Starship Krupa

I'm currently working with the trial version of Stutter Edit 2, thinking of picking it up in the iZotope Community Appreciation Bundle. I love it, it's something I've been looking for, as long as it works. But I've been running into issues where parts of the UI become unresponsive and I have to remove it and put it on the track again to get it to start working again. iZotope explicitly say that it's compatible with CbB, so I'm wondering whether this is something to do with the fact that I'm running it in trial mode or if there's some other issue. If you're using SE2 with Cakewalk, please chime in.

You get Stutter Edit 2 in that Community Appreciation Bundle.

Hmmm, thinking about TRIAD over here....

Ah, found it:

Which is of course the usual state of things during rendering, when we need the processor clock the most. I'll see if I can find Pete Brown's guide to Windows system optimization for DAW use. Pete is our resident Microsoft employee.

It seems more that the days of widespread forum participation are slowly passing away. I do wonder, though, these youngsters who consider forums to be an outdated form of community information exchange, what platform(s) are they using in place of them? Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, there's nothing that I've seen that can touch the encyclopedic density of persistent information that a forum generates (which the young ones also benefit from via Google searches). As far as I know, I can't topic search a Facebook Group. Nor a YouTube comments section (I notice that YouTube added a "community" tab to channels that functions more like....a forum). Reddit discussions seem to have a much shorter half-life than in a forum. Besides the ease of information access, there's the sense of community that's like walking into a favorite cafe where you've gotten to know the regulars. I guess since I started out as a BBSer 30-odd years ago and still have IRL friends from those days, I'm pretty used to threaded message communities. FIDOnet, then usenet after that. For anyone concerned about Cakewalk attracting a younger user base outside of this forum, check out the views counts on X.E.L. Ohh's YouTube channel. His tips on Piano Roll View got10,000 views, his one on using Graillon in CbB got 27,000, how to record vocals 16,000, and weirdly enough his video on making a beat using only TTS-1 got 4,300 views. He has 3,000 subscribers, which isn't exactly Rick Beato territory, but that's 3,000 people who want to know whenever he drops another tutorial. Another YouTuber is Mike of Creative Sauce, whose CbB videos draw in the tens of thousands, and his Cakewalk Basics video has drawn almost 250,000 views. I don't know (and don't really care) how those numbers stack up against, say, people who do Cubase tutorials, but I like the idea of a quarter of a million people watching a video about how to use Cakewalk. BandLab sure don't seem to be throwing money at advertising, the budget looks to be going to pay developers, which is fine with me. REAPER looks to have a solid place in the market based on being a quality product at a low price, and I think they've relied on word of mouth (to a fault at times).

How nice that I didn't notice that, due to the diligent efforts of the development team. 3 years ago I would have spotted it very quickly.

Your best bet at this point is probably to revert to the earlier version. For future reference, normalization is best applied at the beginning of the mixing and editing process. I never use it myself, I prefer just cranking up the Gain knob on any tracks that were recorded at a low level. Also of course, in addition to duping tracks to try things out, Save As is your friend, as well as possibly enabling versioning in Preferences. I try to remember to Save As before making any big moves, especially on a mix that's nearing completion (completion, HA).

Thank you so much for saying this. Really. I've always felt that my bringing fresh eyes was my best asset, considering I had almost zero experience with SONAR. 3 years of using CbB, I still feel like a n00b. Some features I've never touched except to experiment with them, like Audiosnap and even the Step Sequencer. I've never edited in Staff View, only used it to print out sheet music. Poked at Matrix View and had a hilarious experience with not being able to figure out how to turn it off, it was like an I Love Lucy bit where my loop was blasting over and over and I couldn't find the stop button anywhere. Never tried Drum Replacer. So Cakewalk is like this huge building with rooms I never go into. I'm all about the big 3: Track View, Console View, and Piano Roll. I was afraid of coming off like a hothead, but in retrospect, I think some of my flailing and expressed frustration may have influenced the change to the Smart Tool and the attention given to enabling a simpler editing workflow. The devs never said this, but I was blowing up the forum for a while with my consternation about trying to perform what are basic editing tasks in most DAW's I've tried. Cakewalk just kept getting in my way. It's so much better now, but from time to time I do trip over things like this weird cross-take fade (which I can repro, BTW, so fingers crossed). Many of the issues I've had come up because as a drummer, I am in love with Cakewalk's clip grouping feature (sorely lacking in Mixcraft, and one of the main features that pushed Mixcraft to 2nd DAW status in my studio) for editing and comping 4 track drum recordings. So every move I make has to propagate across 3 other tracks in perfect sync. One bug I uncovered with this only happened when my other 3 tracks had their lanes collapsed. The devs had a hell of a time reproducing it because they usually work with lanes open, not surprising because they're trying to observe what's going on. But I work with lanes closed to avoid screen clutter. After months of back and forth and sending them my messed up projects, someone noticed that mine were being sent in with my lanes closed. It was a nasty mother of a bug, too, causing major portions of takes not to appear in clips. The worst part was I had a friend tracking drums at my place who has a Pro Tools studio at home and though he liked Cakewalk, he was shaking his head at the clip weirdness. It was fairly easily remedied, but scary at first. Maybe nobody else works with closed lanes, or they noticed that things went sideways when they did and stopped doing it, or whatever. Anyway, pretty sure this current thing with the long fades is a bug, and one I can repro. I suspect it has to do with the fact that my takes were all recorded in one continuous loop with no stopping, so it's one big audio file. Maybe the devs record their takes mostly one at a time rather than sitting down and bashing into 4 audio tracks for 20 minutes on a 4-minute song. But that's the way drums are recorded here at Glitchseason....

