Starship Krupa

The UI designed to make you feel like a doofus. "Umm, let's see, I think vocal not have enough TONE. Me add TONE. Oh no! Now it lack CLARITY!! But now I ran out of CLARITY. $160 wasted on iZotopes!"

Very nice. I think the one place that I got super lucky with my "okay dining room, you're it" studio was the fact that it has a 10' ceiling with coffer beams, a bay window, and several bookcases. One of the corners has a fireplace at a 45-degree angle. It's all dumb luck, but let's hear it for idiosyncratic Victorian architecture. When I'm tracking drums, my right elbow is next to some really great literature, in case I want to read some Mark Twain or Robertson Davies. For my "vocal booth" I did something I've never read in any budget studios article. I got my camcorder with its decent quality stereo mic and had my friend speak and we walked around the room shooting video. Then we played it back on the monitors and noted on the video where I was standing when it sounded best. Bang, that's where I set up my vocal mic. Crazy, but then a few years later my buddy visited Sun Studios in Memphis, and they show people the "sweet spot" in their very live, untreated room, where they had their artists stand. There's a hole in the linoleum floor tile that is said to be from the peg of Bill Black's bass (swoon). I like my idiosyncratic setup and the sound I get, but it sure is nice to see a room and workstation that's done "right."

If your mixes are transferring well, then who needs it? You have what we all want. I was being funny anyway, because if you saw my setup, well, look in my sig. I can at any moment flip between 4 sets of monitors. I finally set up a reasonably flat response mic (Oktava MK 012) at my listening position and ran some sweeps and pink noise, and the Events are the only ones that are on the same continent as "accurate." The Monitor Ones don't even have the same curve between left and right, and it looks like a mountain range. Both they and the Point Sevens have a huge dip and spike around 150. I was pleased to discover that my hearing still goes up to about 12,500, which surprised me. Age 59 and veteran of many live shows. The A70's are really 1980's bachelor pad speakers. The price on the Events was pretty insane. One channel didn't work, so I got them for free. Replaced a fried chip amp and they were fine. My studio is a friggin' hodgepodge, which is why I love how yours is set up. Everything in its right place.

I'm sure this is an endlessly requested feature: can we please have Undo apply to mixer knob movements? This is so essential. I know I'm not the only one who slips with their mouse, or accidentally clicks on the wrong channel strip and screws something up in a hard-won mix before they notice that they tweaked the Reverb Send for the Left Overhead instead of the Snare or whatever. And yes, I know how to safeguard against this with mix recall and automatic backups and whatever. I really shouldn't have to. These moves are critical and there is no reason for them to not be Undoable.

Ooh, nice desk you have there, Josh. Very nice. Really a beautiful workstation. Mine is....funky by comparison. Sort of a Millenium Falcon. But I do have more monitors for referencing mixes.? My first thought was whether a Workspace might be able to handle this, but Workspaces and I don't get along very well so I have no specific suggestions.

It is unlikely, but not impossible that such features could be added to Cakewalk. While you are waiting, there is a plethora of great 3rd-party freeware metering plug-ins available. MVMeter2 is an excellent VU meter, and the same company has another LUFS meter I use for mastering. Meldaproduction's FreeFXBundle comes with MLoudnessAnalyzer, MStereoAnalyzer, MAnalyzer, and a couple others. The first two are in every project I do. Voxengo's SPAN is another popular spectrum analyzer. If you try these and they are still not enough metering for you, remember: mix with your ears.

I have the word from on high. There are two behaviors, "Insert Track" and "Add Track." Insert puts the new track right above the currently selected track. Add puts it at the bottom of the list. The user is supposed to be able to access both behaviors depending on which menu or button they use, but as noted here, it's not working 100% as described. Currently there's no way to create an instrument track and have it appear just above your currently selected track, and there should be a way to do that. So the "option" is designed in, it's just not implemented correctly at the moment. Also, tracks that are added via a couple of methods that are labeled "Insert" (Global Insert menu and INSERT key) result in the "Add" behavior, which also may not be correct. I suspect this will get sorted in a future release, so hang tight. Prognosis is good.

Yes, indeed, it would be great to have those themeable. Especially when one is running a darker theme, having those dialogs pop up in bright white is jarring. My eyes!

