Starship Krupa

Nobody is going to come up with the "definitive perfect DAW for everyone." Nobody (at least nobody in their right mind) is trying any more. We can't look at the music and software market of 2020 with 1997 glasses any more. It's not about becoming or challenging the Industry Standard, it's about carving out a significant enough niche. You're talking about which current DAW's are going to "disappear" if Behringer's vaporDAW ever becomes a reality. Look to the recent past. In the years, yes yearS, plural, since BandLab have had Cakewalk on the market with the freeware subscription license, how many DAW's have failed as a result? People make music in their homes, in small studios, using the tools that feel best to them. Many more people have computing devices and know how to use them, are comfortable with using them. They're used to using media creation software. The market has grown, it's way, way larger, and it's not about what's in all the "professional studios." The DAW that used to be a thing that people used to record and edit audio is now something that is used to compose or create pieces of music out of various pieces that could be samples, MIDI files, loops, live performances. Some programs are stronger in certain areas than others, some programs have idiosyncratic workflows that appeal to a solid but not dominant following. Companies don't have to "own" the market in order to survive if there are now 10X the number of users of DAW's than there used to be. Remember all the wild speculation about what a "game-changer" it was that the mighty SONAR was going to be free as the wind? The "little guys" like Mixcraft and Mu-Lab and Tracktion were pretty much doomed, weren't they? Well, I guess if you like the way that Mixcraft works, as a primary tool for an important hobby, it's still gonna be worth throwing $35 at an upgrade license. I'm saying a lot of things off the cuff here myself, but I'm curious where you are getting that impression about the market being "controlled by a wannabe mindset that needs the most expensive thing that all the famous producers use." Kids you know personally, forums? It's not my perception beyond the usual human herd mentality, everyone always wants what the cool people are using, be it a Strat with a Floyd, a Jazzmaster, whatever tool/toy the people we want to be like are using. Hey, the old Cakewalk forum from early 2018 is on the phone, it wants its obviously well-considered armchair quarterbacking about the software industry back.? I was explaining this kind of thing all the way back then when certain people were just baffled at how a multinational music gear and software company that was already comfortably marketing 3 freeware DAW's (iOS, Android and web-based) and whose established business habits included acquiring and rehabbing famous respected American musical trademarks, and who had multiple other revenue streams and whose principal was the quite personable and switched-on scion of one of Singapore's most successful entrepreneurial families, could possibly survive if they were freeware licensing a zombieware Windows DAW they probably didn't pay terribly much for in the first place. How could it possibly be expected to work? ? BandLab would surely go broke, Cakewalk's quality would surely suffer, because how will you cover the development and support costs with no licensing fees??? Y'know, like how Google failed and their Chrome browser did so poorly in the marketplace because they didn't charge people to use it. Remember? Oh wait, no, they are one of the most wealthy and powerful companies in the world and Chrome is the most popular browser. Hmm. Wait, no, Google has other revenue streams, and Chrome integrates with and promotes them really well. Maybe Cakewalk could be doing something similar for BandLab. Maybe the amount of cash required to keep Cakewalk afloat with the devs and support working in decentralized offices is small enough that just the word of mouth and brand awareness by itself makes it worthwhile. Like how Tostitos pays many millions of dollars to put its name on a college football game and gets paid zero from the ticket sales, yet they keep doing it because it's good for the brand. One kid makes a zillion-seller using Cakewalk and mentions it in an interview and right there is enough brand recognition to pay for the whole shebang.

Oh snap (to note), and since you're a Staff View user, that's one area that has received bupkis in the way of enhancements, so you have less incentive feature-wise to go with CbB. I do suspect that it would address your stickiness issue, though. I promise you'll dig it! I'll personally refund the price of your subscription if you don't think the latest Cakewalk core is an improvement over the last Sonar core. ? To get on the same page with you (although I mostly use Staff View only when I want to print notation or tab), I just called up Staff View and right clicked in the middle of the staff. I get a context menu with 4 sections. The first has Layout, Regenerate Tablature, and Export to ASCII. The second has commands for MIDI plug-ins and quantizing, the third has the fancy processes like Deglitch and Transpose, the fourth has the Fit to commands. If that's the context menu you're talking about, it works with my Logitech Mouseman Marble and my Logitech M305 wireless, and I didn't touch my Ctrl key. When I right clicked holding the Ctrl key I got the same menu. When was the last time you tried CbB to see if they'd corrected it? There have been what, something like 15 updates since BandLab took over? Maybe you got used to something else during the Gibson ownership, but these guys go after bugs as if they had taken their little brothers' lunch money. If this solves both of your issues and lets you use the new program, then I'm really glad I brought it up. Good luck.

