Starship Krupa

I started with a Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 license given to me by a friend and upgraded it to the first and then second versions of SONAR. Stopped there, then when I got back into recording in 2013 or so, went with Mixcraft. Then back into the fold with CbB. While researching exactly what version I started with, I found that some madman has made a (so far) 14-chapter YouTube series on Pro Audio 9.

I'll guess that you waited one or two then. ? I jumped right in with the first BandLab release, which I guess was what would have been the last Gibson release, had they released it. It was kinda....I could see what the complaints were about regarding stability. Freezes, crashes, and most often, the playback engine stalling out not only under load, but in response to odd things like moving the playback loop markers or tracks or clips around. Noel and the gang put a stop to those shenanigans pretty quickly, which I took as a positive sign for the future of the product.

I remember this coming up on the forum a while back, confirmed the behavior: if you have either the Multidock or any other Cakewalk child window on monitor 2, plug-in windows will get hidden behind it when it is in focus. Whatever logic keeps plug-in UI's on top of the main window when it is in focus is broken for child windows. Needs to be fixed.

A couple of bits of advice for getting your feet wet with comping in Cakewalk. There are different modes of doing it. Speed Comping is (I think) unique to Cakewalk and is awesome for straightforward comping tasks like different takes of a single instrument/vocal. It takes some time to get used to how it works, some hitting the documentation and Reference Guide, maybe a YouTube vid or two. For more complex things that include big edits, like copying entire choruses and multi-mic'd drums and pasting them around, I prefer to work in Manual Comping mode. That's the more traditional one, common to most DAW's. You might want to start with just one of them and then explore the other at your leisure. IMO, Manual is more intuitive, Speed is of course faster. Like wayyyy faster once you get a handle on it. Speed can also be simpler just because it does so much for you. But if you're like me, you'll put a shiny spot on your Ctrl-Z keys while learning it. I find that when working in Manual mode, it's often easier to switch off the Comp tool in the Smart Tool's options, and make good use of the Edit Tool rather than trying to get the Smart Tool to do everything. The Smart Tool is great because you don't have to explicitly switch it for things like moving and copying, but with great versatility can come a greater possibility of unintended consequences.

Eugene Blanchard has a nice collection of YouTube tutorials. Jason R. has a series of 5 vocal and voice oriented videos. Just in this topic, there are 16 Cakewalk by Bandlab-centric video series on YouTube. I know there are more out there, and that doesn't even take into account the plentiful older pre-Bandlab SONAR content. Way to go Cakewalk users!

The logic of it must be....interesting. I would think that it would work like "there's MIDI data in this track, let's display it" rather than depending on something happening during the initial recording process. I should check Event Viewer and see what's in there. I whaled on it some more while watching House M.D. on my second monitor for diagnostic inspiration. So far, I can only get it to misbehave if the data is the first thing recorded (if I first enter things in the PRV it works fine), and so far with one particular instrument, Meldway Grand in MSoundFactory. Meldway Grand is a 60GB library, so maybe there's something about memory going on. I'd upload the template, but it requires owning at least MSoundFactoryLE with Meldway Grand installed. Just an odd glitch, I think, and not one that many are likely to stumble upon.

And thanks to you, Colin, for starting TYLIP and continuing to update it.

The amazing invisible MIDI track: it plays back but you can't see the data in it. Therefore can't perform any editing tasks.... I got a piano chord change in my head, so loaded up my basic "piano song" template, set the tempo, record armed the MIDI track (not the synth track) set the record mode to Step, played a two-handed chord and.... Heard the chord sound, but didn't see the expected notez appear in the track. Stopped and hit play. Hmm. Expected chord makes sound. Opened Piano Roll. Nothing. Opened the take lane. Nothing. Set Now Time to start of measure 2, re-arm, strike chord #2. Sound again, no visual data. Play it back, sounds fine again. Same deal. Nothing in the lanes, nothing in PRV. Closed project. Opened new project, tried again, and hey! Everything works as expected. Just posting this to share the wonder, and in case anyone else ever sees something like it.

Good work on finding the culprit! In my observation, after about 5-6 years, heatsink paste can start to lose its effectiveness, and of course we don't know that it was 100% perfectly applied in the first place. It's also possible, especially in portables, for the mechanism that holds the heatsink in place to get knocked around, maybe compromise the thermal bond a bit. Whatever, if you have your tech replace the paste and then check the temps, I'm guessing they will be fine. Actually, you'll likely get a peppier system overall because it won't be constantly running at the hairy edge of thermal shutdown. BIOSes are supposed to throttle processor performance when they get too hot. The farther you keep them from temperatures that will trigger throttling the better. My favorite monitoring tool is HWINFO. Its "sensors" view is very similar to HWMonitor, but it also has another view with very detailed system specifications, like it can tell you the manufacture date of individual RAM sticks, remaining battery health, remaining SSD life, and on and on. To see what Windows has to say about these events (if anything), look at Event Viewer, just type that phrase into Windows' search bar and it should pop up. Run it, and you'll find what you're looking for under Windows Logs/System, if the OS is able to trap anything. It may be that your laptop is dropping so fast that the OS is taken by surprise.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the goal, rather than using automation to put together a single performance from different takes, you might try using Cakewalk's comping features. You cut the different takes into clips and then stitch the clips together to form one performance. You can move the clips around, copy them, adjust their levels individually, etc. Then once you have them arranged as you wish, you can select the individual clips you want and bounce them to one big clip (with a right click).

