Starship Krupa

?‍♀️ So far we have the Waves plug-in recommendation, an assumption that someone with the handle "girldairy" is male, the "time travel" solution (where you go back and re-record everything, except better).... Also an Amish rakefight on the topic of normalization and, something that baffles me no end, multiple recommendations to purchase commercial FX whose functions are duplicated by plug-ins that ship with Cakewalk. Like having a pizza delivered to the free all-you-can-eat buffet. Boost11 anyone? Sonitus MultibandFX? Both quite good, both quite capable of serious enloudening, depending on the source material. As the saying goes, if you can't get it done with these, buying "better" ones will be of little help. How about some of those mastering FX chain presets? For basic "loud," they can get pretty close to Ozone Elements, IMO, at least enough to help out a frustrated newbie. We even have an ultra-simple one-knob thing called MAX. Turn MAX clockwise, MAX makes your track LOUDER. English does not seem to be girldairy's primary language, but they are savvy enough to have tried Audacity as well as "Sonar." It looks like they tried to get their audio to sound louder by increasing its gain, but ran up against digital clipping (the song just "cracked"). No, a change in level won't increase the perception of loudness, that probably calls for the services of dynamic range and EQ processors. A multiband compressor, limiter, and EQ have been mentioned in this thread. We have an excellent multiband compressor, limiter, and parametric EQ at our disposal in CbB, and a nice handful of presets for them that are designed for just this task. It is not rocket science to get "one acoustic track" to sound LOUD, without taking classes or spending money or understanding new psychoacoustic principles: 1. Load track into Cakewalk. 2. Apply Cakewalk FX presets (or MAX) until sufficient LOUDness occurs. If 2. fails, report back to forum. We may need to tell you how to either normalize or apply the Gain knob to your track to give the FX more level to chew on.

I shall raise the jocular pedantry stakes and say that he indeed does still need it, only now he is fortunate enough to have it. As are all users of Cakewalk!

Tip for those who want to have their newly downloaded Cakewalk Reference Guide but a menu click away: I added a link to the Utilities menu in my installation that launches the Guide using @scook's ToolsEditor utility. The utility has far more uses than just launching a PDF, but it does that without even breathing hard. To find out how to add the new Reference Guide to your Utilities Menu go here: http://forum.cakewalk.com/Adding-programs-to-the-SONAR-Utilities-Menu-a-new-tool-Updated-for-CbB-m3237117.aspx

Our own @scook created a handy utility for adding items to the Utilities menu, and I found that it works a treat for adding an entry to launch the Cakewalk Reference Guide. http://forum.cakewalk.com/Adding-programs-to-the-SONAR-Utilities-Menu-a-new-tool-Updated-for-CbB-m3237117.aspx

Groan....missed it again. I am really good at this. I check Deals as a daily ritual for months at a time, then I promise my best friend I will help her with spring cleaning her yard. After hours of pruning, brush clearing, pizza consumption, get home last night too tired to check the forum, then play catch-up on missed work. Until just now.

Man, why in the name of all that is holy can't the name of the note (or drum) appear (and no, not just over at the left on the fake piano, I mean right at where I'm looking) when I hover my cursor over the damn thing in the Piano Roll View like happens in every other damn MIDI editing program? In this one I have to guess? Button my eye, it should just be there already. Instead, it's hey, look at the grey grid with the meaningless rectangles on it! I guess I could right click and pull up a TON of information about the note....