It's pointless and asinine, and Cakewalk's process of adding a virtual instrument track would be no less a speedbump were it not for the existence of track templates. I tell ya, until I twigged track templates, trying to negotiate the process of setting up drum maps in Cakewalk was where rhythmic ideas went to die around my house.

I sometimes do a bit of mixing/referencing with Cakewalk playing back through an Altec-Lansing Mini Lifejacket, and the most difficult part is getting my notebook talking to the Bluetooth speaker, which you've already set up, so the rest is easy. First thing to do is from Cakewalk, check Preferences/Audio/Devices. Look at the lower pane, labeled "Output Drivers," to see if your Klipsch (your Klipsch) is on the list and is checked. It should be. If it's on the list but not checked, check it and click OK to close Preferences. Next, use the keystroke Alt-2 to open the Console View. Look at your Master strip. Down toward the bottom, below where it says IN/OUT, it will have a pulldown selector where you may select which device your Master bus will play back through. Change that to your Klipsch (your Klipsch, your Klipsch, your Kliiipsch) and that should take care of Cakewalk playing back through the Bluetooth speaker.

Do you mean how when you add a VSTi track it plops a track down with whatever the globally defined default instrument is without asking you which VSTi you wanted? So your new instrument track ends up named "Acoustic Piano" even after you go in and change it to what you did want?

I am not a lawyer and I do not speak for BandLab but I have followed the forums since they purchased the Cakewalk assets. My understanding of the user licensing issues is as follows: Software licensing agreements in existence at the time of the breakup of Cakewalk Inc. were made between the users and Cakewalk Inc. BandLab did not purchase Cakewalk Inc., it merely purchased a portion of its assets in the form of intellectual property, trademarks, and likely some odd bits of hardware that were necessary to maintaining the aforementioned (build systems, servers, etc.). BandLab Inc. has no legal obligation to honor or service any agreement(s) made with any user(s) who bought licenses from Cakewalk Inc. They have chosen to keep some services available to maintain good will with the former customers of the now-defunct Cakewalk Inc., but they have not stated an intention to do so indefinitely. Therefore, it is a poor idea for owners of Cakewalk Inc. software to rely on BandLab to maintain the old Cakewalk Inc. download and licensing servers indefinitely. I'd call it a stupid move, even. I have a couple of bits of Cakewalk Inc. software and have figured out the process of offline installation and authorization and you and everyone else should too. I'd say that at first you appeared to be very unfortunate (I was not a Sonar user, but I felt for you all when I heard about the demise), then very, very fortunate. When Gibson kicked Cakewalk Inc. to the curb, you appeared to be stuck with an orphaned product/platform. Now, under the current plan, you will be getting your free lifetime updates, under the care of a company that seems to be doing a dang sight better job of it. You still get to use all the rest of the stuff that came with the Platinum Suite while the core component continues to be updated. None but good unless you're one of those sour guys who hated it that the bailout also meant that other people would be allowed to use the core component without paying fees. In a huff that their 1st-class lifeboat was also picking up 3rd-class passengers. I think that most of the old Cakewalk Inc. intellectual property is now owned by BandLab and they may do with it what they choose. In every company, time and resources are limited, and management must decide how they will be spent and to what end. From the outside, BandLab look to be using a nimble, decentralized organization for software development. There are always things to consider when we "armchair" it. Everything that ships with the Cakewalk by BandLab suite must be supported (CbB is supported software). We may say "plug-in x used to ship with Platty num-nums, and Cakelad is just that on spinach, so why nots my plug-in?" But CakewalkbB has been around for a couple of years now, and the staff or other developer who used to work on Dimension Pro may be working elsewhere as a veep of development and want a ton of money to go back to the code in case something in it conflicts with Melodyne or whatever. Also, and we need look no further than CbB itself, with each passing month, what is available for free gets better and better. Even the years since Cakewalk went freeware have seen changes. BandLab don't need to shovel bucketloads of bundled plug-ins with Cakewalk. Does a lack of bundled slickaroonies hurt REAPER's reputation? So what may seem like the most "done deal" to us (reissuing out one of the old VSTi's) might come with a whole bunch of other burdens. As a big ProChannel fiend, I'd love to see more of the old native PC modules return, but it's been a couple of years. Nobody knows what's going to happen, ever. When I buy software licenses, I buy them with the expectation that the software may never change from the moment I plunk down my licensing fee. What do you mean, "nothing is free in this life?" You are referring to Cakewalk by BandLab's freeware subscription license?

