Starship Krupa

Thanks. As I said, I know about linking. It is fab. Something that Mixcraft doesn't have. I did some research and the way Cubase does this is that MIDI tracks can have sends similar to audio tracks, so you can set up any number of MIDI Sends. That seems pretty elegant to me.

Yeah, not something I'd ever make use of. When I do need extra bands, that's what things like your Fabfilter and my Meldaproduction EQ's are for. It's too specialized a use case to be concerned about having it built in to CbB, IMO. There is a plethora of freeware EQ's that will do it. The Quadcurve is a console EQ at heart, which traditionally aren't used for fancy surgery. You use it to notch out the honk(s) or add a bit of sweetness. It happens to have that fancy popout display with the analyzer, but it's still a console EQ. Adding extra bands would clutter up the non-expanded view. (This reminds me, I need to remember the ReaPlugs EQ's when I'm doing corrective surgery on unfortunate camcorder footage. They do things like linear phase and allow for unlimited bands. ReaFir is crazy good for noise reduction.) I'd much rather see the LP EQ's make an appearance, either included or for sale. Not too many linear phase multibands out there, and I never owned a SPlat license. There has been mention of makeovers of the Sonitae, updating UI's and going to VST format. That would be nice, too. I especially like the compressor, it does a passable dbx 160 imitation. The bakerzoids don't seem to be interested in plug-ins at this point.

These actions are present in menus but can't be bound to a keystroke or Custom Module button: Rename Clip and Insert Synth. Both of them are actions I do multiple times in every project, and having to invoke them from their menus each time is slower than if I could bind a key and/or add them to Custom Module buttons. I don't know why they're missing. You can bind a key to rename Arranger Sections but not clips. Every other kind of track has its own default keystroke.

I don't and I didn't. The point is not how popular Cakewalk is or might be, but rather that a person doing a search for the right DAW will have the BandLab name flashed at them. I don't believe I said "here's a comprehensive list of DAW's in order of popularity."

How about "if" one is overusing them? ? After all, you don't know how many EQ's or bands I typically use. And pretty much the only time I use more than 4 bands+hi and lo pass is when working with challenging material such as the cam footage audio from a party I attended a couple of weeks ago. The guy performing wanted me to play cowbell, and nobody else wanted to hold my camcorder for more than about 30 seconds, so I wound up with 30 minutes of the closest instrument to the mic being my danged (and dinged) cowbell. You'd be amazed how many harmonics a cowbell throws off until you try to notch the friggin' thing out. Ideally, I'd travel back in time and set up a couple of nice condensers in an X-Y or mid-side, mic the amp, take a feed off the vocal PA, etc. and only use the camera feed as a reference. Since I seem to only be able to move forward in time, I had to rule out that approach. I wound up with 5 bands of MAutoDynamicEqualizer clamping down every time the cowbell was struck. I made my notches narrow enough that it didn't have much effect on the rest of the sounds. This is something that a 4-band knob EQ would have been inadequate for. If anyone who listens to it notices phase shifts or whatever, I'll give them the raw audio and let them re-do it. My philosophy is that "doing it right or wrong" can only be determined by listening to the final mix. If it sounds good it is good no matter how many EQ's or bands the mix person used. I do endorse the notion that some approaches make it harder to get good-sounding results, but "doing it wrong" is too absolute for me. Before the time Daft Punk came along, audible pumping was considered a no-no, an indication that the mix engineer was overusing it. Now there are dedicated plug-ins that simulate it, along with bitcrushing plug-ins to simulate "bad" A/D D/A conversion. The term "overdrive," in the guitar world now indicates a desirable tone (most of the time), but broken down, it means "too much drive." Also, ne of the genres I dig is industrial noise, where "doing it right" can mean the opposite of what it usually does (it's all right, but I prefer it more grating). I share the opinion that if someone absolutely can't get listenable results with "only" 4 bands plus lo and hi they probably either lack a grasp of the basics or they're working with badly recorded material. In the case of the former, hit some YouTube and call me back. In the case of the latter, if it wouldn't result in a time travel paradox, go back and record it over after you figure out what messed up the capture the first time.