Was that a bug at some point? 'cause that woulda pis't me off no end as well. The Groupin' o' th' Clips is part of why I'm CWAF. Fun times, just last night I recorded my drum kit with Group All Clips turned on, that's with 4 mics using my own variation of the "Recorderman" configuration for the overheads. First thing I did after saving the project was pop open the Lanes on Track 1 (Left OH), set the Now to where I wanted to chop off the thumping about at the start of the recording, left clicked to select the clip, hit "S" to split it, then clicked on the clip to the left, hit the Delete key to get rid of the chaff, then clicked up at the top of the remaining clip and dragged it to the wall. Close the Lanes, hit the spacebar to play the project and it's all trimmed, all in sync, all 4 tracks. Everything (in its right place, in its right place) grouped correctly through the splitting, deleting, and moving operations. I was one happy boy, because that's something that Mixcraft can't do. Through all that, I didn't even bother to open the Lanes on the other tracks to see how they were doing. Now were you talking about something else, or did this used to be broke back in the grim, dark Sonar days? 'cause that's at least 3 operations where I clicked on a single grouped clip and all of its groupmates followed right along, including once where grouping survived a splitting operation. As long as I don't get cute and start right clicking, which has its own rules with grouped clips, it works great (the right click stuff does too, once I figured out the logic). Also, resizing the strips in the Console view independently? I'm not sure what you mean there, but I can make both Track and Bus strips narrow and wide individually and then do them all at the same time by holding my Ctrl key. What I mean is like 2 or 3 of each can be narrow and the rest not. But if I want all of my Track strips to be narrow, I can do them all in a swoop using the Ctrl modifier, and that affects only the Track strips, not the Bus strips. There's also been some serious retooling of the stretch algorithms, they've sourced that engine from a different vendor, Elastique rather than Zplane, or vice-versa, but you can still choose which one you want to use. Maybe you could download the latest release and try some of your "killers" and see which ones of them have gone bye-bye while you've been gone. If it seemed like the old company was letting bugs and annoyances float around like turds in a punchbowl, maybe you'll find it's a new game. There's been over a year of not having to find new users to pay new license fees to keep a whole corporate division going. The promise:deliver ratio with BandLab has been very favorable in the past year. Regarding a PDF manual and offline documentation, we heard "no plans no plans no plans no plans" for a year right up until this beautiful, fully updated, downloadable PDF manual that has obviously been under construction for months just pops up with a forum announcement from the author and a permanent menu download link. CWAF! ? (I think Reaper is great too but when I try it once every 3 years or so it takes me an hour and a half to arm a track for recording. I think this means that I am not among the people who are smart enough to use Reaper and if I were to come over to a studio that was using Reaper I'd have to just tune the drum kit or something)

Yeah, that's a cool thing about the NanoKONTROL2, it has a built-in "Sonar" mode that of course works a treat with CbB. Meaning that everything is programmed except for the "Set" button under "Marker" for some reason. There are a couple of other matters that maybe Mark can help with. With Mixcraft, I had the NanoKONTROL2 set up so that its strip #8 was always set up to control the Master bus, no matter what else the other strips were assigned to. I'm wondering if I can do that again with the device set to "Sonar" mode. Is it possible to dedicate a NanoKONTROL2 strip to a CbB track, bus, or even hardware output fader?

Wow, this is just amazing. I've been meaning to ask if anyone had any special insights or tricks regarding use of the NanoKONTROL2 with Cakewalk, and here Mark is with something way beyond my imaginings. The first thing I want to be able to do, though, is just get that damned Marker/Set button to set a marker ?. Seriously, why is that the only thing that Korg just couldn't manage?

While you're waiting for help, can you provide more details, like possibly putting your system configuration in your sig like I have, or putting it in a message reply, and whether the project is audio, MIDI, or a mix of the two? In the past, I have found problems when I had many unused muted takes in lanes during the comping and editing process. Moving them to their own tracks and archiving them helps take a load off when I'm not ready to delete them.

Please tell us what operating system you are using, what size monitor, and what resolution. Also whether you have scaling turned on in the OS.

That would be @Morten Saether, the hero of the day.

I really like M-Delta Lite. With M-Delta, I don't know if I'm seeing the same effect as described. What I get looks like horizontal lines in the Control Bar background. I do get dots in other areas.

TheSteven, thanks, too for calling it the "External" Madness Sale. I don't think madness for Meldaproduction FX should be kept on the inside.

That someone is @Morten Saether, so raise a cheer for him!

This is a great idea, a most wonderful thing, thank you so much. It will be of so much help to new users who are starting with CbB and never had access to this before. Note to new users: the Reference Guide is not merely the HTML documentation in PDF form, it's a much more detailed 2,600 page book on how to use Cakewalk.

Preview pix are not showing up, not that I will let that stop me from downloading and trying out a new @Matthew White theme! Esp. one based on M-Spec 4. Just an FYI.

