Starship Krupa

I have multiple monitoring devices and I don't use sends. I use a dedicated "Output" bus. Everything up to and including the Master bus is probably as anyone else would do it, but then I have the output of the Master set to my Output bus. Depending on which hardware out I wish to listen to (headphones for instance), I just set the destination of the Output bus to it. The reason for doing it this way rather than just routing the Master right to it is that it allows me to use that Output bus as a volume control without disturbing anything on the Master bus. Other people might just use the faders on the hardware outs, but I don't like disturbing those either once I have them all set how I want (roughly equal to each other in volume). Perhaps it's not a one-click switchover, but I don't have a need to switch outputs that quickly.

Digital wolf tones. ? An exported WAV would be a product of offline rendering, though, which I'm positing could be different from playback in the same DAW. People try the null test; I tried the null test with Cakewalk and Mixcraft (they didn't null completely, but they weren't off by that much, either). But the null test is done on rendered files, not the output of the DAW's playback. There's nothing requiring the programmers of a DAW to use the exact same algorithms at playback time (when resources are more scarce) as they do at render time. If they were completely equivalent, why doesn't it take exactly the same time to render a track as it does to play it back? If you leave Task Manager running, you see CPU usage is way higher during render than during playback. Is it possible that something might be handled differently for the sake of less chance of dropouts during playback? I listen at a slightly lower fidelity while mixing, by my own choice. I use plug-in oversampling, but only turn it on for rendering. 20 years ago you did NOT want to let anything convert your tracks' rates up or down. The trip from 44.1 to 48 would mess things up (phase shifting, aliasing). Then at some point the algorithms got good enough at it that nobody's concerned about it any more. I've done enough testing with Resource Monitor of both Mixcraft and Cakewalk to know that on similar projects, Cakewalk does a lot more disk reads than Mixcraft during playback. As far as I could tell, Mixcraft was loading the audio files completely into memory (which would help explain their bullet-resistant playback engine) while Cakewalk was streaming them from the disk (supposedly not an expensive operation in terms of I/O).

Curious, Craig: what do you think of my hunch that while that's true for recording and rendering, it may not be true for playback? For sure about the I/O,and not just the analog components. I was gobsmacked by how much better my Presonus Studio 2|4 sounded than my Presonus Firepod, and I had to learn why. How could it be possible that two interfaces from the same company sounded so different when their published specs were so similar? I did some research and found out about how jitter degrades the listening experience. According to that paper, even a mathematically small amount of jitter can be perceptible. The Firepod was made before prosumer companies like Presonus started using DAC's with JetPLL, a technology that drastically reduced jitter. So once I learned this, it made me wonder what other less commonly understood or cited phenomena might affect the listening experience. The marketing hype around the introduction of the compact disc said that it was like the end of hi fi history, that digital audio was now a "perfect" representation. It's kinda funny how many improvements have been made to "perfection," even fairly recently. I can name three DAW's, Samplitude, Mixcraft and Ableton Live, all of which advertised that they had "improved" the sound quality of their audio engines within the past 3 or so revisions. This raised a question for me: if their engines already did the same thing as every other DAW's audio engines, how was it possible for them to "improve?" ?

Not one that I know of; this is supposed to "just work." Is this in every project or just one or in some of them. Whatever the case, the devs would probably like to see a project that exhibits this behavior. As simple as possible. Then they can study it and see what's going wrong. Have you tried a simple reinstall or "clean" reinstall?

Good shootin'. Documentation errors are getting hard to find. @Morten Saether is the person to alert about documentation/Ref. Guide issues.