The next thing to do is run LatencyMon again and then click on the Drivers tab and find out which one is chewing up your interrupts. I was getting high latency stats from LatencyMon and used it to figure out that my network interface driver was what was causing it. I rolled back to the previous driver and it was much smoother sailing. If that doesn't turn anything up, what it says about BIOS settings definitely applies. Common wisdom says to disable certain Intel BIOS features for DAW work, and I was following that. Nailed my processor to what I thought was its maximum clock speed. I reenabled one of the forbidden settings (turbo boost, I believe) and my processor speed jumped. This was the case on both my Dell tower and Dell laptop. There are also power settings in the OS that allow you to set things up so that your processor never gets slowed down by the OS in favor of battery savings.

At $6 a set, they're not going to be eating much market share any time soon. I can get Ernie Ball, Dunlop, or D'Addario sets for less than that from Amazon's own site. GHS are .07 more, and Fender are $4. If I really want store brand strings, Musician's Friend's Musicians Gear electric sets are $2.60, and free shipping without having to pay $14 a month for it. Musician's Friend have been selling those strings for decades and I don't think they've put any reputable string makers out of business. To the contrary, in that time period, Dunlop started making strings at their factory in Benicia, just North of me. Good product, too. I don't think that store brands have a negative effect on name brand products, especially commodity things like strings. I like my GHS and D'Addario, and I'll pay a buck a pack more for them if I have to, which I don't. If anything, I suspect that they cause the name brands to step up their game and make sure that their product is competitive.

Ha, @Colin Nicholls, did you get this? It seems to happen at my house for no reason I can pin down. I thought at one point it was odd or even days. I'd never paid much attention, I guess I write my notes in take lane headers and don't put enough tracks in a folder to be concerned with how many there are.

FLIGHT DECK's MIDI and audio reset button is invisible on my monitor, and if I click it, the audio engine button goes invisible as well. Maybe my screen is set to a lower contrast than yours?

Ha, what kind of minds think alike? I tried to post last night with a photo of my new states 1-3 buttons, which like yours add a "+" sign. See it below. I like what you've done with the rollover, and I agree that it now makes sense. Cakewalk just isn't using it in a way that indicates anything other than "your cursor is now over this button" unless you already know about the behavior. I may change my Cell 1 image back to the standard now that I've seen yours, but I do like static buttons that suggest what will happen when I click on them. I will mull it. It's a fine line, isn't it, between functional and clever. Was this always in Flight Deck and I just didn't notice? This is proof that a good theme can add functionality that's not there in the stock themes. Anything that makes it easier on new users is great by me. Here's an image of what my new lanes buttons look like in all their static states: As you can see, the "loud" button is for the state when lanes exist but the lanes panel is closed. When the lanes are open, it switches to a black background image.

Welllllll....in this case, we are getting what we paid for, it's just that we paid for most of it years ago. Our license fees funded the first 30 years of development, and now that code base is owned by a company that wanted to keep developing it and let everyone use it for free as a promotional, brand-building product. There were some that were very upset that they had paid hundreds in licensing fees for a product that was now going to be free for everyone, but it's a fact that as a Cakewalk by BandLab user, I know that there is a lot of bonus material in that Platinum bundle that I can't get my hands on for any amount of money, and I also didn't get to use SONAR for all the time that the paid users did (although I did own a SONAR license back in the early 2000's before I set the hobby aside for a dozen years). I was using Mixcraft when Gibson pulled the plug. Mixcraft is a great little program, but a little program it is. I've found Cakewalk to be much more capable.