I'm a big fan of the Quick Group feature, use it every time I mix. But as with some similar features in Cakewalk, it's implemented inconsistently in that it works on some things, and then it doesn't work on other things that you would expect it to or in the way you would expect it to, as in the case you note, where it only works when you do it with the button, not with the context menu. I suspect that this is due to the scenario of for instance Quick Groups being implemented as a feature, then several years later, these other features get added and it just doesn't occur to the developers to have Quick Grouping apply to the new features. With a program as old as Cakewalk, where so many features have been added at different times in different phases by development teams with different personnel, things like that are inevitable, and that's what feedback is for. For me, an elephant in the room is all the things that Undo doesn't undo, like mixer knob movements. Sometimes I slip with the mouse, and sometimes I adjust the control on the wrong strip. Having Undo apply to those moves is pretty essential, and Cakewalk just doesn't do it.

Some very good ideas here....however, oy, it's seldom possible to tell as a layperson from the outside how simple or how much work something is going to be with a huge venerable beast like Cakewalk. Having worked in software development, the only changes I ever present as being likely trivial are text strings. ?And sometimes even those can break something. In that spirit, I'll throw out a couple: how about we give the poor "Track" menu in the Console View an "s" so that it can be the "Tracks" menu like every other view that has a Tracks menu? And while we're at it, can we put the Track Manager in that menu so that I don't have to go searching for it every time I want to use it? I couldn't even tell you which menu it's under right now. Strips?

It may be a holdover for all I know. I think the release notes I saw were for improvements added in S3 but I can't be sure.

I just checked, and according to their Help, your tracks can be up to 15 minutes in length.

Excellent. Remember, BTW, that you have a BandLab account that allows you to upload and host songs with no size/quality restrictions.

If you continue reading to the end of the sentence you quoted....you see where I say "Quick Grouping does?" I was not kidding. Select the tracks you wish to Freeze (which you can do by swiping, if they are adjacent), hold your Ctrl key, and click the Freeze button on any selected track. Then kick back as all those tracks freeze.

This is great. AudioSnap, tempo maps, VocalSync I've tried messing about with them a few times and each time just had to stop when I reached what I felt was that "automated tool point of severely diminishing returns" where I had spent too many hours more moving little lines around in a clip without understanding the point than it would have taken me to re-record the audio or sit there with a MIDI keyboard and play along with one finger to make a click track that fit the audio. You know, that point where you look up and realize that you've been tearing your hair out trying to get a noise gate set correctly for a much longer time than it would have taken you to slip edit or gain automate the unwanted sounds out of the track into digital infinity. My workflow so far could be described as: "this isn't doing anything, this isn't doing anything, this isn't doing anything" and then I press a button and the whole project starts playing back like it's a 45RPM record on 33 1/3. Sometimes it's different, and after nothing having any effect, and pressing a button, a single track will start playing back like it's a 45RPM record on 33 1/3 while the rest of the project plays normally. So it's good to see people using it and sharing their tricks. Next time I give it a shot, I'll stop and ask some questions and then come back to it. I've been giving up too easily. I think mostly where I've tripped and fallen is the part where Cakewalk presents you with a clip with a bunch of vertical lines that you're supposed to drag around to "line up with the transients," and it's always seemed to me like it's started way off, like I could detect transients better with a morse code key and an old Heathkit oscilloscope. And I know it can't be that bad. Like maybe I'm setting it up wrong before the detection part or something? So I sit there not really knowing what I'm doing and also wondering why it's my job to spot the transients visually, because isn't that the algorithm's job? Yikes. Definitely doing something wrong....

