preset, you'll get nice strong grid lines in your Track View. The name: Nickel because it's a silvery metal and a tribute to the bloke whose work made it possible for me to start creating themes (he prefers light themes, he might not recoil in horror from this one), then Mint because of the green highlights and because in the US, we call 5p coins "nickels," which are of course, minted. Comments and critiques are welcome. The idea with this one was to make a theme with broader appeal than my nutty pop culture ones (or dark dark dark Racing Green), so I'm even more interested to see what you have to say. I put a lot of work into it, but I can put in a little more if needed.

One could have a bit of fun with that if one were of a mischievous nature. As anyone who's opened the About box on EVA 01 knows, it's a good place to put Easter Eggs. I've started "signing" my custom themes in the About box.

Forgive me if I'm not getting this, but how would this be different from what we have here?: