Starship Krupa

I have some more information on Control Bar/Menu Button's use in Tools/HUD Module (Large). Cell 1 is used when the Smart Tool or Draw Tool are not selected. This cell should be a color that will contrast well with the "default" white text color. Cell 2 is used on the HUD in that odd case where after you click on the duration menu, it flashes briefly as the HUD closes. It also acts as a "pressed" state button in the case where you have neither the Smart nor Draw Tool selected, but press on it. A brief flash again. Cell 3 is not used. Cell 4 is used when the Smart or Draw Tools are selected (which is appropriate, because note duration is meaningless for tools that don't draw notes). It should be given a color that contrasts well with Focused Track Text. For whatever reason, the HUD uses Cell 1 for the Smart Tool. Cell 5 has the usual Control Bar cell 5 duty of getting displayed when no project is loaded.

Note of caution: I downloaded this and checked within and the newest date on any of the files is August, 2018. This means that the themes will not be compatible with the current release of Cakewalk by BandLab.

The thing is, while everything said here is true, a Ryzen 7 with 16G of RAM and an SSD is more than capable of running Cakewalk. Playback through the onboard hardware CODEC should be fine with WASAPI Exclusive. It's way more hardware than I use, especially my notebook system. There's something else going wrong here that buying an external interface is not likely to fix, although if you're recording guitar and voice, an external interface is essential. It's not the Realtek CODEC itself that's the issue, it's the circuitry connecting to it. You'll sound so much better with studio quality mic preamps and analog-to-digital converters. Definitely look into decrapification. HP is known for loading up their notebooks with tons of stuff you don't need and don't want on your DAW. Also, exclude your Cakewalk Projects and plug-ins folders from active Defender scanning. Resplendence LatencyMon is one of the system tuners' best tools for tracking down what's causing trouble.

A few days ago I suffered a failure on my main DAW apparently due to the system losing power during a disk operation. I know this isn't supposed to happen there are lots of failsafe measures to prevent it, but I wound up in the dreaded Windows Repair loop. All my stuff was there, I could see it from the command line, but just could not get Windows to start up. Finally I submitted to a "reset," where it nukes your Windows installation and installed programs and keeps the rest of your files. Bone stock Windows. One of the first things to go back on was Cakewalk, with the dread that accompanies having around 700 plug-ins installed on my just-crashed system. Fortunately, I keep my iLokables on a physical iLok and my Waves on a USB stick, and most of the rest seems to be trusting that I still have the same computer. So I started Cakewalk and created a simple two chord drone using Xpand!2. Looped it and let it run, and sure enough, about every 8 seconds or so, a big CLICK. No indication from Cakewalk's Performance module that the engine had suffered a buffer underrun. Next stop, LatencyMon: I looked at the Drivers tab, and sure enough, NDIS.SYS was eating humongous interrupt time. I'd seen this before, when I first upgraded my system from 7 to 10. What fixed it was rolling the NIC driver back. Of course there was nothing to roll it back to with my fresh install, so hit Dell's website to get the older driver. Here's the Microsoft/Intel driver that was installed with the reset: When swapped out with this one, from Dell's website: All was well: One theory I have is that these "clicks and pops" that come with Windows updates, and the regular admonitions to disable your network interface whenever you're doing DAW work may be down to network card drivers that are too grabby with the interrupts. So if you're seeing this issue, of course, run LatencyMon, and if NDIS.SYS is causing trouble, see if you can find an earlier version. If you have a Dell or Lenovo or HP or some other brand name, usually their drivers run a revision or two behind the curve. Where Microsoft used to be too conservative with hardware drivers, they now seem too aggressive about pushing out the latest shiny driver. If you have something go sideways, and you haven't just done a reset like I had to, most drivers can be rolled back using Device Manager.

Okay, I found what I think is one important location: Users/<username>/AppData/Roaming/Cakewalk/Shared Presets. The subfolder names are what appear to be GUID's (those 29-digit numbers in parentheses).

Having experienced a catastrophic failure of my Windows installation a couple of days ago, resulting in the need to hit the Windows Reset button, I'm in the process of rebuilding my system, salvaging what I can from before the incident. It would be a great help if I knew where a default Cakewalk installation stored everything. I know that some of it is in AppData/Roaming, which I have access to, and some in the registry, which I can't do anything about. Most intriguing, there's a folder for Shared Presets that, if it contains all the presets I made, would be most helpful. Where else can I look for Cakewalk's settings? In addition to trying to sift through the wreckage, I also want to include them in future backups.

