Starship Krupa

Okay, I just revisited Instachord again hoping I could help get a fellow frustrated forumite to the point where they could try this out. I got it to work with @Paul P's instructions, but there are a couple of other cautions about the process involving Instachord itself that may be leading people to think that it isn't set up properly when it actually is. Do everything he says. The "sounding" instrument may have the checkbox for enabling MIDI output greyed out, and that's okay. Once you get it set up like Paul says, the next hurdle is that Instachord, heaven knows why, does not launch with a preset that will result in the darn thing making a peep unless you happen to hit the C above middle (at least I think that's what key that is on my controller). So you need to go up to its preset menu and select one of the presets. Any one will do, it just needs to populate the two columns on the right with "actions." Once you've done that, look at the Instachord UI and tap a key down in the "Chords A" area, and then play around pressing keys in the "Picks A" and "Picks B" areas, and you will experience the magic of Instachord. The compositional value I can see in it is if, say, you decide you want to do a song in a certain key. Rather than wearing your hands out going back and forth trying different chords in that key, you can just select them with your left index finger while your right index finger plays one key that triggers a pattern of the notes in the chord. I sort of naturally fell into this while I was testing it and had an "aha" moment (no, that's not when a pencil-drawn motorcyclist comes to life from the comic you are reading). And if you want to write a song that will sound good on guitar, you can call up a guitar sound while you're doing this. If you remember the Suzuki Omnichord, I think it's maybe a more sophisticated form of that: select a chord with one finger and "strum" with the other. So for me, it's no biggie, I can play that anyway, but I can see where it could eliminate a certain amount of drudgery. Also, I often like to use weird chords with "slop" notes where my fingers fall off the keys or I accidentally hit the "wrong" key and it sounds cool, and I would not want to wall myself off from access to that serendipity.

I think I wound up with the 2-fer bundle because it was the monthly Pluginboutique giveaway. I'm also interested in improvisatory music and performance that allows non-musicians to contribute by using technology to restrict the notes and chords they are able to play or generate chords or patterns or the like. So I downloaded them and tucked them away and then remembered and decided to see what was up, checked out the gee-whiz reviews. They're better as an exercise in learning MIDI routing in Cakewalk than anything else at this point. What I would like to have is a MIDI chord analyzer plug-in that actually works on these oddball latter day Radiohead slop chords I'm always finding and using.

I gotta say, this release, all these new features, I'm still bumping into cool stuff that I either hadn't noticed or hadn't quite grasped how useful the feature would be. For instance, Selection Markers. The ability to make selections with persistent repositionable markers is going to be HUGE for me. In my workflow, it'll allow me to do the same kind of precision selecting that I do in audio editors like Sound Forge and Audacity. And all the markers having the little letters on them so I know which one I'm moving! Brill!

Chris, can you describe in more detail what you mean by this, what issue you are running into? I do most of my recording by doing full-length takes, so I may not have encountered the situation you're talking about yet. Does Cakewalk use the first available lane if your newly-recorded clip doesn't overlap with any previously-recorded clip(s)? If it does, then yes, it would be nice to be able to turn that off.

Okay, I've narrowed down the recipe. Track View Control Text and Values does affect Take Lane notes text, both via themes and via color prefs. However, in order to see the result of making a change, you must close your current project, then open it again (or open another one). Apparently, some color settings are only read at the time CbB opens a project, not when a theme is applied or when they are selected in Color prefs., which is good to know. (00FEFE blue and FF9900 orange look good on the black background, BTW)

See next message for final outcome....

Hoo doggies. It looks like a certain amount of rain dancing must take place before the color can change. I thank you all for looking into this. Now of course I fear that the lurid color changes I tried in my test theme will start leaping out. I wonder if the color only changes if the parameter gets called in a certain order, like it has to be read by another part of the program before the change will show up in the Take Notes space. All I've been doing is the standard sequence of: Change color in test theme, switch CbB to Mercury, save test theme, switch to test theme in CbB, hit Apply, observe result, repeat. If there's some other dance that needs to be done in CbB besides just hitting Apply, my efforts were for naught (well, they were for naught anyway).