You've really been hammering away at this one. Fortunately, there is a solution that is 100% effective which is to not put Sonar into memory in the first place. Cakewalk (by BandLab), from which this forum takes its name, is a revival of the Sonar codebase, with the addition of a couple of years of bug fixes, performance and stability improvements and features (I personally witnessed issues such as the one you are experiencing becoming less and less frequent as the BandLab ownership continued). It's licensed via a freeware subscription, which must be renewed via an internet connection at least once every 6 months. Installing it works much like Sonar did, you first install a download/licensing manager that handles the downloading and installation of the main program and add-ons. Once this is accomplished, you may uninstall the download manager until you wish to renew the subscription. No network communication is necessary until that time, and Cakewalk will warn you days in advance of the need to renew your subscription. All that is required to get the subscription is a valid email address, such as the one you used to gain access to this forum. It installs and runs nicely alongside existing installations of Sonar, including being able to use any bundled plug-ins or other content, so there is as little risk involved in trying it as there was with any Sonar update. And it's free besides. You could continue to search for solutions to the program's misbehavior with "everything up to date" except for the program itself, but that seems....inefficient.

Hear hear, in the case of hardware tips for sure. I think things like excluding your Cakewalk project folders from realtime virus scanning are universal, but with anything, you're right, even if we don't state it, TRY is implied. If someone's having problems, or if they want to tinker around a bit and see if they can squeeze a little more performance out of their hardware, TRY these things and then see what happens. I linked to a page with useful tools for monitoring performance, and one of my favorite ones is built right into Windows. We should all know how to run Task Manager and click on Performance to get a general idea of how many resources your system is using. You can also launch a more detailed tool from that page. Down at the bottom, there's a button for open Resource Monitor. That's how I discovered the behavior with Cakewalk's playback streaming and Defender's realtime scanning. You can use it to see what processes a specific program is launching, what files it's reading and writing, etc. I've noticed some other interesting things that CbB does, like doing a big disk read whenever a Loop Marker was moved. Noel might have amended that or I stopped noticing after I got an SSD. It used to stall my audio engine from time to time, especially if I wasn't diligent about defragging.

Great tips already! For those posting and for those reading: we're all just users, nobody speaks for BandLab, and it's anecdotal. Tuner beware, YMMV. My hope is that perhaps some of what we post here will eventually replace the out-of-date suggestions in the current documentation, but for now, it's just us. We already have conflicting opinions, which is great. Since many more people read the forum than post, I exercise caution in the matter of recommending disabling peripherals as a matter of course. While it is true that any interrupt-y component (network, video, audio, USB, Firewire, etc.) can have a defective driver that can cause problems that result in high latency and/or playback dropouts, I recommend working the problem and getting them to function correctly rather than just turning them off. This is especially true in the matter of network adaptors. While you may not use them, these days there is a plethora of DAW functions that depend on networking. Wireless control surfaces, MIDI over ethernet, OSC, streaming audio, remote desktop, VNC, licensing validation, all sorts of things. While it was once true that a computer couldn't handle audio and network traffic at the same time, modern ones should have no trouble at all with network activity as long as the networking is functioning properly. I've run VNC servers and Cakewalk with no issues, and that's constant network activity. There are tools such as Latency Monitor that we can use to see if a driver is causing trouble. If it is, then maybe try downloading the driver from the manufacturer's website instead of using the one that Microsoft supplies or vice versa, rolling back to the previous one, etc. I had to do this with the NIC driver on my Dell when Latency Monitor showed that the network driver was causing spikes. I've had to do it with video drivers. There is some danger in blanket recommendations where maybe we don't want things like "I heard you can't use wi-fi with Cakewalk" going around. May seem silly, but have you checked the sales stats of Corona beer lately? So maybe "wi-fi drivers can sometimes be flaky, if you're getting playback issues when you have wi-fi on, use Latency Monitor to check and see if your driver is the culprit" might be better advice. I can tell you that I have an ancient Dell i5 notebook that I run Cakewalk on and wi-fi is always enabled and has never caused a bit of trouble. I also use the onboard sound chip. It sounds fantastic through my Sennheiser cans. More tips to come....