It occurs to me that no wheels need be reinvented here. How does it work in other, similar, audio/video editing software? If most of them work a certain way and Cakewalk doesn't, that suggests a change might be due. We're talking "standards" here, but in addition to Windows/Microsoft standards, there are also standard behaviors among similar apps, which should probably be paid attention to. I know that developers dislike the argument that since a given feature works so handily in a competitor's product, their product should also do it the same way, but I think there's no call for it to be needlessly idiosyncratic either. Compliance/use of the Windows Clipboard can be as robust as even working between two different apps that share the same datatype (pixels, text, etc.). In your example, if it's confined to being within Cakewalk, let's posit that the user copies a section of audio or MIDI data to Cakewalk's clipboard, and then subsequently they perform half a dozen operations on the original timeline clip, then invoke Paste again. It sounds fraught with troubles, but keep in mind that assuming they made the changes to the original data using Cakewalk, Cakewalk should have no trouble handling that. After all, Cakewalk remembers what it does, doesn't it? Bets are off if the user alters an underlying audio file with Explorer or another program, but that's true for other operations as well. We must be careful when doing anything to our audio data that isn't started from inside Cakewalk itself. So let's say I select a section of a clip, Copy it, then delete the entire track. My expectation, unless I have explicitly copied to the clipboard again since the original copy, is that I will be able to continue to Paste that same section as many times as I want to into new tracks, old tracks, other simultaneously open Cakewalk projects, etc. Whether I use the Move or Split or Draw or Delete tools in between those operations shouldn't clear the clipboard. (It doesn't 100% obey that now, but it's still how I'd expect it to work) When I'm working in a pixel editor that has a Move function, I can select an area of the picture, Copy it, then select the same or another area of the picture and use the Move or Delete (or whatever) tool, and that doesn't clear the original selection from the clipboard. There's a lot of pixel editing workflow that would go right up the creek for me if that were the case. Copy some pixels, then add a layer, switch back to the first layer and delete a bunch of stuff, move some stuff using the move tool (not Cut/Paste) change the hue, then Paste the pixels I copied earlier on top of the new layer. I do that kind of thing all the time. It sounds like how Cakewalk is different is that it's treating its Move tool operations as a Cut/Paste macro, which IMO, may be the way that it is, but if so, it ain't standard. Use of the Move or Cut or Split or Draw tools should not change the contents of the clipboard. If I'm reading it correctly, it's not as if the clipboard then gets filled with the clip the user just dragged so it's not even a full Cut/Paste.

This space intentionally made blank....

I didn't know that. Please tell me some software products that have "public roadmaps" because I am really interested to see what one looks like. I've never seen a "roadmap" for a commercial software product and am very curious to add to my knowledge. These are even more things that I didn't know. Is Cakewalk behind every other DAW in features or just some of them? And in the number of users, does Cakewalk have the fewest users of all DAW's? If not, which DAW's have more and which have less? You seem to have access to so much information that I don't, and I want to learn too.

And so would the developers of every other DAW. Even though the license for Cakewalk is free, the DAW is competing with all the others. Revealing plans to the competition is uncommon in the technology field. Every new release of Cakewalk comes with lovely surprises. I'm sure the next one will be the same.

This. Also, the Skylight (Cakewalk's term for the system of various expandable and dockable panels and views) interface is a feature that rewards spending time to maximize its potential. As Noel said, the stock Advanced workspace throws it all up there, and in an opened state no less. This isn't how experienced users run it. Start with the Control Bar. I guarantee that there are modules on display that you don't need (maybe ACT and Sync, unless you're working with control surfaces and timecode). They can also be resized into larger or more compact form, and rearranged horizontally. The Browser (the long panel on the right side) and Inspector are easily closed and opened as need be ("B" key and "I" key). The Multidock (which is the panel where the Console and Piano Roll views open by default) can be opened and closed with the "D" key. If you're on a multiple monitor system, you can put the Multidock on a separate monitor, and even drag the panels from it to float on their own. Cakewalk is flexible, but with great flexibility comes many "OMG, I didn't know I could do that" moments. When @David Baay suggested I try holding shift when using the "D" key....yikes. Working on my laptop became much easier. Lastly, try some custom themes (see my sig). @Brian Walton is fond of modding his to omit what he sees as labels that experienced users don't need (maybe not great for a new user). My "Flat Dark" ones have flat Ableton/Studio One style transport buttons. An issue with custom themes for new users is that the button images and colors won't precisely match what the documentation shows.

Caveats: although I really liked the demo song, this is a standalone rather than a VSTi, and unless you donate, it pops a beg screen every 3 minutes.