A thing that helped me to understand it is that when you're using the Smart Tool, it's oriented toward the "speed" workflows, which live up to the name once you get a handle on it, but can be frustrating if you're trying to do something other than linear comping of a series of takes, using the best bits of each. When you step out of that and get into cutting, copying, and pasting sections to loop or repeat them is where things can go sideways. The thing to do if you want to edit in that way is to turn off the Comp feature of the Smart Tool and switch over to the Edit Tool for the editing operations. It's easy to get stuck to the Smart Tool, because it usually works so well, but when you're in the Take Lanes, it can become a source of unintended results. I use the F5-F10 shortcut keys to switch around among the tools, and upcoming changes to my custom themes will be including them in plain sight on the Tools Module.

Nah, this is just after finishing up recording. I came up with something I liked fiddling with a synth pad and a stepped filter. I started hearing beats in my head so I set up to loop record my drum kit, 4 minute takes and played for 20 minutes. All I did before performing the slip edit on Take 1 was the obligatory Healing Of The Clips ritual, which must be done every time I record drums in loop mode. This must be done due to Cakewalk's unfathomable practice (as mentioned above) of splitting all the clips in a track at the endpoint of the shortest (usually last) take. The weirdest part is that the takes/clips are the first and last, not adjacent ones, and that the fades were created only on the tracks I didn't actually click on (the clips were all grouped, however). The clips in the first drum track were left alone, fade-wise. Cakewalk does weird things, no doubt. Some of them are known and accepted, others are not. First I need to make sure this is not in the former category.

Hey, we have a winner (unfortunately we also have a loser, who at this point is me)! You must have also noticed the flattening of the waveform display, which escaped me in my advanced state of bemusement. I guess I somehow accessed a feature of Cakewalk that adds really gradual complementary fades to the beginning of the first take and end of the last take in your lanes, and does so only on the tracks you're not directly editing. Now at least I know how to make them go away. Maybe they're something that Cakewalk just does, and I need to get used to removing them like with the spurious clip splits.

As much as I like Cakewalk, I really do, from the start of our relationship it's been my experience that although recording and (especially) mixing give me pretty much what I ask for, when we get around to editing and comping, things get....non-consensual. Because of this I have over the years spent more time trying to figure out how to get Cakewalk not to do things than I have figuring out how to get it to do things. It's always had this tendency to do stuff that I never asked it to or gave it permission to. Being able to change the Smart Tool helped, and there was a bug involving closed take lanes that got fixed, but it still has that weird quirk where it puts a spurious edit in all of my takes if I happen to record one that's shorter than the others. I know how to clean up after it, but I wish I didn't have to. I just accept that Cakewalk does that, there's no way to turn it off, nobody has an explanation why it does it, so it's best that I get used to it, and I have. Recently Cakewalk has taken to drawing lines on my clips, again with no provocation on my part. As shown in the screenshot below, I have a set of drum takes that are grouped for easy editing and comping. The first thing I wanted to do was to clip out some silence and warmup noise from the start of the first take, so I clicked on its left edge, held down my shift key so that Cakewalk wouldn't move all of the clip edges for all of the takes in the track (also no idea why its default behavior is to do that. Am I to believe there are people who want the edges of all of their clips to move simultaneously if they happen to line up with each other vertically? Perhaps they are in a vast majority, and I should just be happy that I have the option to bypass the behavior with a modifier key), and dragged it a few seconds worth. All was fine until I took a look at the other tracks and saw that there were now diagonal lines on two of the clips in all of the other tracks. The grouped clip I meant to shorten had a diagonal line superimposed on it, and the last take in the stack had one too, but going in the other direction. All three of my other tracks exhibit similar lines: The lines seem harmless enough, but I didn't have "View>Show Spurious Lines On Random Clips" checked and I can't seem to do anything to get rid of them, even with Undo. They'd look okay from a style standpoint, but they're not on all of the clips, so they just look weird, and it does worry me a bit that given Cakewalk's propensities, it may have marked them for some later, unrequested operation. Anyone have any idea what these lines signify? Is it okay to ignore them?

I just checked it out using the numbers method and the Take and Automation Lanes work thusly: Cell 1 is normal state with no lanes Cell 2 is the pressed state, which only appears in "no lanes" condition Cell 3 is the rollover state, also only appears in "no lanes" condition Cell 4 is lanes open Cell 5 is unused Cell 6 is lanes closed (but present) Cell 1's look of white on grey is Cakewalk standard for inactive buttons waiting to be pushed. Same with Cells 2 and 3, Cakewalk standard. Cell 4 is the brightest one, which is appropriate for open lanes. The relation between Cell 1, Cell 4 and Cell 6 is important. Cell 6 stock is a dimmed version of Cell 4, which is appropriate, but considering it's supposed to let us know at a glance whether or not we have lanes, it's too muted. I think I'll lighten it up in my themes. Again we have a rollover and pressed state that are only used for one operation, the initial opening/creation of a lane. Once that happens, they're never seen again. There's no reason not to use those when closing and reopening the lanes as well but Cakewalk doesn't. Also: why is the button for removing a Take Lane an "x," while the similar button for removing an automation lane is a "-?" To add either type of lane is a "+" sign, so bye-bye "x."