I have Nebula and consider it a fun and clever thing for making modulation. MSW2 looks like MSW1 with an LFO for the width. A little scare for the headphone listeners. I like that sort of thing. Percolate is the kind of thing that originally gave Soundspot a poor reputation. A nothing-special 3-band EQ with a clunky sideways UI. I just looked at it one last time before deleting it. Do not seek this deal out just to get Percolate. It is not worth the investment of time it will take you to determine that it is not worth your time.

There could be trouble there. That's a whole lotta pagefaultin'. I just ran Latency Mon to get some comparison and while most of my numbers were similar, my pagefaults were 3. In order for us to help you better, we need you to click on the other tabs. Under "Drivers," click on the column header to sort by Highest execution (ms) and tell us what the first couple of driver names are and what the execution times are. Under Processes, click on Hard pagefaults and tell us what are giving you all those hard pagefaults. Those are a big red flag. If you could tell us how much RAM you have and what your HD config is (SSD, spinny, what's where) that would be helpful. I put mine in my sig. Also, Starship Krupa-fy your Windows Defender with that folder exclusion thing I posted.

It seems like a good time to start this, a dedicated thread for sharing (or requesting?) tried and tested tips for tuning one's DAW system to run Cakewalk by BandLab. For people submitting them, I think as much information we can provide about our systems will help people reading. I have my system specs in my sig, but anything that pertains more to the suggestion I'll put in the post. My system is not a rocket by any means. I have an SSD that I use for Programs, OS, plug-ins, sample data, and active projects. 16G of RAM, upgraded from 8 mostly so people would stop telling me I should upgrade my RAM. Here's my first one, already posted in another thread, but it's a goodie. Theoretical background included: First, Cakewalk's playback engine streams from every clip's associated audio file every time you hit Play*. That goes for muted clips and tracks, too. The only tracks and clips that don't stream are ones that are Archived. Second, Windows Defender Antimalware Service is set up by default to scan everything in real time. That is, every time a program reads or writes a file to or from the drive, Defender is sitting there waiting to jump in and scan it. That includes VST plug-ins, samples, audio files and all the dynamic linking libraries that any Windows program like Cakewalk loads during runtime. Just think of a whole extra program between Cakewalk and the drive that's scanning your vocal performance for malware on the fly.... This is not theoretical. In both cases I sat here and watched Windows Process Monitor as I ran a project and did a Keanu "whoa." I had been getting clean DPC scans, too. But enough of my prattle! What can we do about this? Windows Defender allows you to exclude certain folders from realtime scanning. Get thee now to Settings/Security and exclude your Cakewalk project folders from realtime scanning. I also recommend you do it for your plug-in and sample folders. None of these folders are likely to carry a malware payload, and if by some chance they did, Defender would pick it up on its systemwide scans. Be aware that Microsoft loves to revert your security settings, so once you've excluded folders from realtime scanning, check that setting every couple of months to make sure that they haven't switched back. Also, in projects with many unused takes that you're keeping around for possible later comping or alternate versions, etc., consider moving them to other tracks and then Archiving those tracks so that they don't all get streamed unnecessarily while you're mixing and comping your main "keepers." Try these and report back if you see an improvement in performance. They work for me, on my system, but as always, YMMV.