This is a very good subject for tutorials, because in my opinion, it's a needlessly obscure process. Good on ya for showing the step of selecting all the tracks that you wanted in your mixdown, because that step is hard to pick up on. It's not spelled out very well in the official documentation. These are the steps given: The rest describes the format choices. Notice anything missing? That would be the critical step where you must select all the tracks you want to have in your mix.? So if someone follows this set of instructions to the letter, and has, say 3 of their 6 tracks selected from an earlier operation....they won't get a complete mix. Step 2 is misleading. The program will complain if you don't select anything and then try to Export. But it's talking about selecting horizontally, along the timeline, and it means that if you don't make a selection in the ruler, Cakewalk will export from the beginning until what it considers end of project. Not "everything" in the sense of "all the audio in my project," but everything in the sense of the full length of the project. I was used to controlling which tracks showed up in my mix by using the Mute buttons, so this having to select them as well came as a surprise. I managed to figure it all out, but it took me a while, and I also got a couple of odd-sounding mixdowns due to selecting Entire Mix and not realizing that it was coming off of all active hardware outputs, of which my interface has 4 pairs, and I was using one of the others for a headphone cue mix. So some of them were phasing, interfering. I was getting my main mix and my cue mix on top of each other if I forgot to mute it. I caught it right away, but if I were new to this, it could have gone worse. What I do now is make a dedicated bus called "Mix" that has no FX on it, just a loudness meter, and my Master bus goes to it, and Mix goes to whatever hardware out I want to monitor from. I take my mixes from that bus, not the hardware outs. And instead of my Master bus controlling level to the hardware out, I can leave the Master fader alone for automation, and use the Mix fader for controlling level to the hardware out.

I just stumbled on this really handy timesaver, I think I did a search and it turned up in an old list of release notes. As a self-recording drummer, who all the time has to perform operations across 4 tracks at once, hop behind the kit, get up, go over to the DAW, repeat until inspiration is a distant memory, anything that saves a few seconds of repetitive drudgery adds up quickly. Like for instance Quick Grouping, I use it all the time. I wish I could use Quick Grouping in parts of my life outside of Cakewalk. Cntrl-click to select shave gel nozzle, sink faucet, shower handle, then hold and whoosh! the shower's off, sink's on, blob of gel ready, all set for a shave. If you don't know what I'm talking about with Smart Swipe, check page 215 of the current Reference Guide. If you don't feel like clicking, I don't know if I can 'splain it, but: Say you want to Mute or Solo 10 tracks (or buses) that are all adjacent, which is a use case that does happen a lot, most people group all of their guitars, strings, drums, vocals, whatever. Click on the Mute button on the first one, hold your mouse button down, and swipe across the buttons on the other 9 and you're done. One gesture replaces 10, or if you selected the tracks for Quick Grouping, 3 or 4. Obviously, it's most useful in the Track and Console Views, but it works for certain operations in the Piano Roll, Staff View(!), and Step Sequencer. You may think that this belongs more in the "Tips and Tricks" sub, except that it is my shot across the bow to warn that I shall now commence to pester the Bakers to add Smart Swipe functionality to EVERYTHING APPLICABLE. ?? For instance, it doesn't work on Freeze, which seems odd, since Quick Grouping does. And a couple of the buttons seem not to be working in Track View, like Phase and Interleave didn't get their Smart Swipe when they were put back, so mind that if you check it out. I'm sure los panaderos will take care of it.

No apology needed! As an American, yet a regular, nay, constant, user of irony, I have caused myself (and others) no small amount of distress over the years. Did you know about the various proposed "irony" punctuation marks and tags? I hoped that by now something would have made it into html, or some convention, like if you turn your text purple, that means you're speaking in an ironic tone of voice. Nope, John, never had that go sideways for me, no sir. People allllways know when I'm joking. Public discourse these days is so civil, don't you think? When my generation were younger, we were industrious, law-abiding, and respectful of our elders, which is certainly a sharp contrast to the young people of today that I know. Something like that.

Unless, say, you want an entire pro-level DAW and to be able to outfit it with all the plug-ins you really need to make any kind of music. I have no authority whatsoever as any kind of moderator or enforcer, all I did was start this thread, but it, and its companion, the Favorite Freeware FX thread, are specifically for all of us to post FX and instruments that we have been using in Cakewalk and know to work. The idea is you can download stuff people post in these threads with a greater assurance that it will work in Cakewalk. So nay, I say, nay on that, there are over 100 posts in this thread with links to freeware instrument plug-ins that you can expect to work just fine. There's never been a better time than "these days" to obtain amazing music creation software for free. I do hope you get that thing to work, though. I had a fondness for Yamaha SYG soundcards around 20 years ago, the ones that had the virtual analog technology built in. It was hard to get a driver that would enable it, but once I did, I got some amazingly expressive brass and woodwind sounds. I wonder if your instrument has it. Can't remember what it was called, it was developed at Stanford. Had a name like Sonitus....Sondius! If you could find a driver to access the Sondius technology in your Yamaha soundcard, the modeled analog instruments were just off the hook with a little aftertouch and velocity manipulation. Yamaha kind of squandered that.