The create/show lanes buttons work in an interesting way. It has a logic. Before it's clicked on it's grey to indicate there are no lanes, and it responds to a rollover. Then when there are lanes (the first of which are created the first time you click the button to open the lanes), it changes color to indicate that lanes exist, so that when the lanes are closed, you know that they are there, but hidden. If you delete all your lanes, the buttons go back to their original state. I'd like every button to have an appropriate rollover (meaning you'd have a rollover button state for any button that can be pushed and get a result), but once the lanes exist, the buttons are static, with no rollover state. The bakers of yore seem to have been more into pressed states than hovered states. This has me thinking that it would be good to have more of an indication that lanes exist, because I didn't understand or even notice this behavior until you all started discussing it. The "lanes exist" buttons on the stock themes seem kinda dull for their function. So do mine because I didn't understand it. There's plenty of weirdness around with hover states. For instance the buttons to expand a track header have a hover state when they're in the "expand" mode, but not in the opposite ("contract?") mode. So there's visual feedback for expanding but not for the other way. As with so many elements in Cakewalk, less consideration for consistency was given to this than I'd like.

I misspoke, I guess. The add track flyout buttons will change state if clicked on, they're toggles. I think the UI should let you know when you hover that if you click here, something will happen (it fails to do that in many other locations, like add and remove lanes). It's appropriate visual feedback. The thing about the Export module is that it's really a radio button, click on this empty circle and the state changes, click on the other empty circle and it changes again. Clicking a second time on an active button will not result in a state change. Which lane buttons do you mean? The expand buttons work correctly as far as I can tell. The behavior can be changed with Theme Editor like I've done with my Export Module. I made the hover image the same as the normal image so there's no longer a change when the selected button is hovered or pressed. I can do it on any other buttons that exhibit incorrect (in my mind) behavior. If there are any other buttons that act like this, please let me know and I'll eventually fix it in my themes.

This might be something for TYLIP, but I'll post it here for all. @Colin Nicholls may add it if he chooses. I decided to take on the task of figuring out the button logic for the Project/Selection radio buttons in the Export Module. I saw an opportunity to have fun with green circles and orange dots. This required a lot of button/image logic detective work, because the image has 8 cells, 6 of which are used for the button states. Yes, 6 different button states, all used. Since the buttons are so small, when I tried to create a test image with numbers in each of the cells, the numbers were too small to read, so I put colors in in the order of ROYGBIV. As follows, in order of the cells in the image: Position 1 is normal for the unselected button Position 2 is for when the unselected button is pressed Position 3 is for when the unselected button is hovered over Position 4 is normal for the selected button Position 5 is for when the selected button is pressed (this seems odd to me, I can't think of anywhere else in the UI that pressing on an already selected button results in an image change Position 6 is for when the selected button is hovered over (again, odd) Positions 7 and 8 are what is displayed with no project loaded I wound up using the same button image for conditions 4, 5, and 6, because I don't believe that the user should get any feedback from pushing or hovering a button they've already selected. It's not a toggle. I used a darker circle for condition 1 and a brighter one for condition 3. I had some fun with condition 2, I have a green dot for the pushed state that switches to an orange one for selected. It's fun to dig up these locations that are often left alone due to it being a pain in the neck to change them. I hope this helps.

I have multiple AIR products and yes, the .big file is their sample container. It doesn't get unpacked during installation (or ever, the instrument just reads from it directly). My guess is that with the Pro Tools installer, it only installs the AAX version. These folks mentioning Pro Tools and Avid lead me to believe that this might be the cause of their problems. Unless there is some way to choose to install the VST version, you may not be able to install it from the installer you got from Avid. I don't know what their policies are regarding bundled software, but you may be able to use your licenses if you just download newer installers from AIR/InMusic. I would try using the newest installers and see if they recognize the licenses on your iLok.

My favorite option for 3rd party sampler is Speedrum Lite, but Sitala is a useful and popular option. From what I can see, having an integrated sampler in Cakewalk would result in a big uptake among EDM and hip hop producers. A demographic that I am sure BandLab would love to see more of.