Other DAW's as well. Mixcraft, for example, has tracks similar to Cakewalk's "Instrument" tracks, with the difference being that instead of having one conjoined synth, you can add as many as you like.

And rightly so!

I didn't make the list, just copied and pasted. https://www.google.com/search?q=what's+a+good+first+daw

I would love to be able to route the output of a MIDI track to more than just one synth. Natively, without the need for external loopback software. As it stands, the only way to get this result is either to use a synth that includes a MIDI thru function or to duplicate your MIDI tracks. The most obvious use case for this is only needing to edit one MIDI track no matter how many synths are playing in unison (yes, I know about linked clips, but they add complexity, as does using an external MIDI splitter). Secondarily, there is screen clutter reduction, and not getting mixed up as to which MIDI track is going to which synth. (If anyone knows of a MIDI plug-in that can accomplish this, please tell me)

Oh man, the thing I miss the most when I'm using Cakewalk instead of Mixcraft is Mixcraft's infinitely nestable bus/folders. To create a bus/folder, you just drag one track onto another. Boom, now the target track is a bus and a collapsible folder. And they're nestable. You can have a Drums folder with an Overheads folder inside it, a Vocals folder with folders for Lead and Backing, etc. And nest them as deeply as your computer resources can handle. The routing for this can be duplicated with Cakewalk's excellent routing abilities, but I took to Mixcraft's way the moment they introduced it and I still love it. If this interests you, download their trial and check it out.

I think those of us on the forum get a skewed picture of the user base due to the younger folks not being forum-oriented. Regarding Mr. Dylan, I read Clive Davis' autobiography and he said that although Dylan's records for Columbia at the time of their release didn't see great chart action, he wanted Dylan due to the prestige he brought to the label. Of course, time has shown that Mr. Z's albums were fantastic catalog sellers. Even if they never download it, everyone who is shopping for their first DAW will at least see/hear the name "Cakewalk by BANDLAB." I just did a Google search on "what's a good first DAW?" Here are the results: Cakewalk by BandLab – Free (PC only) Reaper – $60. Logic Pro X – $199 (Mac only) Ableton Live 10.1 – $99, $449, $749. FL Studio 20 – $99, $199, $299, $899. PreSonus Studio One 4 – Free, $99, $399 So I think BandLab are getting a fine return on their investment. Addition and refinement of the tools that people use to make beats is probably what they need to focus on if they want to pull in the younger crowd. The YouTube dance music crew, X.E.L. Ohh, Adk, and eWoof have all stated that lack of a sampler/sampler track is the biggest drawback to using the program. Add just that and I think they'll see way more uptake. I can only imagine the slew of tutorials on "How to use the sampler in Cakewalk by BandLab."

"Macho macho man...." ? I can mix with a 4 band EQ, but I get more satisfying results by using the various modern tools I am blessed with. It's 2021. The classic productions would certainly have used these things if they had been available. As for "feeling I need," need's got nothing to do with it. I can cut a sheet of plywood with my handsaw, but I choose to use my circular saw and table saw. Am I "doing it wrong" by using whatever tools I have at my disposal? I've often said that I could happily do a mix of a standard rock song using whatever FX come with the DAW (more happily if I also get to use the Meldaproduction freebie bundle ?). However, I'm happier and faster with the 3rd-party FX I've acquired. (Once I get into EDM territory, though, things become much more complicated. The FX I use become an integral part of the composition.)

Yes, but I've already decided that I don't like the results. ?