Don't need to have a terribly long memory. Many programs still ship with or support DX plug-ins. Adobe Premiere is another one. I picked up the last MAGIX Humble Bundle, which for me, was primarily a way to leapfrog from Sony Vegas Pro 10 to MAGIX Vegas Pro Edit 15 for $25. I guess MAGIX went all BandLab with Sony Creative and bought up all the IP with the idea of cleaning up the code and then resurrecting the various products in versions that didn't lock up as often. I also got Sound Forge Audio Studio 12, which is now my go-to audio editor. All of the audio FX for Vegas and most of the Sound Forge ones are still DX, and their other audio programs ship with DX plug-ins. I don't know the last time that they had created any new ones, but aside from the minimal UI's on most of them, they work great. I'm not sure what the intermediate versions of Music Maker come with. The Sony/MAGIX pitch shifter has come in handy a time or two in Cakewalk. So it looks like Microsoft/Cakewalk got some buy-in. It probably waned due to the ubiquity of Macs running Pro Tools at the time and the fact that it was Windows-only. Apple has probably only managed to get better support for AU due to also having a good DAW with wide acceptance. I was bummed when Mixcraft dropped support for DX. Still, there's about as much support for AU on Windows as there is for DX/DXi on MacOS. If Logic and Final Cut were able to load VST's, AU might begin to fade out as well.

You've been around, though, you know that it can be what the market demands that drives that decision. Unless you're Apple, it's really hard to tell your customers what they want. Hence what I put in there about the company trying to go with DXi. But everyone wants to use Macs, and the men in jeans tell the marketing guy that they already have a bunch of expensive VST's, and their favorite FX aren't available in that format anyway, and the company is getting tired of trying to chase compatibility with neutral standards when the market clearly wants VST's. So they suck it up.

That is not what he is talking about. What he is talking about is one of those fundamental "good lord how can these people live like this" features that when Mixcraft was my primary I nearly wore the paint off my "0" key I used it so often and couldn't find when I tried Cakewalk. Every big program has (or rather lacks) at least one or two. (When I first started using Mixcraft they had just casually removed its ability to add a marker on the fly with a single keystroke. Which....um, I pretty much do it that way about 9 times out of 10, because I use markers for marking where flubs/edits are in takes and other on-the-fly things like that. Somebody got me going by helping me map a MIDI event to it, but whoa. I joined their beta program and the feature was returned for the next major version with the help of my plaintive cries) He's talking about a command that will zoom in or out to show the horizontal extent of the project (that is, from the beginning to where you go when you hit Ctrl-B) without affecting the vertical zoom. The use case for this is as follows: I am zoomed way way in to do some surgical clip editing, I've zoomed in and scooted over and zoomed back out a little and back in so many times I barely even remember where the heck I am along the timeline. I want to keep working on this track/clip/lane, so I'm going to pull back and see just where I am in the project along the timeline, get an overview, see if I missed anything, without disturbing the track and lane heights I have comfortably adjusted. Or, simpler, maybe I have everything in closed folders except one or two tracks, and if I Shift+F I'll get a screen with Attack of the 50 Foot Waveforms. I feature requested this on the old forum back in April 2018 and was told by two friendly users that CbB already had such a command, and they both told me about the command that zooms both the width and height. Even though I thought I was pretty explicit about stating the "no vertical resizing" part. (I wonder if it's like coming to a beach town and asking for directions to the fishing pier where the platypuses dance. People just smile politely and point in the direction of the fishing pier, because they want to be helpful and you asked them for something that sounded 75% reasonable and 25% WTF are you talking about) Now, I, on the other hand, have little use for a command that messes with my track heights when all I wanted to do was pull back to an overview of the timeline after doing close work. Maybe there are only 4 or 5 tracks in the whole project so far, and if I hit that "fit project" command, the track heights are going to grow to a giant height, or I have a lot of tracks, and I "fit project" and the track I'm working on shrinks down to a tiny little stripe. I don't want that, not now, hardly ever. Maybe in between demos at a trade show, or right before I save and exit, to tidy things up, but as part of my workflow, I can't see using it all that much. Nice that it's there, but much less useful to me. (For anyone who still doesn't get it, think of vertically resizing every track in your project to fit on the screen as "with ice cream." Now that might seem silly, who doesn't love ice cream? And who doesn't want to be able to view all their tracks top to bottom as well as left to right? But what if "it" was matzoh ball soup? That wouldn't be good with ice cream in it. Or Ethiopian injera bread? Delicious, but with ice cream on top? None for me, thanks! So for those of us who only want to fit our projects horizontally, that's like ordering matzoh ball soup. But when our tracks always get resized vertically along with it, that's like getting a scoop of ice cream dumped in our soup just as it's brought to the table. Ewww. Waiter, I'd like a feature request!?)

