Starship Krupa

Sonar isn't a pre-press program, I doubt that it speaks CMYK. The Theme Editor of olde used hex RGB codes.

It's sweet of you to be concerned about my/our possible feelings of disappointment.❤ However, from my perspective, the color options we have access to now are next to none. The screen elements that we can still control are so minimal that I don't know why they were left in at all. Maybe so that the existing custom color Preferences page wouldn't seem completely broken? Unless there are people whose workflow depends on being able to set a bunch of the more obscure automation controls just the right color. So whatever happens, whenever it happens, we'll be going from nothing to something. We can already tell from the differences between the current factory color schemes which colors can be adjusted. Nobody can claim that, for instance, the color of the Browser text is hard coded, or the color of the Control Bar buttons, the color of the clip pane backgrounds, grid lines, PRV background, etc. Unless the palette has been constrained to 50 shades of grey, but even then, being able to have more contrast would be an improvement. I'd be disappointed if there were screen elements that were limited to shades of grey and not colors, but since you've already expressed concern about our disappointment, I hope that at least you'd be there to console us in that event.🥰 The UI is already flat, and I like it like that. As long as button color is now set by changing a value rather than by loading an image, I'm fine with no access to images at all. So far, the people who have spoken up seem to care mostly about legibility, which is all down to color changes and text size. I don't think we'd ever see access to text size customization, so give us access to color settings, as many as possible, please. I hereby pledge to be relentless if not given access to the color settings that I need to make the program more usable.

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of PreSonus' Studio One forum? I pop in from time to time at Cakewalk's Reddit sub. It pretty much illustrates daily why permanent forums are superior. If you think the same questions are asked over and over on the forum, well you ain't seen nothin' like a Reddit sub that's trying to fulfill the role of a forum. No topics, no browsable sub fora, just information that scrolls away.

Posted on both the official Reddit sub and Discord server. There's a bunch of other stuff, but it all sounded like the grownups on the Peanuts specials until I read this: "We’re introducing expanded color customization and theming controls to give you more flexibility in how the DAW looks and feels." The "T" word! They used the "T" word. They don't say when these customization options will arrive, but they've promised in public that we're going to get something.

From the official Cakewalk Reddit sub and Discord server: "We’re introducing expanded color customization and theming controls to give you more flexibility in how the DAW looks and feels." Let the celebration begin!

The good news is that with the new vector UI, it may be easier to allow text sizes to be adjusted. The bad news, of course, is that so far, we can't even adjust colors. Marker text, Aim Assist text, and ruler digits are all things that I've thought were way too small from the beginning. There's plenty of room for larger fonts. Why not use more of it? I've been able to make Sonar's text more legible by setting its own native scaling higher. You access this in the program via Preferences/Display. There's a slider down toward the bottom. Doing that has other drawbacks such as the UI gets more crowded and you lose real estate. But it's at least something to try. It also suggests that the text might be scalable independent from the rest of the UI, which would be wonderful.

Assuming the drum instrument I'm using has individual outs, I've never thought of doing it another way. Maybe this is because I recorded and mixed acoustic drum kits before I worked with virtual drum kits? It wasn't until several years* into working with my DAW that it occurred to me that I could use a drum map to allow a single MIDI file to drive half a dozen different synths. I had been puzzled about the many one hit drum sounds in the soundpacks and other factory sounds for my A|A|S synths. I didn't understand how people were using them, were they sampling them into a phrase sampler? Making 6 different drum tracks, each with its own MIDI? Seemed much easier to just use a Kontakt-based drum machine, or some other one that supports individual outs. Then it occurred to me that a drum map might allow me to put half a dozen instances of A|A|S Player in the project and call up the soundpack one hits in each of them. And it worked. Never thought about what might happen if I tried freezing them, though. *(Sonar's drum map feature took me literally years to get my head around because the Cakelanders and I were speaking different languages. Before CbB, a "drum map" was something I applied to get the kit piece names to show up on the left edge of my Piano Roll. Therefore, using one centered around the piano roll. I was slightly aware that you could do other things with them, but that was the primary use. In Cakelandia, however, a "drum map" is a tool for routing MIDI notes to notes in your drum (or other) instruments. Therefore, it's in the category of MIDI track outputs. It also allows you to display the kit piece names on the left edge of the piano roll, but if you just want that, 95% of the user base either uses instrument definitions or just memorizes which piano key goes with which sound. Using a drum map just to display kit piece names? Yikes.)