Thanks for letting me know to give these a wide berth. I accidentally purchased the Yellow Submarine thing that came out about 20 years ago when the movie was re-released, thinking that I would be treated to a version of the first rock record I owned but with fewer scratches and crackles. What an abomination. I gave it away because I didn't want it in the house. That record was such a mind-bender that I made it through my teen years without touching drugs (I say my teen years, because I....um, later learned exactly what could have inspired them to create things like "Only A Northern Song"). The wonderful little guitar licks and sounds in those "Beatles at their most psychedelic" songs like "Hey Bulldog" and "It's All Too Much" were almost inaudible, and for heaven's sake, part of the weird charm is the hard panning. Lennon's lead vocal on "Bulldog," with the verses hard right, morphing to stereo on the choruses and fadeout. Martin's stereo mixes get a lot of flak, some of it....deserved, but listen to "It's All Too Much" and tell me that it's not a great mix. To me, heavy-handed remasters are like those lenticular 3-D versions of The Last Supper. It's a DaVinci masterpiece, the height of its time and for all time. You are not going to improve upon it with your brickwall limiter and multiband compressor.

"My name is Ed?"

Ah, a rhetorical question answered by a philosophical statement. Hmm. Coral reefs aren't talking, and the individuals who started it and formed the bulk of it are mostly long gone. If they could tell me, I'd guess it would be because it was formed of many small parts over along period of time by many organisms whose primary goal was to survive and thrive rather than conform to ideas of human aesthetics.

I noticed that some of them looked unselected but I wasn't sure. Are your fade lines showing up as none more black on selected clips? Why o why must there be so many gotchas and fixed elements to theme around?

Look into the Relay function in your iZotope suite. I think it lives in Neutron. Also, doesn't your Pro subscription come with their swoopy metering software? Studying up on how to use that might shine a light.

All right, 45 years ago, how many of the top 10 songs were disco? Let's take a look at the year end Billboard chart: 1"Silly Love Songs"Wings 2"Don't Go Breaking My Heart"Elton John & Kiki Dee 3"Disco Lady"Johnnie Taylor 4"December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)"The Four Seasons 5"Play That Funky Music"Wild Cherry 6"Kiss and Say Goodbye"The Manhattans 7"Love Machine"The Miracles 8"50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"Paul Simon 9"Love Is Alive"Gary Wright 10"A Fifth of Beethoven"Walter Murphy & The Big Apple Band I'd say about half, not necessarily by "disco artists," but I'm going to count the veteran acts on the chart that were there with dance tunes. Dang, that's cool that "Love Is Alive" made the top 10. That is such a great song. How many of the others would you change the station on if they came on the car radio? If I never hear "Silly Love Songs" "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart," or "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover" again, it would be fine with me. Not that they're bad songs, I have just heard them more than enough to last me. Anyway, did this mean that the young musicians of the day were all striving to become disco artists? I don't think so. Young musicians were listening to and emulating the kind of music they always do, which is underground cognoscenti stuff that gets nowhere near the charts and older fundamental artists. I can tell you that for my part, I was into Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac, and just a few years from getting into Talking Heads, Buggles, Joe Jackson, X, and the like. If the bakerzoids had the prescience to predict what kind of music kids were going to want to buy in a year or two, they would be running record labels. They're not, though, I daresay. All they can do is listen for what people want most, keep an eye on the other DAW's to see what features seem hot, and then decide which ones will be the most useful to the widest number of people, or give Cakewalk the most prestige, or whatever is driving feature development. I think the hip hop crew have SPOKEN when it comes to the #1 feature that would help Cakewalk be useful for producing those styles of music: gotta have that built-in sampler or sample track or similar. I suspect that most of us who work with samples would love to have such a thing. Having used Mixcraft, which has 2 flavors of built-in sampler, I can say it really makes things go faster and more smoothly. Select some audio, right click, Send To Sampler, bang. A long, hard look at drum composition workflow in the Piano Roll is in order, too. I can make beats in PRV, but it always feels like I'm using a tool that was really designed for something else. It's a pain the neck to get it displaying drum instrument names, the wheel zooming features don't work in the drum pane, etc. (haha, I just noticed that the forum algo bleeped out an abbreviation for "want to be" and a reference to the great Brian Epstein's orientation)