If your plan is to record a handful of simultaneous audio tracks on the laptop and then bring the project back to the main (presumably tower/desktop) DAW computer, a Core 2 Quad and 8G RAM and a 7200RPM spinner from the time of the W. administration would serve the purpose of the recording laptop. Recording audio data to disk is not a computationally "expensive" task. As for I/O, whatever Focusrite or Presonus has the number of inputs you need, you can't go wrong these days. Mixing is another story. It's plug-ins that burden a DAW system. But even my 2017 i7-7600U Dell business laptop with its whopping two cores can handle some pretty complex plug-in loads without needing to freeze tracks. If you are curious about single screen vs. 2 or 3 monitor real estate management, that's where the Skylight interface really comes into its own. It scales down as well as it scales up. The D key (and shift-D) to quickly open and close the Multidock is golden.

Even then....there are so many loss-leader ROMplers. Kontakt Start, Sampletank CS, Sine Player, LABS, Soundpaint, Analog Lab V. Now that I consider it, nothing I've seen about HALion suggests it would do much for me but clutter my system further.

Wow, I gave up mixing in the track headers when I migrated from Mixcraft as my primary DAW. I love love love Cakewalk's Console View. Best I've seen on any DAW. I know of people who record on other DAW's and import their tracks to Cakewalk for mixing due to the Console. Not that it's not without its issues; as the OP hinted at, it wastes too much space that could be used for greater fader throw. The fader throw should lengthen when other elements are hidden. I'd like to see the Send bin change height as the FX bin does, and I'd like to be able to collapse both of them to, again, create more fader throw. I've started messing with the gain control more after watching @John Vere's video about it. I like the results, it makes for more flexibility and range when working the faders and automation. PT is a notorious resource hog, my suspicion is that this is due to an expectation of AVID's that their userbase don't mind opening their wallets to upgrade their hardware to accommodate its needs. Lazy coding, and the fact that the country where their development team lives is under attack by a superpower probably doesn't help. Cakewalk, on the other hand, is a free program with many users who are frugal about their computer systems. One of the developers (the one who chimed in on this topic) is known to be using an i7-3770 system in his personal studio. In the 5 years I've been using it, it's gotten even more efficient. Its codebase goes back a long way, which can be a drawback in some ways. But in regard to efficiency, if the playback and summing engines' code goes back to when a Core 2 Quad with 8G of RAM was a rocket sled, it makes sense that it will run like a bat out of hell on your i7-4770 with hyperthreading and Turbo Boost and twice the RAM. As far as sound quality, there are actually at least two things in play (so to speak). Every DAW has playback code, recording code, and rendering code. IME, the recordings and renders that come out of different DAW's are so similar as to be insignificant. Unlike many people who hold this to be true, I have actually done the experiment with recording and rendering, and while there was a small difference when null-testing, it was just a difference in amplitude and phase, nothing like you hear when you try to null a WAV file vs. an MP3. Playback engines, on the other hand....I suppose I could test it with my Saffire's loopback, but I haven't. I assume that there may be compromises to allow smooth playback for mixing. The difference in playback sound quality between Mixcraft 8 and the first release of CbB was a shock. Cakewalk sounded "smooth" and "sensuous" while Mixcraft sounded "harder" and "sharp." But at the time, CbB's engine stalled more than a 50-year-old lawnmower on similar tasks. Cakewalk has since caught up. Which one of them has more faithful representation....I dunno. As with your experience, Cakewalk seduced me, even as buggy as it was at the time (so so much better now after 5 years of nose to the grindstone bugslaughter). I put my faith in the new development team and I was right in doing so. I believe that when people speak of one DAW "sounding better" than another, there may actually be a difference in what they're hearing, but it's during playback (and mixing), not during rendering. I've auditioned enough Windows "bit-perfect" audio players to know that even they don't sound alike. Yes, I notice a difference between MusicBee and AIMP, even with both set to use the WASAPI Exclusive or ASIO driver. So go with your ears on this one. You're a mix engineer, a trained listener, so put on your best cans and focus your attention on detail and transients. Both playing back a rendered project in your favorite player (VLC is decent) and with a mixing session. Whatever your findings, you can still, say, record, edit and comp your tracks in PT (if you prefer PT's comping tools, you don't have to give them up), then bounce them to WAV's and import them to Cakewalk for mixing and rendering.

