Starship Krupa

Please describe the steps you took when doing your Export. What's important is the selections you made in your Track View before you selected Export Audio from the menu, and then the choices you made in the resulting dialogs, especially regarding "Whole Mix" vs. "Buses" and whether you checked the various boxes. There are a couple of things that can go astray in the process, and I had a spot of trouble with it myself when I was new to Cakewalk. The documentation leaves out a bit of critical information. I've since developed a more fool-resistant process.

Maybe I'll just make a bunch of dummy templates called "mixing board" and "monitor speaker" and "rock guitar" and so forth and if Cakewalk assigns the icons, I can Snip & Sketch them.? I'll try using some images that are 600x600 bitmap, too, I have a hunch that startscreen might take to those better than large JPG's that it has to crunch.

What would be great would be if zZounds' computer's algorithm picked up on this and started partnering with Amazon to sell cat food. We would know whom to blame/thank. If it took off, we'd eventually see Fender and Gibson branded pet food (why not, they have their logos on so many knickknacks), then, inevitably, Behringer, at half the price.

I know that that's how it's supposed to work. My issue is that it isn't working that way for me on two different systems. First, when I assign an image as described in the link, it doesn't appear as the Start Screen icon. I get the ugly icon as seen in the picture. Second, I don't even know where to find those good-looking images that the stock templates use. Cakewalk assigned one to one of my templates automatically, which was weird, but not unwelcome. Maybe this is more bug report material than how-to.

Yeah, sadly true. Also compounded by the fact that Synthedit, a very popular development tool for freeware plug-in developers, lagged behind and could only build 32-bit until very recently. I remember searching high and low for a freeware 64-bit B3 and there were just none. Lots of really cool, oddball synths and FX, but all 32-bit because of Synthedit, I don't know what the issue was, if it was abandoned for a while or what. Me, I only ever post 64-bit FX and instruments in this and in the freeware FX thread, things that I have vetted in CbB. My primary imaginary audience is people who are thin on plug-ins and need to augment Cakewalk by BandLab with the assortment of goodies such as were bundled with SONAR Platinum or come with Studio One or Samplitude or Cubase or whatever. Secondary audience is us plug-in ho's who love to try anything.?

To better illustrate what I'm talking about, what is going on, and what I'm trying to accomplish, here's a screen grab of part of my Start Screen. It shows a couple of templates that are altered versions of Basic, with the generic ugly icon. It shows Basic, with a nice picture of a studio monitor. It shows a few of the stock templates, and then most odd, it shows one I rolled myself, Drums, with a picture that Cakewalk inserted all by itself. I guess there's an AI in there that tries to parse the name of the template and sticks an icon to it if it can match it. I also have a couple that have the "screen grab of the Track View" icon. I'd like to have control over what these icons look like, preferably the pretty, hi-res vignetted ones like the ones that come with the default templates.

That's not working for me, @scook. Maybe I'm choosing the wrong pictures. I used a large JPG, but now I wonder if it has to be a BMP or PNG? Or within a certain size? Where did you get that nice picture of the Les Paul? Is it in the track icons folder?

