Starship Krupa

They have better and faster zoom and crop and waveform manipulation tools for zeroing right in on those spaces and bumps and cutting or smoothing them out. It's what they're built for, just as Cakewalk is built for multitrack recording, composition, and editing of music. Their waveform displays are usually more detailed so you can spot problems visually without the need to keep listening over and over. Sound Forge Pro can do multiple tracks, and some use it for songs, but I don't think I'd like it. It's hard to describe until you pull up one of your spoken word files and work in each of them to see what their strengths are. Cakewalk will shine on moving around large sections, working with effects, the initial recording, the "big picture." The wave editor will shine at working on cleaning up the little noises and tightening up the gaps. You'll develop a rhythm of "spot a glitch in the waveform, zoom in, select it, audition it, correct it, on to the next one." This can be done in Cakewalk as well. There are plug-ins like RX that are really good at automated cleaning up of mouth noises.

Great news! But c'mon, Marco, tell us what the solution was so we can help the next geezer with 24-year-old projects. ?

This is my preferred lossy distribution format if I must go lossy. I've already set up the Nero AAC Encoder for export. I notice that I can drag and drop .M4A files into CbB, which implies that at least some of the CODEC is present, but it doesn't show up as an option in the Export dialog. It would be nice if it did.

I've been looking at a Logitech wireless keyboard with built-in touchpad as an interim solution. But....no more gadgets, please! For now I use a Korg nanoKONTROL2 on a long cable with @msmcleod's control surface software. I don't like having another cable to get all tangly, and Mark suggests wireless USB as a possibility, but another gadget just to get in and out of Record and Play modes? The tethered nanoKONTROL will do for now. I wanna use my phone or $50 Android tablet. Leave it to Avid to come out with something that only runs on iPads. ?

My friend Jim is a pro VO artist and teacher and makes good use of iZotope RX in his work. I scored a license for RX Elements at deep discount and believe that it would be an excellent tool for spoken word recording, either using the individual plug-ins within Cakewalk or the standalone editor itself. As far as differences in setup and all that, when I was doing narration for a friend's technical book, I found that it was in some ways more difficult than singing, because I wanted to maintain a consistent speaking "voice" throughout the project. A song vocal take is minutes at longest, but a book reading is much longer, even if it's just phrases. Different discipline. Plosives, lip clicks, stuff like that come through way more obviously because there's not this whole rock (or whatever) band covering them up. It's "naked," like having your vocal solo'd all the time with minimal FX. These are some things that worked for me: Use your pop screen and any old LDC, and get close to the mic for an intimate sound. This will sound good on earbuds. Maintain a consistent distance (having the tone drift doesn't sound good). Sit in a comfortable chair with the text you are reading displayed at an angle that allows you to read it while holding your neck and throat at a good angle for the voice work. Have a bottle of water close at hand! Be prepared to at first detest the sound of your speaking voice, then fall in love with it. ? As others have alluded to, trying to do it all entirely in Cakewalk would, IMO, be possible but needlessly difficult. I would do it in a hybrid way: Track in Cakewalk making use of the multiple tracks, sound effects (fun in a book project!), punch-ins, etc. available in a DAW Comp in Cakewalk using CbB's fabbo Take Lanes, Speed Comping, etc. Export the result in lossless format of your choice, WAV or FLAC Open the file in an audio editor such as Audacity, Wavosaur, iZotope RX, Sound Forge Audio Studio, any number of free or reasonably-priced and excellent audio editors. My favorite happens to be Sound Forge AS, which you can get for about $25 for v. 12 on Amazon. Edit out your breath intakes, long pauses, lip clicks, page turns, mobile phone notifications, whatever Import the result back to Cakewalk for final mastering/sweetening or if it supports VST's you can stay in your audio editor

As long as each person has their own user account it's fine.