Mixcraft has some very nice features that I would like to see implemented in Cakewalk. Numero uno that I can think of is that their markers have "tails" that extend down to the bottom of the last visible track. This helps sooooo much with editing/comping. Despite this, though, Mixcraft lacks Cakewalk's more robust clip linking. Of course, Mixcraft has also had a more useful Performance Panel (in comparison to Matrix View) and those integrated sampler instruments. Still, after I got my taste of the first couple of CbB releases, Mixcraft seemed somehow incomplete. Let's hope the 10 release remedies this. I think it's a great DAW to start out with, and even continue with depending on one's needs. It follows "industry standards" well enough that the skills developed translate to other DAW's like Cakewalk and Studio One.

I'm kind of interested in this, but I didn't care for it last time I tried it. The interface seemed tiny and the license registration was this needless circular maze (weird to have to jump through so many hoops for something they were "giving away") that ended with their virtual dongle running on my computer all the time.

I think I got Animate a while back as a freebie. Haven't installed it on my newer builds. LEVELS on the other hand, is in every one of my project templates.

Also, as a note to anyone who was puzzled as to why I would sink so much time, money (not that much, actually, I had all of the other parts except for a case), and effort into a gen 6 processor especially when I built a nice i7-6700 system less than a year ago: this thing hauls a55 in comparison to that one. In Cakewalk, at first I wasn't sure whether the Performance module was working, because it wasn't displaying any activity bars. Spec advantages this system has over my last one: 10 cores instead of 4, unlocked core and cache freqs, and support for DDR4 RAM (yes, the earlier one, despite the i7-6700 supporting DDR4, can use only DDR3, I guess it was made to accommodate people who wanted to reuse their old RAM sticks). I'm not overclocking it by very much, just bumped the max turbo up to 4.2GHz. My indie adventure/puzzle games run fine on my 2 core i5 notebook, and of course Portal 2 runs great at full graphic quality on this one, even with the GTX550Ti. Looking forward to seeing the render times in Cakewalk and Vegas.

I suppose that as long as Intel introduce new sockets and chipsets before releasing all of the compatible processors, it will be an issue. This is a clever way to address it, but it's not as well-known as it should be. I found so many posts about "brand new motherboard endless power cycling" that were (surprise) only solved by getting a replacement board from the manufacturer (which of course had the latest BIOS). There are multiple LGA2011-v3 boards on eBay that are "for parts only" that I now wonder about, whether they suffered the same issue as my Gigabyte. Well, if I get the ASRock working, I'll pick the one I like best for the i7-6950X and put the i7-6800 in the other one. Maybe peddle it. This series of processors is known for being a power hog, but even under load, the 650W Corsair barely ever works hard enough to spin up its fan. Once I replace the GTX550Ti with my GT 1030 I will have a truly quiet PC. Even my current system, which has an EVGA PSU with lesser fan control, I walked into my studio space the other day and wondered if my system had powered down, which it hadn't. That's the dream of the quiet PC builder, to not even know it's on.

OMG, I've never seen anything like this. Maybe because the HD was a transfer from another system. But after Windows updated itself to its satisfaction, I looked at the "Optional Updates" to see what drivers it had, and there were 81 for all of the Intel X99 chipset drivers. That was a lot of clicking, but those drivers really soup up a system once they're installed. BTW, I'm not going to name it Sisyphus. I don't want to be reminded of the work and headscratching it took to get it functional.