No. It didn't, for anyone who paid attention to the notices. Cakewalk by BandLab and Sonar Free Tier have overlapped for weeks. Install them both side by side, ensure that everything works in Sonar, and proceed with no interruption. That's what most users did. It's no more "worthless" today than it was a year ago. Sonar Free Tier is able to use the vast assortment of Cakewalk and 3rd-party plug-ins that came with SONAR Platinum. All of those licenses are still valid. The core program, SONAR, Cakewalk by BandLab, and now Sonar, has changed, but still uses the same project format that Cakewalk by BandLab did. For that matter, SONAR Platinum should still work as well as it did when you bought the lifetime license. It seems that you experienced a bug with the installation of Sonar that somehow broke your ProChannel presets, that's unfortunate, but it's neither by design nor is it common. Contact Cakewalk/BandLab support about the issue, if you haven't already. Installing Sonar definitely should NOT break anything about an existing SONAR installation. Do the presets buttons work in Sonar?

The ProChannel Quadcurve EQ that the user sees when they open the large view of the EQ is a really nice EQ. So nice that I often set aside my policy to avoid DAW-locked plug-ins and use it anyway. I'd like to be able to use the expanded version of it in Sonar's FX bin. It's so much better than the Sonitus/Core EQ.

I don't know if there's some catch here, but this price seems insane: Blue Blackout Spark SL I picked up the Blue Bluebird last year when it was on deep discount at Amazon and couldn't be happier with it. I'm getting it, I think I'd regret it for a long time if I didn't. Heck, get a pair of them for your drum overheads. If you'd like an alternative to the workhorse AT2020, this is it. Here's a comparison video of the various Blue SL mics:

If they don't come through for whatever reason(s), it could possibly be put on other parties'. There are some great 3rd-party customization tools for CbB. It's too bad that the hardcore customization gurus seem to have moved on (probably to Re: Purr).

You mean clips' note color, right? Because unless I'm misunderstanding, PRV currently uses the tracks' foreground color for a track's notes. Doesn't it? I change my colors up all the time, both clip background and track foreground. I'd be very sad if I couldn't set clip background colors for PRV. As far as clip (not track) foreground....I wouldn't use that, but I can understand why some might want it.

It was called to my attention that CbB's Theme Editor was originally created by end users who reverse engineered SONAR's resource files and figured out what images and color settings were stored there and how to alter them. It wasn't a product of Cakewalk until Cakewalk bought it from the end user who had published it. If some intrepid user(s) could figure out where/how Sonar is setting/storing its color settings, it might be possible to do something similar for Sonar. A Sonar Color Editor would be much simpler, because it wouldn't have to deal with images, just be able to read the color settings and change them. My (current) abilities in this department aren't suggesting where the color choices might be kept. It wouldn't be in the EXE or DLL files, because I don't think you'd want to be rewriting those whenever the user changes color schemes. The first big question is where does Sonar keep its color schemes? When Sonar switches color schemes, are the factory schemes stored in one of the executables and your selection of which one of them to use is written to the registry or wherever? That would be my first guess.

The colors I most need to be able to set are: Measure and beat grid lines. Clip pane background (goes with the above) Text (in as many areas as possible) Aim Assist line Button image (esp. note values in PRV) Button background (goes with the above) Browser text (incl. Notes) Browser background These are all colors that vary between the various factory schemes, so I know it's possible to change them. In the case of the grid lines, Aim Assist Line, and (I think) Clip Pane Background, those colors could be changed using the existing Customization/Colors dialog. The dialog is still there, but those settings have been removed. Please add them back.