Short answer: no, it is not now, nor has it ever been necessary to unplug your computer from the Internet for DAW use. At least not if you are following the most basic guidelines for avoiding malware infection and data loss on the system. Longer answer: I am a former IT security professional and I promise you, I never saw such a cautious (nervous) bunch until I started reading DAW forums! It's pretty unusual for the workstation of a rocket scientist or biochemist to be behind an airgap, heck, for their servers to be behind airgaps ("airgap" means the system is physically disconnected from access to the Internet). It's actually harmful for systems to be offline and allow their software to become out of date, fall behind in patches, etc. Who is spreading this terror? Has any recording magazine such as Tape Op run an article or something suggesting that this was "best practice," or was it just "some guy(s) on an Internet forum?" A bunch of people said so therefore it became "true?" Think about this. Have you experienced or even read or heard a verifiable story of a hobby, semi-pro, or pro recording studio experiencing loss or theft of data due to a "malicious attack" on a DAW system that happened because the computer was connected to the Internet? I'm asking because I haven't. Maybe you have. The largest and most tragic loss of data I'm aware of was at a facility that was storing it in analog form, the fire at Universal. What data do you keep on your DAW computer that a data thief would think worth stealing? How would a thief become aware that it was there (I know, BandLab Assistant?)? Of course you know not to blindly run email attachments and browse sketchy porn sites and the like on your DAW computer. Do you have a robust anti-malware scanner installed that you can run every so often? Is your system behind a router/firewall? Does your system have Windows built-in firewall enabled (the answer is yes for the majority of computers connected to the Internet). Do you make backups of your project/audio/data files on separate media? How about installation files/media for your software? Software keys? If you are a pro or semi-pro, have you spent an hour or two outlining how you would get your DAW system back up and running if a large hairy man came into your studio with a sledgehammer and smashed your computer to bits? And if he did that 5 minutes from now, how many minutes/hours/days' work would be gone forever due to backup intervals? These last two questions are the most important of all (especially if your studio is in the American Pacific Northwest, where large hairy men run rampant). Do you know that even Windows 10 Home allows you to schedule updates so that they only happen outside certain hours of the day? And that you can set it so that even during that time, if it detects that you are working and it has an update, it will defer the update? This is how I have my system set up. I have had situations where LatencyMon detected that my ethernet driver was causing latency issues, and disabling the card would have ended the troubles. Instead, what I did was a bit of sleuthing and wound up rolling the driver back a revision and the problem went away. The issue was not that I was running with the network enabled, it was that I had a malfunctioning driver. This might be how the "you should always turn off wi-fi when you're doing DAW work" thing started. You don't need an airgap for DAW use, never did as long as you take the basic steps to ensure your computer doesn't get malware on it. It's not even a good idea, as your plug-ins and other software will start to get behind on patch level, then the next time you do connect the system to the Internet, you'll sit for an hour while all this stuff downloads and installs. As far as network activity being a source of dropouts, it shouldn't as long as your network adaptor is properly configured. It's just another bit of hardware. One thing that I found that was causing undue overhead was Windows 10's built-in malware program's default setting of scanning every file as it's read from the disk. I used Group Policy Editor to disable realtime scanning and only do scheduled scans.

It seems dependent on whether you have a license for Sonar>Artist.

When I was running on my i5 notebook with 4G of RAM, I used Process Lasso to kill any unnecessary programs. Just start it before I start Cakewalk or whatever other resource-sensitive program.

That's cool you're still a faithful user. Waves is a weird plug-in system. Every once in a while I go checking around my drives to see if any plug-ins are putting files anywhere I don't expect and Waves has their stuff all over the place, and they install every different flavor even though I only want Windows 64 VST2 and 3. Every so often with version 9 upon starting Mixcraft, Waves would ask me over and over for the location of its files. The SONAR Platinum licensees have been treated fairly to say the least, IMO. Even though the company has not existed for almost 2 years, the Cakewalk zombie licensing server is still running, still able to download and authenticate old Cakewalk software as well as it was when Cakewalk Inc. existed, and I think that's pretty amazing. Needing to run an ethernet cable to your DAW every 6 months to let it canoodle with the home server is standard stuff for a subscription license, which is what Cakewalk by BandLab's is. With any other subscription license (Adobe, Avid, etc.) your computer would somehow need to check in with the home office every so often for validation, same deal with BandLab. It's like that free subscription to Tape Op, the only price I pay is they get my address, and to keep it coming I have to confirm yearly that I'm still here and still want the magazine.

The expected behavior for me would be that it would just do what it says: if your FX are on, it will turn them off when you hit Record. When you stop recording, your system will be returned to whatever state it was in before you hit Record. If you had already switched global FX off, that would be the same.

Oh I like this idea. It would be a good thing to have under Preferences/Record. Having FX switch back on when in Play would also eliminate that moment of "my mix sounds like poo" before I remember that of course it does, I turned off all the FX in order to track. ?

A nice stylized "V" would do the trick.

I have yet to try any of these FX, but there's one GLARING problem I have with the UI. You have something to be proud of there, they should have your logo on 'em.

@Craig Anderton wrote up the procedure for enabling them in the April Sound On Sound magazine, singing the praises of VX-64 and PX-64. I believe that it was @scook who said that some of the Style Dials depended on VX-64, PX-64, and TL-64. This makes sense because there is a transient shaper Style Dial, a de-esser, gate, saturator, and those processors are all to be found in the "-64" modules we're talking about. Nothing else native to CbB has a transient shaper besides PX-64, and while you could roll up a de-esser using the sonitus fx, it would be easier to use the one in VX-64.