Well, there is a page in the official Cakewalk documentation about improving audio performance, but I'm not even going to link to it here. It's so out of date that I started a lighthearted humorous thread about it called "Wisdom of the Ages." It looks as if it has not been updated in decades. There are men and women reading this thread, using CbB, who were literally not yet born when that document was last touched. I would like to compile a Windows 10-appropriate list that the new devs could incorporate into the current documentation if they wish, but that's another thread. Anyway, when I first upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 (I'll now call it an "upgrade"), my system was not 100% happy. So I rolled up my sleeves and looked at what was going on using some analysis tools. I learned two important things. First, Cakewalk's playback engine streams from every clip's associated audio file every time you hit Play*. That goes for muted clips and tracks, too. The only tracks and clips that don't stream are ones that are Archived. (*Not all DAW's do this. Some have logic that figures out which is the audio that needs to be streamed (that is, clips that are unmuted) and streams only those files, and some may even do dirty tricks like compress or bandwidth limit on playback (on PLAYBACK, I stress, not mixdown) in order to provide that coveted glitch-free mixing experience. With so many people believing that "all DAW's sound the same," they can do whatever they want, because, after all, it's impossible for a DAW to sound different. ?) Second, Windows Defender Antimalware Service is set up by default to scan everything in real time. That is, every time a program reads or writes a file to or from the drive, Defender is sitting there waiting to jump in and scan it. That includes VST plug-ins, samples, audio files and all the dynamic linking libraries that any Windows program like Cakewalk loads during runtime. Just think of a whole extra program between Cakewalk and the drive that's scanning your vocal performance for malware on the fly.... This is not theoretical. In both cases I sat here and watched Windows Process Monitor as I ran a project and did a Keanu "whoa." In @Robert Bone's worst suspicions I doubt there's a wi-fi adapter driver around that could eat up as much overhead as I was seeing, and I was getting clean DPC scans. ? But enough of my prattle! What can we do about this? Windows Defender allows you to exclude certain folders from realtime scanning. Get thee now to Settings/Security and exclude your Cakewalk project folders from realtime scanning. I also recommend you do it for your plug-in and sample folders. None of these folders are likely to carry a malware payload, and if by some chance they did, Defender would pick it up on its systemwide scans. Be aware that Microsoft loves to revert your security settings, so once you've excluded folders from realtime scanning, check that setting every couple of months to make sure that they haven't switched back. Also, in projects with many unused takes that you're keeping around for possible later comping or alternate versions, etc., consider moving them to other tracks and then Archiving those tracks so that they don't all get streamed unnecessarily while you're mixing and comping your main "keepers." Try these and report back if you see an improvement in performance. They work for me, on my system, but as always, YMMV.

I was enthused when I saw that Cakewalk came with a MIDI plug-in effect for chord analysis, less so after I tried it out and found that it was not as useful as I had hoped. I must investigate the program that you linked to.

In my experience it's been more a matter of the plug-in than the computer. These days, most compressor plug-ins have provision for doing parallel compression built in via a "dry/wet" knob or something similar. There would be no delay because the processing would be handled by a single plug-in. I am curious about your signal flow. I'm not 100% what "a Kick/Snare crush with a lo-fi & dbx160" is. Probably a destroyed sound using a dbx-type VCA modeled compressor and a bit crusher? You should be running them comp>lo-fi rather than the other way. Here is one possible way to set up Addictive Drums (or any drum machine with multiple outs) up for parallel compression, plus what I assume is a bit crusher. Create a bus. Name it "Kick Snare." Create another bus. Name it "Drums." Route the kick and snare from AD to "Kick Snare." Route "Kick Snare" and the rest of the AD outs to "Drums." Put your compressor of choice in "Kick Snare's" FX rack. Mine might be the Signal Noise SN01-G VCA Compressor*, which has a "dry-wet" knob. Then put the lo-fi in the rack after it, because it's easier to get a slamming drum sound and then destroy it rather than the other way around. Set the compressor up the way the YouTube parallel compression video guy said to. Set up the crusher until it sounds appropriately sikk. Set the fader on "Kick Snare" so that it blends in with the rest of the drum kit. The idea here is that I'm using the plug-ins' own Dry/Wet controls for my parallel processing rather than doing it the hard way, which is not only harder, it can result in things like missing playback delay compensation, which it sounds like you've been experiencing. I like to compress my kick and snare independently of each other, so they might each get their own bus, then another with the bit crusher, but that's me. YMMV. *for really slamming drums, there's nothing like Audio Damage's Rough Rider, which is free and just came out with version 3