Dang bdickens, you sure can whoop up on those straw men. And I'm actuaLOLing at the flurry of questions at the end of your post. For those of you following at home, the argument fallacies he's engaging in are: "reductio ad absurdum," "straw man," "appeal to authority," and "begging the question." Well it looks like you say it even when nobody has said that. But don't let it slow you down. Continue to attempt to provoke only fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and offer no solutions. You may have a future in television news. No you don't. Nobody in this thread said that (straw man). I know you won't answer this because answering direct questions isn't your style, but since the Internet is such a scary place with all these threats lurking everywhere, and obviously, since you are here you must have a browser and an email address, do you just live with the existential dread and inevitability that disaster will surely befall you, or do you take steps to prevent these awful things you describe from happening? If so, how about sharing those instead of trying to stir up fear? I mean, it does seem kind of odd, you talk about all of these terrible things that happen, and although you are not quoting me, I know I am the biggest naysayer in this thread. I've been Internettin' for 25 years and I don't do it in a constant state of hypervigilance. By rights I should have fallen victim to at least one or two of these awful occurrences. How do you explain this? Is it all done so covertly that I don't even notice it? If so, I must ask again how "dear" the cost actually is, if I haven't even noticed it. BTW, what's your take on those "loyalty cards" that stores like Safeway hand out to give you deep discounts so they can track your shopping habits? My guess is that you think I'm a chump for paying a boatload of money less for my groceries when I use mine because it allows Safeway to analyze my valuable data. But here's the thing about my data: no matter how much money Google or Safeway make from selling what I'm interested in to advertisers, it doesn't come at a cost to me because I can't sell that information somewhere else. In effect, I'm selling it to Google and Safeway in exchange for using their services and getting discounts on my food, and they're reselling it. In exchange for use of this or that, I'm granting them the right to watch what I'm up to when I use their services or shop in their stores. That's kinda the way the world works. I'm ever surprised by people who seem to have only recently figured this out. "They're making money off it!" Well, um, have you been living in Mommy'sMagicPurseLand? Cakewalk seems pretty dang free so far, about as free as a trade show tote bag on the scale of "free." I haven't had to grant them or give them anything meaningful in exchange for the use of it (and I get to keep what I put in it: hmm, good metaphor). We can never go back to how things were when I was a child. I imagine that someday, in order to even have a phone, we'll only be able to go through one government-sanctioned monopoly, we'll have to use their equipment, and everyone's name and home address will be published in hard copy volumes that will be distributed everywhere, in every business and home and will even be dangling from cables in public kiosks so that anyone who wants to will be able to know our phone number and where we live and where to send us mail, and the only way we'll be able to opt out of having our information published will be to pay a monthly fee to The Phone Company. Oh wait.

Title says it. When I'm at the Start Screen and click on "New Project," the stock templates that come with Cakewalk have these lovely hi-res photos of mixing desks and so forth. When I alter them and save them under different names, I get a plain generic icon. I want to assign the purty ones. I know how to add my own pictures for .CWP files so they show up in the recent projects screen, but I want the nice vignetted pictures on my templates, darn it. How do I work this?

It is a fact that Waves have an idiosyncratic way of installing their plug-ins. They put "shell" loaders all over the place, then the individual plug-ins are loaded from within the shell. They don't give the user a choice of whether they want to install the 32-bit shell loader, the AAX loader, etc. No matter how much one likes the plug-ins themselves, this does incur costs. For instance, my notebook computer has a single 250G SSD, and every MB counts. Every stupid AAX plug-in that some installer puts in is another step toward me having to replace the damn thing. For 32-bit plug-ins, it has a double cost, which is that DAW's like Cakewalk that have built-in bridging systems automatically enumerate every plug-in on startup, which slows down their startup time. I'm not singling out Waves here, A|A|S and Meldaproduction are two of my favorite plug-in houses and they are hilariously guilty of shoveling useless nervous nellie versions of their plug-ins all over the place when all I want is 64-bit VST3's. My Waves FX plug-ins I can take or leave, but my favorite soft synth of all is Element 2. I choose to suck up the idiosyncratic install/licensing method. They've flowed me plenty of freebies. I like the USB dongle vs. iLok. If it breaks, Waves support have a policy where they will grant you a "scout's honor" restoration, I think you can do that once, or once a year or something. It has its drawbacks, I was mixing on my laptop sitting up in bed and it wound up buried in the covers for a couple of days. Fortunately, I have critical licenses installed on the HD of my main DAW. A few years back, I had just a couple of Waves plug-ins, and somehow they lost the script and every time my DAW started up they would ask me for the location of their own folder over and over and over. They fixed that in v.10. Using their product comes with the annoyance/drawback of having those shells all over the place, but I suck it up because the product is useful. I completely understand that some might not find the cost:benefit ratio as favorable. It's not "brain dead," it's well-considered. I'm with @mibby on that. If having a bunch of crap all over your hard disk is more of a bother than the joy of being able to use a certain company's take on a compressor or delay (Waves ain't been that big on "unique" so far), then screw it. I used to use TrueVerb, but now I have Phoenix, which smokes it. I'm also with @ensconced in that I don't get what the big deal is that people have with the WUP. Sure, most plug-in houses seem to have a default "lifetime" update, but my Waves plug-ins are very stable, don't cause trouble, I don't care if I'm on version 10 of TrueVerb, which is never going to be updated anyway (except to say version 11 in the about box). There seems to be this fear that once the update plan expires they'll stop working or something. Has yet to happen for me. I think I once paid them about $14 to re-up my WUP because they actually made some meaningful changes to the antique plug-ins I have, but that was a special case. Don't worry about it and enjoy your plug-ins that have been working great. They'll still work great "out of warranty." It's like shopping at Best Buy, just politely tell the salesperson you decline the extended warranty.