What RBH said. Have you tried clicking through that error message? First, it would be much easier for us to help you if you would list for us what plug-ins are missing. Due to a quirk of the forum software, screen captures stay at "preview" size when they are clicked on, so I can't read what's missing. If, as RBH says, they are audio FX, it may be fairly simple to just replace them and tweak them a bit.

At least once a week, maybe more often, I notice someone asking for help in the main forum, and mentioning that they are using Sonar Xwhatever, and I will butt in with my CWAF! routine and grill them about why they are running an old version of Sonar when Cakewalk, a big leap forward, is available to them for free. And they will reply that they're confused and unsure about the ramifications of installing CbB, sometimes of the belief that they will lose plug-ins that they are now using, need to pay licensing fees, be obligated to use BandLab's social media site, etc. (fortunately, the tinfoil hat crowd and the "I'll never forgive them for allowing people to use it for free" manger dogs seem to have found a rock to crawl under). Or someone will outright post a topic with the above concerns. The first topic in the forum right now is just such a topic. And every time, we explain the same thing to them: no, it's perfectly fine, it's free, it installs right alongside Sonar, any premium content that came with your Sonar suite will work with it, and performance, stability, and feature-wise, it blows the doors off of any version of Sonar. There are currently no sticky topics in the main Cakewalk by BandLab forum, but I think it would serve the user base well to have this one up there. "Currently running Sonar. What happens when I install Cakewalk by BandLab?" or similar.

This is a great idea, but as it does require work/maintenance from someone at BL, not sure we'd ever see it.

No it's not. It's the much-improved successor to the program that was known as Sonar that stopped development in 2017. Like Doctor Who in 2005 or the James Bond films that started with Casino Royale in 2006, it's not just the latest issue. It's been revamped and is being produced under new management under a different set of principles. Sonar is dead, long live Cakewalk. CWAF!

Yes, I just had it happen this evening. What was happening was I was setting up to record my friend playing guitar, and had recorded a little bit of him playing just to see if everything was getting through properly, then hit Ctrl-Z to delete the little bit that I had just tracked. Poof! No more Cakewalk, no error message, no hang, no freeze, just absence of Cakewalk. There it was, and the next second there was the Firefox window displaying the documentation page I had been reading when I had launched help ab out copying Quadcurve EQ settings.

I know you've been around for a while, so you know they've been working the code hard to take care of those issues. I'm relatively new and I saw vast improvements in stability and speed just in the first 6 months of the BandLab stewardship. If you're getting the same kind of crashy behavior with all those different versions on your system, have you totally exhausted configuration issues? 'cause that is a drag.

Oh man, you are in for a treat. Cakewalk by BandLab is designed to install right alongside your existing Sonar installation without interfering. As long as your system is 64-bit Windows 7 or later, you're good to go. Once you have it installed, you should be able to use any VST in CbB that you use in Sonar. The only issue that I've seen people have, and it's unusual, is that sometimes they need to go into Preferences in Cakewalk and add a folder or two to get all of them to show up. Your friend had it wrong, BTW. I didn't personally do it, but Sonar Platinum was the next revision of the product after X3, and I've not heard of anyone losing VST's in the upgrade. The old forum, which goes back at least a dozen years, is still readable at cakewalk.com. There are people here who have gone from Sonar 8.5 to CbB and are using the VST's that were included with 8.5. Give it a try, as I said, there's little risk, it drops into its own folder and doesn't mess with your Sonar installation. If you do run into any snags, there are other CWAF! people on here who will help you straighten things out, as well as the fact that Cakewalk has a support staff that answers users' support requests. And yes, I believe one of Sonar Platinum's licensing models included a monthly fee. There was also a pay once lifetime model. Neither of those has anything to do with Cakewalk by BandLab, which has a free license. The only requirements are that you create an account, which you've already done, install the BandLab Assistant, use it to install the program, and then after that you need to renew it at least once every 6 months by connecting to the internet so that the BandLab assistant can ping their licensing server, and that's it. BandLab updates Cakewalk about every 1-2 months, usually a nice feature or two and a fistful of bugfixes. It's becoming easier to transfer projects back and forth to BandLab's website.

brainworx bx_saturator and bx_subfilter and the guitar amp sims. Softube Tonelux tilt EQ, Sonnox Dynamic EQ, Antares Auto-Tune.... ....to name a few that are available in both versions.