Happy Chrimble to all from Alameda, California, USA.

Whoa. This just got me to finally download it and try it. These instruments sound REALLY good. I'm playing with Layers, which is orchestra sections. Now I'm really interested in looking into Cakewalk's Articulation Maps....

Soundpaint is my current fave in this category.

Essential, IMO. One of my Desert Island FX.

Bandlab have owned the Cakewalk/SONAR program longer than either Gibson or Roland.

Not sure I understand the question. TTS-1 is already multitimbral and we can already layer its sounds. Are you saying that for instance you would like to be able to set the MIDI channel of each TTS-1 voice to any channel we want so that we could send it notes on MIDI channel 1 and play both piano and organ (or whatever) at the same time? That's probably too easily done by just duplicating the MIDI tracks and setting them to different channels. Therefore not much incentive. If I'm not getting what you want to do, please fill me in.

Hmm. I'll take a crack at distilling/translating this. "I feel that buying a Nektar 61 (keyboard controller) and Volca Sample 2 (hardware digital sampler/sequencer) won't be as good as inputting notes from a keyboard into Cakewalk to trigger samples and sampled instruments. How do I configure Cakewalk so that I can layer multiple instruments, either by overdubbing or using imported patterns." Only an educated guess based on context.... Since it would probably be helpful in Edward's case, I think YouTube offers captioning in multiple languages? Try this:

In my experience, Kontakt Player seems to be more sensitive to wanting the MIDI track that's driving it set to output on channel 1. Sometimes I have to sacrifice a chicken or two to get it to either start making sound or start making sounds again after it mysteriously stops, and setting the MIDI track to channel 1 is the first chicken I sacrifice. Make sure the input to the MIDI track is set to your keyboard controller or interface's output, channel 1. Then make sure it's output is set to Kontakt channel 1. Sometimes I have to go back to the coop and create a whole new MIDI and synth track and copy the data from the old MIDI track. I don't know why this happens and why what I do makes it work again, it just does sometimes. It's like having an old car where you have to tap the accelerator a couple of times before it will start, then skip first gear because otherwise it will stall out. Then be sure not to turn off the wipers before you turn off the defroster. It makes no sense, but I need it to work more than I need it to make sense. It probably has something to do with how wonderfully versatile and powerful Kontakt is. But sometimes with great power comes great "I have no idea how the %@*& to get this thing to work." So, to the OP, try setting the MIDI input and output channels to 1, even though it shouldn't make any difference. The channel setting may not even be the "problem," but if setting it fixes it, who cares? (if holding the chicken in your right hand, shake it in a counterclockwise direction)

There's no reason to be running SONAR X3 these days. Install Cakewalk by BandLab. Leave SONAR X3 in place. You'll be running a much better DAW and have access to all of the FX and instruments that came with X3. If Auto Tune Evo still doesn't work, Cakewalk is currently supported. You can get help here on the forum and from BandLab's support staff.

This is definitely not how it's supposed to work. The Surround preferences don't mean anything here. You have left and right, and that's it. What's better to check is Audio/Devices/Driver Settings/Playback and Recording. Do you see the appropriate devices? Do you have it set to WASAPI (assuming that your DAC doesn't have its own ASIO driver)? What are you showing in your Hardware Outputs strips?

Um....yeah, no, not going to be anyone's priority to make the software able to create files in a format that almost nobody can record or play back. I mean....is this a joke?

I understand being on a budget, but you didn't mention any. Based on the prices I see, you'd probably have to spend about $30-$40 to get not really enough RAM on a not really fast enough computer with a spinning drive. Add another $40 for an SSD and you're up to $70 to end up with a system with specs from 12 years ago. Whatever you're trying to cook up with such old parts, how about a very capable, built like a tank system for just over $200 instead? Refurbished Dell Optiplex, i7-6700 (which is, BTW, the processor in my main DAW is an i7-6700), https://www.amazon.com/Dell-OptiPlex-7040-Bit-Multi-Language-Supports/dp/B07GNDFSB8/ Free delivery with Amazon Prime, plug it in and go. You'd be able to throw anything at that system. Video rendering, orchestral VST's, anything. It would be a real pleasure to use for slightly more peanuts than you'd spend on the pain in the a55 system.

See my quiz on "desert island" FX. I wrote out my list, then looked at it, all 15 of them, and asked myself why I have 20X that many. Yeah, some of those are one-of-a-kind sound design-y things from the likes of Glitchmachines, Freakshow Industries, and Unfiltered Audio, but the list in my "compressors" category is huge.