I saw this. The coding elves over at W.A. are cranking this stuff out. Now a vocal cleanup tool? I have a bunch of their stuff, obtained on deep discount or PB freebies, and I think they shine when they stick to their EDM creative tools, but who knows. I'll probably get this in order to qualify for next month's PB freebie, whatever it may be. These vocal cleaning tools seem to have varying degrees of efficacy. I'm disappointed so far in the results I get with Nectar's breath control. BTW, I have Sphere Delay, and it's off the dang hook.

More impressions: ACID 11 is likely a dead end for me at this point as a DAW. To the extent that I'm getting into that style of work, I'm more interested in using tools like Break Tweaker inside Cakewalk. And since Cakewalk's mighty Console View is the True Love of My Life, it's tough to open the mixers on these other DAW's and have that "how do these people live with this?" impression. Maybe they export stems to Mixbus or Pyramix or something (I really want to know what Dave Tipper uses, that guy is my mix engineer idol). Similar impression I had with the MPC Beats DAW. Maybe if like most of youse, I had more seat time with Cakewalk/SONAR itself and wasn't still learning it, I'd be more interested in these, but even though it's been years since the BandLab release, I'm still learning CbB and its strengths and limitations. Movie Studio Platinum 16 was a pleasant surprise. Whereas the last version I had suffered from being an obviously dumbed down version of Vegas Pro, this time around it's more of a targeted version of Vegas Pro. There is the dumbed down mode, but also Advanced mode, and rather than just turning things off, it also simplifies the interface to eliminate distractions, but in a good way. I may be spending some time with this one to see if I prefer it or Video Pro X. Seems odd when I have Vegas Pro, but I don't really use the features that are missing from Movie Studio. Vegas Pro comes with more FX, but just like with SPlat/CbB, install Vegas Pro, then install Movie Studio, there are your FX. Speaking of FX, MAGIX USA seem to have been working out on their little minimal UI DXi audio FX, and it installs a bunch of those. Paragraphic EQ, multiband compressor, etc. DXi lives on at MAGIX. Maybe that's their copy protection. If you're on the fence about getting this for some reason, spend the price of dinner for two at Burger King on it, make some delicious spaghetti marinara instead, and get a bundle of amazing programs.

This....this is...a very good deal. I initially looked it over and kinda tossed a mental coin, y'know, I got the last one and the update from Vegas 10 to 15 was great, and I settled into Sound Forge Studio 12 as my go-to audio editor, but they're both working just fine, Movie Studio is for the laptop and I don't know if I've ever even done a full project with it. But it was a huge value for the money, and this one seemed a bit less of an addition to my toolset. I thought it would be fun to try out ACID, though, and maybe I'd like this Video Pro X, and shoot, if nothing else, it's a version upgrade to my favorite audio editor. BUH-DANG! I'm kind of shaking at the idea that I might have passed on it. I could tell within 5 minutes of opening Video Pro X that unless the program is crashy, Vegas would likely be fading into my past. Sound Forge 13 is an insane leap feature-wise, now it has visual themes and a video track and 5.1 surround sound and tempo mapping and LUFS metering and too much other stuff to take in, so if you've been using Sound Forge 12, it's well worth the quarter for that upgrade alone. If you do video, it's a way to check out Video Pro X, which is probably less capable than Vegas Pro in the sense that it may not be as suitable for tackling network TV kinds of productions, but it has a much smoother and intuitive look and feel to it without seeming dumbed down. And I haven't even installed ACID or Movie Studio Platinum or Music Maker Plus yet, in descending order of anticipation. I watched the promo video for Movie Studio, and even it had some interesting looking new features. Music Maker is of little interest, but I think Plus may come with a few VST or DXi plug-ins that work outside the DAW. And I like to see what's out there for people who want to get started.