Thanks, lads. @Kevin Perry, that's a good excuse to dig into Articulation Maps, which I haven't done since they appeared. @Kurre, I thought that there must be a way to do something like this. Thanks!

I know I got an answer to my question, but I just wanna vent here: I've been wading deeper into the glitchy waters of Stutter Edit 2 and MRhythmizer and this discrepancy between how they and even other DAW's designate note names is driving me nuts as I try to switch back and forth. I can see how NASA screwed the pooch on that unmanned probe by having one engineer calling out a dimension in centimeters and having the probe part built in inches. I set "Base octave for pitches" to -2 to get Stutter Edit 2 and Cakewalk to agree, so I could put in a C1 in the Piano Roll and have it register as C1 in SE2. This got me through my Producertech Stutter Edit course without clawing at my head. Now, if I have a MIDI note that Cakewalk calls "C1," Stutter Edit will respond to it as C1, but MRhythmizer thinks the note is C2. Trying to get my head around this: the reason I can play a middle C on my controller and the sound that comes out will always be middle C in a software piano or organ is because my controller doesn't care about this C-whatever-number, it's just sending the number 60 to my interface, which is passing it to Cakewalk, which is passing it to the synth, which knows what pitch to play when it gets a 60. They speak in whole numbers from 0-127 and that's that. Where it comes unraveled is that these plug-ins are doing something other than playing a note, they're launching their sequences or gestures or whatever based on what note they receive and they label their slots the C1, D1 way. Which it turns out, is not an absolute like 0-127 is. So if I want both Stutter Edit and MRhythmizer to agree, then I guess I need to put that Cakewalk Transpose MIDI FX plug-in on the MIDI track.

Yes, I mean, it's a tool I use for writing songs, certainly. I'm not sure what a "platform" would be. Band-In-Box, maybe? I work out what chords I want to use in my songs by playing them on keyboard or guitar. I guess my material is "pre-written" in that sense. I use Cakewalk as an arrangement tool, though, moving sections around, adding, etc. To me, it's a recording, note entry, and editing platform, and as such, useful when writing songs. I started using Cakewalk in 2018 and I've deleted measures and dragged the clips together to shorten things, probably doing it like Craig Anderton suggests in that thread. I've also used Arranger Sections. But my songs rarely get above 20 tracks, usually more like 12-16. The Arranger Track has been around for some time now and I think it's probably the answer to that feller's question about how to cut a section of a song out with the least disruption. For people who like to compose using notation, I understand that Cakewalk has some shortcomings, when I go that route, I do it Finale Notepad and export/import MIDI. Someone who was clamoring for a chord track described it and I understood it but now I've forgotten what one does, so it probably isn't an important thing to me. They make substitutions and transposition easier? I dunno.

I love their emulation of the MG-1.

I get ya, for sure, it's not like you can use those dump files to figure out what's going on so who needs them? One thing I can say is that although who knows what's going on in your case, Windows 10 loves log files. When I first upgraded my laptop to Windows 10, I noticed that the hard drive light was on constantly. I'm told (and experience bears out) that when you first upgrade your system to Windows 10, you might as well just leave it turned on 24 hours a day until it settles down with whatever it's doing. Being a curious sort, and familiar with diagnostic tools, I used Resource Monitor to figure out that it was writing zillions of log files, and configured it to turn as many of them off as I could find. It was logging everything. I don't even remember how I did it, but there are utilities that allow you to configure it. Also, my policy is that if it's in my Temp folder, it's fair game. Off with its head. Into the trash and emptied. Sometimes things will complain that they're in use, in that case I leave them alone, but everything else is gone gone gone. I'm very stingy with my hard drive space, my laptop has a 220G C drive and that's it. My favorite tool for figuring out what's eating so much space is WizTree. Gives you a graphic representation of file size on your disk, what's taking up the most space. iZotope and IK Multimedia love to leave their downloaded installers laying around, which isn't a big deal on my main system with plenty of storage, but on the laptop, out with it.