Dang, not on my system. I found a setting in Preferences/Colors for Track View Control Text and Values and that didn't budge it, then I opened up TE and tried it there and no go, so I went through everything in Track View root level that was black and one at a time changed them to garish neon colors and the only ones I got visible action on were track names. Which leads me to seriously wonder what the heck the rest of them even do. Now I have this dummy test theme with some wild colors in it that don't seem to affect anything. It's called ClrTst. Hey, maybe we could have a St. Stupid's Day challenge next April, a competition to see who can change the most things in Theme Editor without their having any visible effect on Cakewalk itself. I feel like I could be a contender. Seriously, I changed half a dozen colors in the Track View from coal black to '80's nu wave and got a single visible result. I'm stuck with magic Nancy Drew spy writing that you have to swipe across with the cursor in order to read unless I can figure out how to change it. What color is it on everyone else's systems? I swear I thought that it was white or at least grey at one point on my system but I haven't tried using that area in such a long time.

Thanks, Matthew, you are, as always, the theme master. Yes, the color preferences override and its unintended consequences. I tried reverting to the default colors in Preferences, but it still came up black, so I don't know what's going on. I'll mess with Control Text and see what's going on. Is there a way to give control of all colors back to the themes once the user has started customizing them in Preferences? I thought that choosing one of the presets might do that, but perhaps not.

You mean if you set it up with Auto Punch. Hmm. I think it's a bug. They're not "adjoining clips." If it happened when you were moving the end of the clip, I'd get it. I tried folding it over, but then it turns into this....and I don't want this.

That would have been my first guess, since you said you were working with some of them. It would be fun if Crimson Merry or someone could twist up a few GUI's for him.

Hie on over to the Favorite Freeware FX thread and hit up Airwindows. The guy is a brilliant DSP engineer, but likes to work alone, I think. That extends to partnering with someone to do GUI's. From what I've read in his blog, he's even a bit contemptuous of GUI's. Oh well.

I don't know what it's called, but when you have your Take Lanes open on a Track, there's a notepad space to the right of the Lane controls and to the left of the actual lanes, where you can make notes on your takes. Pretty handy for when you wind up with a lot of lanes. The only problem with it is that for every theme I can find, the box' background is charcoal grey and the text is black, making it hard to read unless I highlight the text. So, themesters, anyone know what color sets that background? Better still if I could find out how to set that text color, too. I went through the Colors in Preferences and didn't find either of them in there (doesn't mean they're not in there). I'm going to set to the task again tonight and report back if I find anything....

This has been annoying me for some time. I record in Comp Mode, Group All Clips, and New Takes on Top. I also usually have Loop mode turned on when I record so that when I get to the end of the song, I automatically start over again with another take. At the end of a tracking session I may have say, 4 takes, all the full length of the song. Usually I want to crop the beginnings of the clips to get rid of the silence, shuffling, whatever, before the song starts. To do this I use Cakewalk's Edit Tool (and I swear, the first person who suggests "a better way to do that" instead of just answering my question is gonna get it-the second person, this set of steak knives) to drag the left (starting) edge of the clip over a measure or two. This works just great except for one thing. Why is it that after I've recorded say, 3 takes and I'm sitting down to do some editing, I'll grab the left edge of the clip in Take lane 1 with the Edit tool and it will turn into the "butterfly" version indicating that it's moving two adjoining clips, then both the left edge of the clip and the left edge of the clip in Take lane 2 above it will slide to the right if I drag it? The workaround for this is of course to press the Ctrl key, but why does it do this? The clips aren't adjoining. The right edge of the clip in Tl1 would be adjoining the left edge of the clip in Tl2, but not the left edge.