Sure, as you both point out, Ed and Jeremy, neither hardly add up to "paying dearly." Having your email pwnd is a reminder to go around and change your passwords, which, admit it, when was the last time we did that? And Ed, speaking strictly for myself, I can't entirely fault them for not knowing that they're sending email to such a rampant plug-in 'ho. ?‍♂️ BTW, I'll say it again here for anyone who isn't already doing it: email addresses are free (except the ones that mine your precious personal info oh noes). Create a "low security" one that you use for things like getting free plug-in offers, Denny's Rewards, Baskin Robbins Birthday Cone, whatever. Use a different one for banking, insurance, IRS, mortgage, etc. This isn't necessarily because the people who issue freeware are inherently "suspect," it's because they can't afford to harden their servers and username/password lists against attacks as well as the big dogs. It's just going to be plain easier to hack SoundSpot than it is Wells Fargo, but if you're using the same email and password at both places, bingo! So be "dingdongdawdaddy AT yahoo dot com" for things like BandLab and PluginBoutique. Yahoo allows multiple email addresses. Use one of the "5 free email addresses" your cable TV company gave you that you never use. Whatever. The companies giving you the freebies don't mind, they can still send you the offers, and when you feel like browsing, you'll have a dedicated inbox to open like a catalog. Also, if you're getting too many offers, for heaven's sake unsubscribe. Although with some of them (cough Waves cough) you have to put up with what seems like a daily dose of junk offers (2 FREE plug-ins!!, um, that is if you spend more than a certain amount) to get the occasional true gem.

I'm guessing that this is the CbB installer. One of the dialogs is for the VST directory, which you may select on your first install, but only on your first install. Once you've installed the program on that system, however, even if you select "Custom Install," all choices will be greyed out and set to your original choices. Somehow, the OP's VST directory got set to the root of an E drive they don't even have, so the question is, how do they clear that.

Oh puh-leeze. Calling this out here and now. Tell me what I "dearly" "pay" by giving willing consent to Google to observe what I'm interested in when I engage in my pastime of web browsing? So far, it consists entirely of having the ads (and I will get ads in that place of one type or another) in my browsing experience targeted, which means that they're going to be ads for things that I'm interested in. So I might "pay" but only if I choose to buy something that I noticed in one of these ads. I'm also savvy enough that when I don't wish to be observed, I know how to switch into browsing modes or use browsers that allow me not to be. So tell me, because obviously I've been fooling myself and have been paying dearly all this time while somehow being unaware of the cost. Maybe you believe that your browsing habits are somehow critical and fascinating information? That they're this valuable treasure to be guarded fiercely? Oh dear. Companies just want to send you more effective advertisements so that you'll maybe buy more things or vote a certain way. That's it. You're just not that special. So unless this is just a "ha, you silly fools, I know more than you in your blind delusions" smug drive-by, please school me. Tell me exactly what my cost is in using, say, Google Chrome, to pick just one. How do I "pay dearly" for that?

I am really glad to hear that! I'm glad that your grousing only extends to the installer.? (I hope)

Yes! I'm sure you're right. Maybe you went to the NAMM Shows post acquisition. I didn't, but Cakewalk sure looked like it bumped traffic to the booth up. Big announcements on every blog, in every magazine. Suddenly everyone wanted to know who this company was. Pretty wise naming strategy, too, even if most people have settled into calling it "Cakewalk." I see it referred to by its proper full name "Cakewalk by BandLab" on compatibility lists, yearly best-of lists, etc., and every time that happens, more eyes on the name "BandLab." On the old forum, I remember some geezer said that he was taught that every single product needed to earn money for a business to thrive. I said that whoever taught them that was a prime example of "those who can't do, teach." Then I pointed to the example of the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, where Tostitos paid many millions per year for the privilege of doing something that netted them nothing whatsoever tangible. The bowl game didn't give them any ticket revenues or anything else in exchange (maybe some VIP boxes for the corporate heads), all they did was let them add "Tostitos" to the beginning of the event's name. But they doubtlessly moved freight cars full of their tortilla chips before, during and after the game, and for fans of any teams who won the game while it was the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, they'll probably never buy a competing brand as long as they walk the earth. Even typing this, I have an urge to go get a bag of Tostitos and a jar of salsa. And a bowl, 'cause, festive. Cakewalk by BandLab will have to be around for a while before it will have cost as much as one Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.