Not a huge grab, but I was curious. Global|Menus/View Menu Text determines the color of the description text at the bottom of the plug-in browser:

One for Plug-In Property Page, should you wish to include it. For Preset Name drop-down menu, the first cell in the image is its standard state, the second is what's displayed after the user double clicks on it to change the preset name. It persists until the preset is saved. Whatever color you use for both cells should have good contrast with View Menu Text.

The solution I'd be looking for is how to prevent Cakewalk from crashing. Make notes of what is going on when it crashes, ask here in the forum and/or with tech support?

The description as "unique" is kinda funny. Vojtech himself has said that it's a clone of Gross Beat, of course with extended functionality. Everything in their product descriptions is fiery hyperbole, though. $22 is a great price. If you're into things like Stutter Edit, this covers similar ground, and more.

Thank you so much, John. I do have the one theme that's my "fade into the background theme," Racing Green, but yeah, the "bold" is fun. I find myself switching back and forth between them even during a session, depending on the task at hand. The bold ones seem to be good for initial inspiration, coming up with chords, beats, and basslines for EDM, and then for the more technical tasks of editing, comping, and mixing, I switch back to the soothing green. And speaking of switching back and forth, when I switch over to Mercury and Tungsten, I'm reminded of how much a custom theme (and color preset) can improve upon them by adding contrast. This is especially true in the Track Pane and Piano Roll, where I like to have brighter gridlines and more contrast between foreground and background.

In a nutshell, what I figured out was that those images just indicate which plug-in UI has focus, regardless of ACT. So they should indicate it as such by being lighter or a different colour. It's a useful indicator in cases where you're controlling plug-ins with the computer keyboard or whatever. As you know, once I started fiddling with those images it opened a can o'worms with all the different images. I changed a couple of them, and it was like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube to back out, so I forged onward. It helps to have Amazon Prime Video running on monitor 2.

In addition to multiple adjustments for the sake of consistency and legibility, we've also added more visual whimsy. Here's some more work on the Transport Module: And faders: And what you get if you don't lock your Control Bar Modules:

I've been fiddling about with the images used in FX Rack, and I have a suggestion for an addendum to YLIP p. 38-39, if you care to. Details about what "ACT Focus" means, which is that it's the effect plug-in that currently has Cakewalk's attention or "focus," whether one is using ACT or not. It tripped me up because I thought it only applied when an ACT controller was enabled, but as it turns out, Cakewalk always lets you know (via switching these images) what plug-in has focus. And a plug-in can have focus and be bypassed at the same time. Also, as far as I could tell, the middle cell (or cell 2, "pressed") of Open Plug-In UI (in all its forms) isn't used because it seems to switch over to the appropriate Name Background (ACT Focus) image as soon as I press it. As I say, "as far as I could tell." This is about the trickiest area for sorting out button states. There's enabled, bypassed, focused, unfocused, regular, narrow, plus the hover and pressed states, so I may have it wrong. You must have gone through a lot of coffee figuring this stuff out!

It's very bright.

You are a gentleman and a scholar. Also, I want to especially commend you on your Quadcurve fly-out.

Although I usually prefer darker themes, this one really lives up to the light theme paradigm, much more so than Mercury. How about a Custom Color preset to get those "graph paper" lines into the Track Pane?

Since you seem open to working on your singing and mic technique, yeah, your voice is an instrument that needs regular practice to maintain a skill level, just like guitar or piano or drums. As far as mixing-related solutions, using the Quadcurve EQ in ProChannel, take the green band, set the Q to about 8, crank the gain up to about 10 and then sweep the frequency knob back and forth until you hit the "ugly" frequency. You'll hear it, it will be the once that grates like chalk on a blackboard. Once you find that unwanted resonance, pull the gain down to -3dB and then fiddle with the Q and gain as necessary to tame it. As with all things mix, take care not to overdo it to the point where there's a frequency hole. I do this for every vocal. To my understanding, it's what happens when your voice and the mic (and maybe some room reflections) form a resonant peak. It can be reduced by learning more singing and mic placement technique. Even if you don't have a vocal booth, you can set up your mic in different places around the room until you find the one that is most flattering/flattening. That's how Sam Philips did it.

The "hidden treasures" have some useful features. You can enable them using Plug-in Manager as shown:

Dang, that is a heckuva bundle of sound design for a negligible amount of money.