Nice video, and I like your track, too. Refreshing to hear something a little different from the usual genres used in tutorial vids. I also like your use of native plug-ins and freeware to get your sounds. You may know this already, but if you would like to have greater control over the individual parameters, I'm pretty certain the MAX Style Dial is a "front end" for either the TL-64 Tube Limiter/Compressor or the Boost 11 Limiter. These are part of the "hidden treasure" plug-ins that come with Cakewalk but that are disabled by default. It's a simple matter to enable them, as well as VX-64 and PX-64, using Cakewalk Plug-In Manager. The Style Dials are great because they're instant access to the important parameters, and it's possible to get at the "guts" behind all of them with those 4 hidden plug-ins. In any case, Boost 11 and TL-64 (click on the buttons that open the advanced panels) are also ways to boost loudness, and they come with Cakewalk.

Sure. The big reason that I have such an interest in this. After a few years of Mixcraft, when BandLab announced the free subscription license model, I was about ready to "graduate" to a DAW with a larger feature set. I downloaded a copy of the first rev of CbB/last rev. of SONAR and imported raw stems from a session I had tracked in Mixcraft, with the idea that I would see how good a mix I could come up with using mostly the supplied plug-ins. After I got all the tracks set up and hit Play to start mixing, the difference was apparent immediately, it was like the difference between high thread count cotton sheets and no-iron blend. It made it easier to sit and mix. And incidentally, it took me only a matter of hours to surpass the mix that had taken me days in Mixcraft. Mixcraft 8 still had what I refer to as the Fisher-Price mixer, pretty much useless for anything but setting up routing, IMO. CbB's Console View is my instrument when it comes to mixing. I wound up using the ProChannel FX pretty heavily on that first project. But yeah, immediately audible difference, and one in favor of CbB. And it helped me give CbB a chance despite the problems that first version/last version displayed on my system. Crashing, locking up, audio engine stopping all the time, screen artifacts. But I had a hunch that once they didn't have to chase license fees, things would change very much for the better, and I was right. People on this forum and the other one told me I was being overly optimistic, but everything I said came true and more. This is one case where I don't hate to say I told you so, and I don't think anyone will begrudge me that.? Except for the tighter integration with the other BandLab DAW's. That seems to be back-burnered in favor of working on basic functionality on Cakewalk itself, which I don't think anyone who's CWAF! minds.?

Thanks! It's me, from last December. Yeah, would that I were off-base. I've been in that engineering department when the marketing department came in and delivered a woefully incomplete spec or demanded a "spec" from us that only existed on scraps of paper and (if we were lucky) comments in code. It's conjecture out of thin air, but....not that thin. I've said before that if John Godfrey Saxe had lived to see the computer age, he might have added "software" to his famous “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made” quote. (BTW, despite or because of the above, I have a lot of respect for the Cakewalk development staff and their process. They do it right, and seem to be correcting for some decisions that may have been made in haste when development was more sales and marketing driven. Just dig the list of fixes with every update!) And thanks for taking it in the spirit in which it was intended (lighthearted). Believe me, I wish it could be different, too. But it's also good to understand and acknowledge why it is like it is. Steinberg created VST to sell more Cubase. IMO, Steinberg went to VST3 to force plug-in vendors to correct for inadequacies in Cubase and Nuendo (specifically sidechaining and UI scaling) that most of them had already gone ahead and done within the VST2 spec anyway. Making VST3 conform to open source standards seems to me like a self-serving move to encourage more adoption. They're taking a page from Apple's book by forcing people to dump something they're perfectly happy with in order to get them to adopt a newer, overhyped thing that doesn't work as well. In doing this, they're making a lot of perfectly functional audio software obsolete because it will only host VST2's. VST3 is the future, just like iPhones without 1/8" audio jacks are the future.