Your first statement is false. Cakewalk by BandLab uses a free subscription license. This is objectively, demonstrably true. Anyone with an email account and a computer that meets the requirements may obtain a copy and use it for free. There is no way that your experience of that fact being "good" in any amount can change it. Cakewalk is free, whether your experience of that is good or bad or indifferent. Have you not tried the process? Your second statement is odd, unless you're used to commercial software companies releasing their proprietary code as open source for no good reason. Of course they're hiding something, they're hiding the intellectual property that they've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for and continue to invest in! Are you new to computers? Photoshop isn't open source either. Adobe is also hiding something, their valuable intellectual property. If the juxtaposition of the two statements is supposed to be meaningful, it still makes no sense. Does the licensing model for the software combined with the code not being open source lead to your suspicion? Does the suspicion come solely from it being free? If you had to pay money or perform a service in exchange for your license, would that reduce or eliminate your suspicion? If so, how much would you have to pay before your suspicion would be eliminated? How would it being open source change things? I rely on good sense and research in such matters. Cakewalk by BandLab has been around for over 2 years. If they were "hiding something," such as subjecting you to "targeted ads" aka "the unrelenting horror, degradation, and violation of changing the sidebar ads in your browser to being for things you're interested in," they'd have to be hiding it extraordinarily well not to have it turn up in a Google search or a malware scan. Moreover, spending all that money and going to all that effort just to pull such an easily detected stunt? Knowing that once it was detected it would turn the product and the company into pariahs? I took those odds.

Okay, @aidan o driscoll, @lmu2002, and @StudioNSFW, since your panacea is for him to buy an audio interface when all he would be using it for is a playback device, please, explain, in detail why he needs to do that, and in particular, martsave, how doing so would "fix" the problem he's having with MSoundFactory. Every computer comes with a Realtek hardware CODEC on its motherboard, which can be run in WASAPI mode. Oscar, the OP, has stated that he is a composer/producer who works entirely via Piano Roll methods. He doesn't even require low latency for realtime MIDI performance. School me. Why does he need to drop over a hundy on an external interface just so he can listen to a 2-channel playback? I really don't know, you all obviously have more information than I do, you sound very confident. I only have my ears to go by, which tell me that when I plug my laptop into my monitoring system via its 1/8" out, using WASAPI in either mode or ASIO4ALL, it sounds fine. Excellent even. I've already heard plenty of times that all Realtek hardware CODEC's are inadequate to the task of audio playback, so I don't need to be told it again in some variation or other. Yes, I know, I just need to be educated as to in what way they're inadequate, how they're inadequate. If plugging my mixing cans directly into my laptop and going for it is compromising the final product vs. lugging around an external D/A converter, I want to know before I ruin any more mixes. I also want to warn my friends who don't read Internet forums and therefore don't know any better.