How can I Unsubscribe from Subscription offers? ? To the extent that the subscription model makes sense for anything to me, it's particularly silly for me to subscribe to a plug-in bundle. I'm a big ho-bag for plug-in deals in the first place so I have to watch it to make sure that my drive doesn't fill up with a bunch of great stuff that I wind up never using on projects. I need to be careful to only even download and keep things that I know I will make use of. The idea of paying monthly for a collection of plug-ins I might use 5% of is insanity. First, I'm not so into bundles. It would be like going to a woodworking store that carries Porter-Cable and telling them to give me one each of everything P-C makes whether I actually need a router, circular saw, jointer, planer, drill, etc. I may already have a Hitachi drill that works great, I might never use a jointer. I may not even like P-C's model of sabre saw. I might make an exception for Meldaproduction. ? Next is the subscription model itself. I think it works in situations where the software is used in a commercial environment where it's used to generate income. A graphic design house can just pay Adobe every month for their software and be done with it. It's another invoice. Where someone's a broke bedroom musician who saves up to buy one $25 Waves plug-in at a time every 2 months, and it's regularly going to be down to buying groceries or making rent vs. paying their $12.95 plug-in subscription, no way, not now, not ever dream on.

There is no reason to get rid of the Theme Editor, because its only function is to allow the user to make changes to the program's appearance. No user is forced to use Theme Editor. Most Cakewalk users don't, most users only ever use the Mercury and Tungsten themes. Theme Editor is not even part of the default installation. If a user wants to make changes to the default colors, there is a more direct way to do that in Preferences. It was originally only intended for use by in-house developers, then polished up and released for end users to use if they chose. I think the ability to create and alter themes/skins is wonderful and I am involved in it in a small way, doing my own alterations and participating in discussions when I can contribute. Theme Editor has nothing to do with interface scalability, that is a completely separate issue. Yes, I agree that right-click context menus are a very good way to access operations. That was the original intention of the right mouse button in the Windows 95 UI. I was working at Macromedia when Microsoft introduced Windows 95 and was trying to get companies used to the idea of how to use a right mouse button. If your program has any kind of object, a block of text, a picture, an equation, a sound file, whatever, to make changes to it you place your cursor on the object and click the right mouse button. I got it right away and became the world's fastest right-clicker. I was in QA and if they gave me a program to try out and it didn't have right-click context menu functionality I would march into the project manager's cube with eyes rolled and tell them that their stupid Macintosh Cmd-click stuff was history, that in a couple of years people would be hooking multiple button mice up to their Macs, etc. IMO, every operation pertinent to that area of the screen should be available on the context menu. Especially processing. Select a region, right click, boom. This has been discussed, and @Craig Anderton has said that one of the original functions of Lenses was to "hide" or "reveal" features for proposed different versions of Cakewalk. Logic has Basic and Advanced views and defaults to the Basic view on first run. The Start Screen would be a good place to choose a Basic or Advanced view. It just needs to be "sold" to TPTB and then someone needs to design the Lenses. I think Basic/Advanced views is a great idea and would love to see it implemented. This is one we can say is "easy to do," because it's just a couple of lenses. But then the question needs to be answered: what does the Basic view of Cakewalk look like?

I can only find Session Drums, which I found to be inferior. Session Drums has a bunch of electronic and highly processed sounds, which are useful, but I can do better with myriad drum machine plug-ins. Blue Jay instead has a lot of different acoustic kits, which is what I want from a sampled drum VSTi. I actually only wind up using a couple of them, but when the instrument has many to choose from, there's a greater chance that they'll suit my purpose.

The caravan to Aruba is not the road you'd choose.

It could be useful in a smaller project that you wish to keep more compact, but certainly I can see where that could get very confusing in a large project with many takes. My brain can only keep track of so many before I have to start thinking in terms of "the one at the top is the most recent, and probably the keeper." +1 for giving the user the ability to switch this behavior back to the way it used to work. I haven't encountered it yet, but if I did and didn't know it worked that way, I would find it confusing.