Okay, believe it or not, even though I've set up a return on eBay, I haven't had a chance to box up the Gigabyte for shipping. Since I was feeling kind of bummed and frustrated about this, I was poking around to see what kind of performance gains I would even get from an i7-6950X vs. the i7 6700 system I'm running now. It'll be nice once I get it running. Many cores and greater overclockin' range are good for my uses. But along the way I stumbled across the fact that when X99-based motherboards first shipped, a lot of them didn't yet support the i7-6950X and i7-6800K that I have been trying to get work. And since they were selling to "enthusiasts" who were likely to want to upgrade to the latest, they made it really easy to update the BIOS, you can do it without having anything but a power supply and a USB stick. Aha says I, since that Gigabyte hails from the earlier days of X99, maybe it's barfing on the CPU's I've been sticking in it. Wouldn't explain the power cycling I see without the CPU installed, but what they hey, let's try it. I prepared my thumb drive and stuck it in the correct port and turned on the power and....ugh, power cycling AGAIN. But, and but, and but, I decided to just leave it on and do its thing for a while. And lo and behold, after about half a dozen power cycles, the Q-Flash LED lit up, then it started blinking, which is the sign that it's flashing, and then after a couple of minutes, solid Q-Flash LED, which means it's finished flashing! Turned it off, stuck in a CPU and the tower cooler, and tried again and....whoa, the power came on and stayed on! No video from the GT 730, and there's no onboard video of course because it's a Haswell-E. So now it seems to start up and stay that way, but no video. I left it on for a while and the CPU is even getting a little warm, I mean you can feel the Noctua tower cooler fins getting warm, but it's not full operating i7-6950X 140W heat. The Corsair PSU, bless its heart, since it's not delivering much current, it spun its fan down. Quiet. So now the issue is why no video? The card has worked in other systems. It's piddly enough that it doesn't need anything other than bus power. Its fan is spinning. The keyboard even comes up with NumLock enabled, and I can switch NumLock on and off with the key. That's always been my test for a totally hung system, and it's passing it, so WTF no video! I did find that the CMOS battery was completely stone dead, and put a new one in. Nada. If I ever do get a system working with an X99 chipset, I'm going to name the computer Sisyphus. (edit) Okay, saga over for now. I stand Geek Triumphant. I pulled the GT730 and put in my trusty GTX550Ti and....boots right inta Windas! I had forgotten that the 500G C: drive had been in my notebook briefly. Yes, the computer is running and I could be typing this on it if it weren't in the middle of the Microsoft Update Dance. Now to try the same trick on the ASRock....

For me, the C:=OS and programs and D:=plug-ins and most data is about logistics rather than performance. IME, if a drive is going to get corrupt, it's usually the system drive. Makes sense, it's pretty much constantly in action with Windows 10/11. So I split the points of failure. C: drive gets boogered to the point where I have to reformat or replace it, well, at least my data and plug-ins and libraries are still in place and mostly I won't need to reinstall them. According to Jim Roseberry (who should know), streaming multiple audio files simultaneously doesn't tax even a 7200 RPM spinner very much. The drive isn't the bottleneck for that, so projects can go on a slower drive. My C: drives are all NVMe PCIe, while my other drives are either SATA SSD's or rusty spinners. Anything I want to load as fast as possible, like OS startup and programs, goes on the fastest drive. Nothing else even matters as far as perceptible difference in speed. And on my laptop, I have a single 1TB NVMe, so not even a hard and fast rule.

You are obviously wise in matters of etiquette in electronic discourse. This is an opportunity for education. Can you give me an example of an approach that would be appropriate? For future reference?

Yes I can. It's part of how I learn. Apologies. I was not calling you a "son of a gun." Heavens no. That expression is used for astonishment in American slang. It's short for "Well, I'll be a son of a gun." It's like, "well, I'll be damned," or "well, I'll be a monkey's uncle." I was astonished to learn what you had said. Meaning, if what the person speaking says is not true, then they will declare themselves as a "son of a gun." I am not a son of a gun, neither of my parents are firearms, and, as you said, you can double-click on the separator lines to open the Browser and Multidock. I should remember to take care with ambiguous American slang when conversing with non-native English speakers in this international forum.

Well, son of a gun, you can double click on the thin splitter line and open and close the Browser and Multidock, but not Inspector. I never even tried that. Kind of a skinny target, but it does at least open and close the pane. My feature request stands: expand the functionality to include the borders as well, and include the Inspector in the fun.