Drum Maps don't have anything to do with how you record MIDI data, or adjusting your timing or groove, are you thinking of Tempo Maps? Drum Maps (among other things) assign friendly instrument names to MIDI notes so that Cakewalk can do things like display a list of drum names along the left side of the Piano Roll instead of piano keys. It makes editing MIDI drum tracks easier by not having to remember which piano key corresponds to kick drum, snare, etc. Erik "Rests" Miller

It depends on what is meant by "needs," but if, in your way of thinking, Cakewalk SONAR "needed" an Internet connection, then so does Cakewalk by BandLab and I would pass on it if I were you. As previously noted, to install and operate CbB, you must connect to the internet to: 1. register with BandLab with a valid email account 2. Download the BandLab Assistant program, which includes functions for downloading, installing, and validating the newest Cakewalk. This process should take about 5-10 minutes 3. At some point before 6 months passes, connect the computer with Cakewalk on it to the internet, run BandLab Assistant and let it re-validate your copy of Cakewalk. This process should take less than a minute. Then, before another 6 months passes, do this again. That's it. If you wait more than a few months to do step 3, BandLab Assistant will probably ask you to let it update both itself and Cakewalk, and you may choose to do so or not. Cakewalk does not need to check with any licensing server in order to run. Its license is validated via BandLab Assistant contacting BandLab's servers when you install it, and then whenever you run BandLab Assistant with the computer connected to the net. If not connected to the net, it doesn't care. Once validated, it will run for 6 months without needing to be validated, at which point, at startup it will warn you that you will soon need to validate it or it will switch into an "unregistered" mode where you can't save projects. It will not do this in the middle of a project. You will have plenty of time to plug your computer into the network for its 60 seconds of "phone home." The license is a free subscription, like Tape Op. We get to use Cakewalk for free, all we have to do is let BandLab Assistant say "howdy" to the BandLab server every 6 months, just like we have to fill out that form every 12 months to keep Tape Op coming.

Annoying "You Can Already Do This" Man to the rescue! As you have said that you're a longtime Cakewalker, forgive me if you already know this, but you can already add notes to each Track down in the Lanes. It's not immediately obvious (I found it by accident one evening), but open your Take Lanes and double-click in the empty black rectangle on the right end of the header and start typing. I use it all the time to make notes about just the things you mention: which mic I used, places I might have blown a phrase or note, which synth patch I used or what alternate synth patches might sound good if it's a MIDI track, etc. Since each Take Lane has one, you can make really detailed notes on every take, not just the track. If you want to have global notes about the track itself, you could add an empty take lane for that purpose.

I would like to at least be able to invoke "Narrow Strip" like I can with similar strips in Console View.

Excellent news! Boogex and Voxengo fan here. I have to admit to only ever using Voxengo's freebies, and really good stuff it is, but their UI's, oh man, it's as if they exist so that people can say that Meldaproduction don't have the least attractive UI's in the plug-in market. If they would just make them skinnable, anything to get away from that "Windows 3.0 with the Hot Dog Color Scheme" look. I think Crimsonmerry will work for cheap and does great work.

Are you saying that hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way? ? I'm also with Tezza, maybe with a different spin. Creative professions attract nuts. I've pondered why my comrades and I even bother to do what we do, with so few of us even getting any material gain. One conclusion I've come to is that I think, there's having something to express or communicate that we can't communicate in "normal" verbal ways. That can come from emotional pain or suppressed joy or anger. Just in music, how many people have you met that were dissimilar from their personae? In my practice as an amplifier repairman, I can tell you that the nicest, most soft spoken mellowest dudes are the ones who play paint-peeling death metal. Some of my closest musical chums are Eeyore-level depressed at times, yet musically, they often produce joyful pop. The joy they can't find in day-to-day life bubbles up in their music. (ob deals content: I self-medicate by getting my new plug-in dopamine shots)

At the moment it's slapped right across the Master Bus of the first mix I tried it on, and ?. I hope everyone was able to get it is all, and thank you Larry for turning me on to it. I'm not usually one who's much for vintage emulations (Meldamoonie), but this thing sounds great, at least right now.