Thanks for the detailed information. That's a good attitude to go with: building a DAW is something of a project, so it may take a bit of fiddling and you may need to learn a thing or two about subjects you don't really care about. ? The behavior you are witnessing is not normal. You have downloaded the driver package for your Focusrite interface, and by running it, you install the driver. At that point, your system, including Cakewalk, should happily recognise that you have a Focusrite audio interface installed. This works just fine, but then you restart the computer, and the computer behaves as if the driver had never been installed. That's what the trouble is, and what we need to solve. I can only take educated guesses as to why this happens. My first two: your system may have anti-malware software that detects installation of drivers and removes them at next system restart, or your Windows user account may not have sufficient privileges when running the installer. These are the most common causes I've seen for this problem. To check for the first, you can look in the system tray in the lower right corner where your clock and sound icon and all that other stuff is. There might be a "^" icon as well that you can click on to see more system tray programs. One of the icons down there may be for an anti-malware program that you can temporarily disable while you install the driver. As for the second, you can try running the installer with elevated Administrator privileges. To do this, right click on the .EXE file in your download folder and select Properties. In the resulting page, you may see a notice down at the bottom that says "Security: This file came from another computer...." etc. with a checkbox marked Unblock. If so, check that box to unblock it and then click OK. Then right-click on the .EXE again and select Run as Administrator. Try these and see if they help. You don't have to try them in the order I suggest. If you don't find an anti-malware program, go ahead and try the elevated privilege thing anyway.

Ohhhh. Maybe I got that wrong. Well, maybe not. I did get into trouble a few times with having more than one project open and "mixing" the wrong one! I tried to figure out how Efrem might have possibly been seeing "multiple mixers" and that was all I could think of. I also agree that at first having those duplicate channel strips off to the left of the Track View was confusing, and it made things seem cluttered. All I really use it for now is advanced MIDI stuff like the arpeggiator. The rest of the time it stays collapsed. That is an unfortunate issue with the default layout of Cakewalk: when I first opened it, it looked "busy" and cluttered. Then I figured out what I could leave collapsed most of the time and I run with a much cleaner view now. But if you give new users a "clean" layout they will not know that all these features exist. The Inspector isn't a bad thing, as long as you know that you can keep it closed most of the time. It's handy when you have a 15" screen laptop and you want to use ProChannel.

I try to be sympathetic, and I am far, far from a "pro" user. I only started using Cakewalk by BandLab in April 2018. One scenario I dislike myself and try to avoid is being a Feature Request Apologist, where someone makes a good feature request and I respond with some convoluted workaround. I at least try to acknowledge that it's a reasonable feature request and that what I'm suggesting is a way to soldier through for now, not a way of saying that their request is unnecessary. ? It's often hard not to do that with Cakewalk because it's such a deep program and there are many ways to do things. I this case, however, I lost my cool, because the gentleman in question seemed to go out of his way to self-sabotage by trying to "fix" things, copying what he thought were installation files from various locations on one computer to other places and running them. Then when this resulted in a damaged installation, he responded to it with multiple suggestions that the current licensing and authentication model be "substituted" with pop-up ads at start time as some kind of trade-off. I ignored the first couple but he kept at it. Is the idea that we're somehow paying for the program in Annoyance, and rather than paying in one lump sum, it would be better to pay it off in small amounts over a long period of time? I don't know. I'm unclear on the concept. Unfortunately, BandLab support, which is where the issue should end, has been unable to undo this specific user's mess, but in the meantime, I maintain that the answer to the occasional authorization failure is not to "replace" authorization with pop-up notifications at start time. They do not serve the same or even a similar purpose. If users who experience authorization failures contact support, best case scenario is that the mechanism can be made more robust if it needs to be. If support knows there are issues and what they are, development will be informed. I'm one of the lucky vast majority who's never had a problem, but I can see where it would be really bad news if it happened at the wrong time. I have noticed from watching the forum that it seems to only happen at install time, not for Cakewalk installations that have already successfully authenticated, so there doesn't appear to be much danger of demo mode happening during a critical session.

Um, no, there are no new users to Sonar, and certainly none are hoped for. The product is dead and gone. Just because some users decide to do the computer equivalent of tying their shoelaces together and going out running instead of just following instructions and letting the installer program do its job doesn't mean that the free subscription licensing model is a bad idea. It just means that there's no such thing as "idiot-proof." Also, the fact that someone else decided that he needed to outsmart the installation program and hunt down setup files on one of his computers and copy them around to his different systems and then run them and thereby hosed everything up instead of simply getting in touch with support when he had an issue doesn't divert me from making music at all. If they wanted to, they could have popups on startup now. There is no "trade" in removing registration and activation because for more than 99 users in 100, the current way of handling it works smoothly. Infrequently, as with all computer programs, there is a glitch, and as long as the user doesn't make things worse, BandLab's support staff is able to straighten it out. BandLab doesn't make direct money from registration now, all it lets them do is track how many copies are installed and in use. People that moan about demo mode?? Really? You had to contact support to get your freeware DAW out of "demo mode," and because of that, you want the company who issues it to change the way they do their licensing activation so that you nor anyone else need ever, ever have to re-live the horror of that experience. My gawd, the inconvenience of it all!

When you attempt to run Cakewalk you get that red popup? If you have installed the latest version of BandLab Assistant and still have the same issue, and you have searched this site for "demo mode" and found no solutions, the only thing left to do is contact BandLab Support.