Pile on the functionality says I, and this is something I would use, but I can also think of some reasons Cakewalk and other DAW's don't already come with this technology. First, mature plug-ins that do it are readily available. For $60, I get get the one you've mentioned, or I can hop on over to Pluginboutique and cop the iZotope Ozone 8 Standard suite as a crossgrade from any of the iZotope Elements suites I already own. Ozone Standard comes with a similar tool, one that is integrated with other parts of Ozone and Neutron, and....sheesh, I can't learn mastering chops fast enough to stay ahead of what iZotope's tools are starting to be able to do. At some point, I may just give up. Second, as you say, there are other means, so just going by the video, what does it do? I'm going to go down a list here, not to knock it down, but to see how well I am doing without one of these in my toolbox so far. Although if I had $60 in my budget for that Ozone Standard crossgrade.... a. You can set up multiple sections of the songs you are referencing for looping. That's neat, but the idea of having it is not knocking me out. I usually just hop around with the mouse. b. Loudness match of the different sections. Hmm. For referencing, I do pretty well adjusting manually. And I want to know if there are loudness differences in the different sections. So not much for me there. Hornet makes a $5 plug-in that will gain stage all your tracks for you. I'm not sure what he means about the automatically aligning the tracks so that you can tell if you have a different version. I usually reference my one mix to several other tracks. The various analysis tools' functions can be had for free in the form of Voxengo's Multiband Correlometer and SPAN, as well as Meldaproduction's MStereoScope, MLoudnessAnalyzer, and especially MAnalyzer. The last one lets you take an EQ and amplitude profile of your track and compare it either to another track or to a set of standard genre profiles that it already has in its preset bank. Boz Digital's Panipulator is good for pushbutton auditioning of what a mono playback will sound like, etc. The savvy Cakewalk user can make a track template or FX Preset Chain with these analysis tools in it for mastering analysis. Of course I agree that it's nice to have all of this stuff integrated, but that might be a long way off, maybe some of this will help tide you over.

Former software industry pro here, most recognizable gig was probably Macromedia/Adobe as QA engineer, so I know that it's one of the most efficient ways to get someone involved in the dev process to roll their eyes. One of my armchair guesses says that it might be boilerplate/library code from an early Steinberg SDK. There are a few places where I just plain can't read text without squinting, this on my 22" monitors. One is clip headers. The other is the Aim Assist header, which for me, basically serves as a means to obscure the markings on the ruler.

This one is big time stuff, like notify the magazines stuff, which I so hope has happened. I'd love to see some "Cakewalk in the BandLab Era" articles, because with this release, this is the first time that changes this big have been made to the program's workflow. As an advocate for the program's adoption among legacy Sonar users, I've always been able to say to them "workflow's exactly the same, but there are some cool new features that you can use or not." Going forward, I'm going to have to change my pitch up. Cakewalk is no longer waiting around, this is going to spawn whole new workflows, especially for new users who will never know that it was any other way. I hope that after a couple of weeks @Craig Anderton will start churning out fab new recipes on how to make quick use of the new Take Lanes features, things that nobody else thought of. ?

Forgot to say +1. I was "that forum geek" who reads a good feature request and then offers a workaround. ? Thing is, of course, I wouldn't have had to come up with all that if the default UI were not so microscopic. Scalable would even be nice. And you are so right about inability to guess at the complexity of the task. Opening the most likely ancient section of code that pertains to that UI could have unforeseen consequences. I think the only thing I'm willing to say "probably wouldn't be that tough" regarding is changing menu text or art with the same number of pixels.

+2 Thijs Van Leer and I concur.

Most of Airwindows' plug-ins don't have UI's, they rely on the hosts' "default UI," which is usually just some sliders and at best resembles the UI's for say, ReaComp from the ReaPlugs suite minus the meters. Pretty sure that's what petemus is talking about. Cakewalk offers an excellent way around that in the form of Effect Preset Chains. The person who dedicates the time to making up a nice little UI with knobs and buttons and legible text is the user. You just make an Effect Preset Chain with only the UI-less plug-in. I did one for Airwindows' DeEss and it works great. Any parameter that the plug-in allows the host to automate (which is usually all of them) is yours to access via a knob or button.