Dang, I didn't even notice it, maybe because to me, that Windows 7 look is still the "right" UI. The rounded corners, all that, it really did not need "improvement." It's a known psychological phenomenon, human beings feel more comfortable looking at things that are rounded than we do things that are pointy and square. Walt Disney believed that this was part of why Mickey Mouse outlasted Felix the Cat. Felix has pointy ears, Mickey has rounded ears. If you look at guitars that have staying power on the vintage market, it's the ones that are all curves. We make fun of the '80's pointy ones. No matter how well made they are, they'll probably never have similar long term lasting value that a curvy guitar will. Now, no matter how much I appreciate and admire how well Windows 10 runs, I have to stare at those danged square corners for hours at a time. Ouch! Let me have the earlier look as a theme, please! But yes, Cakewalk should look like Windows, whatever the current version of Windows is. Floated Inspector and Browser etc. windows have the W10 look, and so should the Track View.

(tl/dr in parens) #1 by a long shot: Non-destructive normalization. (Why is this one process destructive? Like @Craig Anderton, I'm used to normalizing dang near everything so that my FX gain staging is simpler, etc., etc., but I don't want destructive processing. At. All. I know, it's probably a throwback to Ye Olde Cakewalke. But for heaven's sake CbB can shift pitch, reverse entire bars, replace my entire drum performance so that it's perfect and played on a Roland 808, all without touching a single 1 or 0 of the audio. Yet if I want to normalize a clip to -1dB, bang, churn, grind, whole new audio file. YAAARRRRGGGGHHHH) Next, setting up Drum Maps could be made a lot easier and more intuitive with some menu additions, documentation additions and maybe wording changes. (For instance, there is currently no way to start the process of applying a Drum Map from the PRV Drum Pane. Once the user has called up the Drum Pane in the Piano Roll, they must leave it to go to a MIDI Channel Strip or Preferences to invoke the Drum Map Manager, then go back to the MIDI Channel Strip and apply the Drum Map. There is no indication in the program, no prompts telling them they must do this, they just have to know it. The documentation does not lay out a step-by-step process. There should at least be a menu item in the PRV for "Drum Map Manager" when the Drum Pane is showing and a right click menu item in the Drum Pane for "Drum Map Manager." In lieu of a larger overhaul of the Drum Map, a "wizard" or prompts or something similar could help. There could be tooltip help in the Drum Pane or in the Drum Map Manager indicating the user's next step. As it stands, the user is "stranded" at a few points along the way. It literally took me months before I got the process "down" to the point where I could start from scratch and get a drum map to work right away, reasonably understanding what I was doing at each step. It pains me to say it, but more than one promising beat got lost while I was flailing about trying to set Cakewalk up for drum editing. Beats are important, yo.) Last, what others have already said about the potential of the Matrix. (I don't have a "Morpheus" around to explain it to me, but if it has the ability to become integrated as a compositional tool (which the similar feature in Mixcraft is), that seems like it could be a killer feature for EDM composers/producers. My understanding is that these audio/MIDI loop grids are meant to give Ableton Live-esque functionality, and I would love to have that to mess with. Sounds inspiring.)

User, I'm not 100% certain because I don't use your workflow and only open EL for troubleshooting and only open SV for printing, but I think what you want might already be there (classic Cakewalker answer to a feature request, I know ?). I tried your request and right now on my 2nd monitor I have separate floating Staff View, Event List, Piano Roll and Console windows. I had a hunch that you, as I was until several weeks ago, may not be aware that you can drag Multidock'd tabs out onto the desktop and they'll be free of the dock. You'll still need to click on their headers to switch to them (or Ctrl+Tab to cycle), but they're all visible. Just open your views and drag their tabs out. Voila! One view will still be Multidock, and if you want the rest back in there, drag them back. The independent ones may be dragged on top of each other without re-docking. Or did you mean something else?