Groan. @Colin Nicholls, I notice in YLIP that when you demonstrate custom colors for clip fades, they appear as the correct color on your "Normal Selected" clips. I've not found this to be the case on my system. Cakewalk obeys the color choice in unselected clips, but as soon as I select the clip, the fade line turns black. As you might imagine, the screws with my ambition to go coal black with my selected clips. I could have sworn that this worked at one point, so anyone else who would like to try it for me, much obliged. Just set your Clip Fades color to any color other than white or black and see how it behaves. One more thing: how does one go about setting the clip background color for unselected clips? There's a theme item for selected clips, but that seems to be it. Is it "Track view / Clips Pane / Clips / Tracks 1,11,21.<. Background" and its sisters? TYLIP warns about the clip backgrounds rabbit hole, but I went and jumped in it because if I can get it sorted the way I want, it will really help.

My guess would be that it has to do with an Instrument Track being a conjoined set of Synth and MIDI tracks, like the Grouping is failing to apply to the audio track. If it once worked correctly and then broke, that makes it relatively low-hanging fruit. A programmer with access to the code before and after can diff them and see what was changed.

This also illustrates how for one user something can be a nasty, while for another, they might never see it. For instance, I never use Instrument tracks, only split MIDI/Synth. I like to experiment with different synths on the same MIDI material and there are advantages to just switching the output on the MIDI track.

Does it seem odd that Cakewalk lightens selected clip backgrounds in Tungsten? This works fine with Mercury, where it gets really light, but in Tungsten, I find that it reduces contrast with the waveform, which is the opposite of what I want. When unselected, an unmuted clip has a nice contrast-y dark background. Select it and you get a lighter background that for me at least, makes it more difficult to see what I'm doing. Also, at the 3-year mark I still find it difficult to tell at a glance what clips are selected but muted, not selected and muted, selected and unmuted or not selected and unmuted. This suggests that it could be improved upon. Another question: if a dark theme were to offer clip backgrounds that went darker when selected, would you find that confusing? I'm going to be doing this in the versions of my themes that I use myself, but if it would be too confusing for others, I'll fork it and offer alternate versions with Tungsten-style backgrounds. I'm thinking of doing a Leonard Cohen tribute theme called "You Want It Dark," which would be close to Tungsten, but with 1F1D1C black in place of dark chocolate. Matthew might already have the "none more black" territory staked out, though, I must check.

Update FYI: I nailed down a repro condition on it and sent in my project and it seems that it's in that odd category of "works as designed, but it's oddly designed." It's for such reasons that I posted this as a question, and yes, I didn't understand how it worked. It actually does have to do with having auto-crossfade enabled while working with my other lanes closed. Auto crossfades will be applied to the clips in the closed lanes but not in the one you have open. Not sure why it would have been designed that way, and no doubt it will be revisited. Moral here, especially for those of us who sometimes experience Cakewalk "getting in the way" of our preferred workflow: sure, it's fun to commiserate on the forum, but what gets the better results is to send the devs a .CWB of a project with instructions on how to duplicate your frustrating conditions. They do not want Cakewalk to feel like it's impeding your process. Can't please everyone, but some things are just idiosyncratic, designed to a different standard, maybe under "rush to ship" conditions in a different era. What's more, they probably don't use the program exactly the same way any of us does. If you hand them a way to spend 5 minutes and see what you're seeing, you stand a much better chance than if they have to take 30 minutes from their other duties to play with it until it breaks. ALSO: If you reported an issue or issues 5 years ago and got fed up with the lack of response, keep in mind that the company that failed to address the issue went out of business over 3 years ago. The current owners skimmed the top developers who now have a different set of priorities. If your old bug is even still around in the database, it's very "stale." Worst that could happen if you tried again would be...nothing.

Be careful. There have been reports of an odd grinding noise that some have said resembles the sound of Delia Derbyshire scraping a guitar plectrum across the bass strings of a piano.