Oh man, thank you @Teegarden for speaking up in this thread. First off, to @Oscar Garzon, the OP, I hope you've checked with the Meldaproduction support forum on this matter. You may get an answer from Vojtech himself. Not so much on whether he is interested in using GPU cores to process audio, but rather your issue specifically. The advice you've gotten to switch to onboard Realtek sound, and especially WASAPI, is the best step toward helping your issue. There are many who will disparage Realtek's hardware CODEC's. They have been around for a long, long time, and have come a long, long way. People who cut them down probably haven't tried giving them a serious, critical listen in the past 15 years, and given how fast computer audio technology changes, well, that's kind of odd. It's like giving Behringer a blanket condemnation, IMO. Or, uh, SONAR. My opinion: with WASAPI, Realtek's hardware CODEC's are fine for monitoring and listening. If you aren't recording live audio, an external interface is a waste of money. To the topic in general, it is not an outlandish idea, as Teegarden has stated, for developers to use GPU resources to process audio. Anyone who thinks that just because CISC CPU's have gotten so fast they can do it all and that shifting the load to other processors doesn't matter, well, there are a lot of people giving UAD a lot of money for their dedicated processors who think otherwise. My video NLE's come with a variety of A/V rendering CODEC's, some of which can greatly speed the process of final rendering of projects depending on whether your system has an AMD card, an nVidia card, how many cores it has, etc. I can't say for 100% certain that those CODEC's are only using those cores to do the video part of the crunching, but it's not outlandish to imagine audio-only bounces benefiting from this technology. I say "bounces," because for whatever reason, even my video programs only use those GPU's in any meaningful way when it's time to render. Why they don't in realtime, I don't know, maybe because that would make the code less portable? There's an issue when you make your plug-in dependent on CUDA GPU processing, which is what of the user who doesn't have an nVidia GPU because they have a notebook with a Ryzen in it? Maybe they don't do it because it's too big a can of worms. The Bakers would have to chime in on this, but Cakewalk is a Windows program, and Windows runs programs better with video cards that have faster 2-D performance. Unfortunately, video card sales are driven by the gaming market, so development is driven by 3-D performance. Frustratingly, published specs and benchmarks are all about 3-D performance. I would love to upgrade my video card to a more recent one with better performance, but I won't do it unless I can rest assured that I'm going to see an improvement. But you ask on any DAW or NLE forum and the response is always along the lines of "you need yada yada yada yada yada to do decent gaming, but pretty much anything you get that will do decent gaming will handle DAW and NLE work." But the thing is, I don't care about gaming at all on this computer or at this point in my life. Maybe later. Other hobbies right now. I've observed noticeable differences between using the onboard HD4000 GPU, my nVidia card, and my AMD card. Things like palette flashes, zip noise (which is similar to what Oscar is getting), pops when I click on certain screen elements, responsiveness, draw times, all depending on which card I have installed. Another thing, in case anyone has the wrong idea: except for ones like UAD and others that are explicitly made that way, audio interfaces don't have processors in them that crunch numbers in plug-ins. What audio interfaces do is convert digital streams to analog audio and sometimes convert analog audio to digital data. They don't know anything about plug-ins and plug-ins don't know anything about them, except in the cases of UAD and similar.

That's the "canonical" method, I think developed because of course that's how it worked if people did it "naturally," so therefore how it was designed to work. It's proven, if anything goes astray, the forum folk who have firsthand knowledge are best equipped. Also, if you uninstall the later installed programs, there is some unpleasantness, I do know that firsthand. I am saying this not to you, Studio, that would be geeksplaining, but rather for the lurkers. I have phuqall firsthand knowledge of the process having only installed magware Home Studio and then uninstalled it. I wound up with the extra plug-ins that are just now being included with CbB, so that was cool, but the aforementioned uninstall thing was no fun. All that happened was I lost some custom settings, templates, and plug-in layouts, but that customization takes a long time. Also, installing versions with fewer features later can cause .INI files to be overwritten that don't have sections in them to handle certain conditions, so I suggest sticking to the canonical order when possible. Or at least backing up those .INI files.

Sigh. Well, at least as has been pointed out, the information is now all right here in this thread.? I hope you're enjoying Cakewalk, anyway!

I'd like to point out here that Salieri was actually a great composer in his own right, there's no historical evidence that he and Mozart ever even met, much less that he was bitter enough about the younger man's superior talent to goad him into working himself into an early grave. That movie was total BS. ?

Well, I'm glad I didn't get any further with what I was just working on. ? Since I felt kind of silly about posting that image in your thread, I was going to touch up the Add Track box a bit, get rid of the magenta tick boxes, add some aqua to the tabs. I had just made enough progress with GIMP and gotten frustrated that I figured it was nap time in this heat. So, check to see what these notifications are....yep, proves my point for me. Why bother even trying? Ladies and gentlemen, a star is born!