Right, after all these years, Sonar still doesn't include a pad/phrase sampler. XSampler was ported from Next, but that was a year ago and XPadSampler is still nowhere in sight. Sonar now includes a "sampler," but it's not the type we were asking for all that time. When XSampler was introduced, I thought that the pad/phrase version would be following shortly, but no. It was a HUGE feature request for a long time. You and I were two of the users who were noisiest about it and I'm glad to see you checking in on it. Yeah, been requesting this since Cakewalk by BandLab first came out. Even Pro Tools has added a fully-featured clip launcher since then. Matrix is a feature that has always looked to me like it was about 3/4 implemented and then abandoned. I agree with all of the suggestions to add the functions that BandLab has to Sonar. Sonar is presented in BandLab's collection of DAW's as the endpoint, where you can start with the web or mobile BandLab DAW, move to Next, and then when you're finally ready, Sonar. The problem with that is that Sonar lacks multiple features that even the mobile DAW includes. To move from the mobile version to Next to Sonar only works if you're willing to give up a phrase sampler, pitch correction, chords and scales, the virtual instruments, and stem separation. As for using multiple EQ's in ProChannel, that would be very nice. Especially since the excellent Quadcurve EQ can't be used in the standard FX bins. Which is another feature request that occurs to me.....

Wow, huh, very interesting. My guess was that it was an in-house tool which was then released to the general population. If Cakewalk used it to create Tungsten, then I was sort of correct, except that it wasn't originally created by them. Was Tungsten something that Cakewalk created using Theme Editor? IIRC, there's nothing to Tungsten that couldn't have been done using Theme Editor. It would explain the botched MIDI Inspector strip image that I noticed and reported. I notice that TTSRES.DLL is still around.

So far we have 5 different ways to do it. I think Bass and Gregy are tied for the fastest ways. My Aux track thing requires a realtime playthrough.

I will say that although TDK-SA sounded the best on my Akai deck, Maxell always kicked their booty as far as the transport design and construction. The Ampex Grand Master also seemed to be lacking in that department.

If you want to see what colors can be changed, compare the factory stock color schemes to each other. They have different colors for buttons, Clip Pane backgrounds, grid lines, and more. Theoretically, if users are given access to those colors, we can set them to whatever we wish.

User @Maria P started a topic calling for color customization. It's near the top. Just reply to it and say "hear hear" or whatever.😄

The biggest one for me is that they dropped the font size of most of the text by a couple of points. Cranking Sonar's internal scaling up gets the text size back up, but it also reduces available real estate. Everything else gets bigger along with it. I don't know why the devs chose to do this, the spaces where that text sits didn't shrink, so it wasn't that. After that of course is the grey-on-grey palette....as soon as I figured out I could use Theme Editor and custom colors to make most of CbB's UI an easy on the eyes color on a jet black background, I was off to the races. Grey-on-grey isn't just boring, it's harder to read.

Ah Sonar. So versatile that 3 different users can each have our own way of accomplishing the same task. When I want to do this I make an Aux track with the audio output of the Synth track routed to it. Really, all of these solutions work. Choose the one that vibes with ya.

Cakewalk Next can't open CbB project files directly. Are you sure you want to transition to Cakewalk Next? The successor to Cakewalk by BandLab is Cakewalk Sonar. It has all of the features of Cakewalk by BandLab, opens CbB projects just fine. It looks very much like CbB and has the same workflow. Cakewalk Next is a separate DAW program.

Are you sure you tried the right program? Cakewalk by BandLab evolved into Cakewalk Sonar. Cakewalk Sonar keeps (almost) all of the features that Cakewalk by BandLab had and adds some new ones. It definitely has Synth Rack and supports WASAPI. Cakewalk Next is an entirely separate DAW, designed for a more stripped down workflow.

So Theme Editor started out as a 3rd party application? I always thought that it was an in-house tool that was polished up for end user use. It could be both, I suppose. Still, I thought it was something the bakers of the day came up with.