I see it as a worthy goal to be pursued as development goes forward, as fresh pairs of eyes get to have a look. A thing that happens is that new users see issues like this in the bigger, longer picture, and longtime users have all the shortcuts and workarounds memorized so well that they don't notice how clunky and impenetrable things can seem to a new user. "Just hit Ctrl-Shit-Z Space-T, then select the audio you want to ZlorpStretch, then paste it, then Alt-0, then Shift-Del-N to ghost flip it into the frequency region non-destructively, then put it back into ripple mode and you're done. Takes longer for me to write it than to do it." To my mind as a piece of software evolves there can be many objectives, none of them ever "reached." Adjusting the menu layout to make more logical sense (whatever that is deemed to be) or for greater ease of use (likewise) or to make it easier to learn can be a goal to pursue, to devote resources to. Look at the popularity of the FlexIQtm feature of the Smart Tool. Much of that was, conceptually, allowing the user to turn some of it off. Same with reducing resource consumption, adding new features, fixing bugs, etc. It's all what ya deem important. Back on the old forum, I think we lost a lot of users who were torqued because BandLab wouldn't provide a roadmap, but everyone navigates using their smartphones now, so who's got the last laugh? If you're gonna have to license content from TomTom or Magellan, I'd rather get some loop packs or a phrase sampler or something. My own current favorite prime example is the Drum Map, but in another case I'd like to see made easier, I took a look at the Track View's menus. The Track Control Manager is something that I wasted a good many hours not being able to remember how to get to when I first started using CbB. We could have a right-click context menu entry for it. "Header Layout," or "Header Widgets." "Header Controls?" Part of my trouble was that the phrase Track Control implied that I would be launching something that was controlling tracks. And don't laugh, the reason why I couldn't find what I was looking for right dead center screen in front of me was because when things were screwed up, the button to access it was labeled either "FX," or "I/O" or whatever. Not gonna click there. I'd be poking around, accidentally hit the button, or poke it wondering what it did and not notice right away and be all messed up. Couple of last things, if you don't always have your Track View docked in the Skylight right under the main program window, you might start to notice that the menu commands for Insert Audio/MIDI/Instrument Track are nowhere to be found under the Tracks menu. Nor is Insert Folder or Template on it. Can't add a Bus from it either. Yeah, I know, just memorize the keystroke. Eventually you won't even need a monitor. Also: why is the Process menu and every item under it all the way up there on the main menu and not sitting down next to (or even encompassing) the Region FX menu? Most of the things under it seem to have to do with tracks and clips, so why not scoot it down where it can travel with the rest of the Track View menus?

Wow, I didn't even know that reverb.com had software. The Sonivox Session Drums and BlueJay Drums are probably worth checking out for $1 each. As much as I love DrumMic'a, it's kind of cumbersome to load up Kontakt every time I want to do some drums.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure what you're talking about is right there already. I know there's something called a Tempo Map, but I don't know if it applies. I think some of the tempo correction stuff hides out under menus that refer to vocal correction, but it just as readily works for other material. I've yet to use it, so if you ask about this in the larger forum, I bet you'll get the recipe straightaway. Or recipes. It seems like there's usually more than one way to accomplish a given task with this great beast. HR-16 for life!

I am also of the opinion that there are many processes in Cakewalk that involve the user way more than they need to. One of them, for instance, is assigning a Drum Map to the Piano Roll View for drum editing. Cakewalk essentially forces the user to create a list of drum maps they want to use in the project, then choose which one they want to use for each MIDI drum track, and the nomenclature is confusing. What's more, the user gets at the interface for this not from the Piano Roll View but from either the Output selector on a MIDI track or in Preferences. With your concept, if the user wants to do some drum editing, it would be right there in the PRV. "Use Drum Map." And then the user would be presented with a wizard or dialog allowing them to choose which mapping they wanted. For the past 20 years, that's been General MIDI, with manufacturer variations like XG, GS, Band-In-A-Box, etc. Or they could choose "New" to create a new one. This is a good idea. I think I'll submit it as a feature request.

If you look at the change log and new features list for the current build, you'll see that a lot of heavy lifting is going into making what's already there work correctly and work better. There are some existing features that are ripe for the picking, like integrating the Matrix View into song composition, making Drum Maps more seamless, that would help make Cakewalk more attractive to people who want to use it for EDM and the like. I think if some attention were put to the Matrix, for instance, that might be the feature that you're talking about. It's already there, it's just kind of isolated. Cakewalk's an incredibly deep program, and its features were added in stages over decades, so some of them are integrated better than others. It seems like the developers have more breathing room to go back and do some touching up, and so far, the results are nothing short of excellent. Every new build is like Xmas morning!