Paul DeRocco

These are Sysex events recorded from an instrument, which uses a Sysex containing program data followed by an NRPN to load that data into a particular channel for playing. It sends this in lieu of a program change if you start a recording (signaled by MIDI Start) with a program that has been edited but not saved. The idea is that on playback, you get the correct modified version of the program, rather than the stored version. These messages come out of the instrument correctly, and they're recorded correctly, but just not played back correctly. I don't see any reason why storing the Sysex into a "sysex bank", and then putting that into the event list, would behave any differently, since it's still a non-channelized thing that is apparently handled as part of a separate stream from the channelized messages. My solution is simply not to use that feature of the instrument, and always start with an unedited program. So that's not really a problem for me, but it does expose something that is wrong with the program, which should be fixed. Is there an official bug tracker that people can post to, or can we only use the forum, and hope someone from BandLab notices it?

I'm doing MIDI sequencing with the latest Cakewalk. It doesn't appear to understand the semantics of CC84 Portamento Control, or CC88 High Resolution Velocity. Both of these are prefixes to the following Note On, and have been documented in the MIDI 1.0 spec for years. If they are present on a track, and I adjust the start time of the Note On, the prefixes are not moved, even if they were on the same tick as the Note On. They should be. By the way, it also doesn't understand the semantics of control change LSBs, except for CC32 and CC38.

I'm doing MIDI sequencing with the current Cakewalk. I have a track that begins with a SysxData event followed by a bunch of Control events for initialization. The other tracks just have Control events at the beginning. I'm looking at the actual MIDI going out the wire. I'm not entirely surprised to see that events on the same tick from different tracks are interleaved randomly. And I'm happy to report that the controls go out in order on each track. But I'm also seeing that the block of sysex is sometimes sent out later, after all the other controls in that same track. This makes no sense. It's behaving as though sysex is sent via some separate thread. Some argument can be made that the order of things on the same tick in different tracks should be undefined, but on the same track? Frankly, I think events on the same tick in different tracks should be done in track order, so that all events on a track that are on the same tick are always sent contiguously. But that's a secondary issue. Having events completely out of order is bogus.

It is checked, and it does work correctly in some tracks. I added another track, which has a solid horizontal line in the volume automation lane like the working tracks, and it's exhibiting the bad behavior. I can't see any difference between the working and failing tracks in the Event List for those tracks. This seems like a bug, but I can't figure out how to make it fail, let alone make it work.

Well that's strange. I have another track that begins with a Shape event, where the Data column says 0.80-0.80, the next column says Linear, and the time is way past the end of the song, and MIDI volume control changes work fine in that track, even when moving the Now time around. I drew a similar horizontal line with a value of 101 in the automation lane in the malfunctioning track, and now it is working correctly. What is the relation of the Volume automation lane and explicit MIDI volume control change events? And what's the difference between a solid line in the automation lane and a dotted line? This is very confusing.

In the latest Cakewalk, I have some volume control changes in a MIDI track which play fine. If I set the Now time somewhere in the middle of the song and start playing, though, it sets the volume to some default value, rather than looking backward for the last volume event, as the manual claims it does, or even just using the volume that was in effect when I stopped. There is no volume automation in the track's event list. Can anyone suggest what may be causing this to use the wrong value?

It doesn't pay attention to PRV snap, only global. 10ms is okay for the controls, but not for note timing, so I just have to remember to turn it on only while I'm drawing the controls. Thanks for the pointer.

Yes, I used pause as an alternative, but sometimes that's not appropriate because it, well, pauses. But I managed to use it to find my bug. Thanks.

It used to be the status bar, but apparently the current Cakewalk has no status bar. I don't see messages from my CAL file appearing anywhere, but its a huge screen with lots of tiny widgets all over it, so I could be missing it.

The PRV snap value doesn't seem to have any effect, and would be too coarse anyway. It appears that Cakewalk limits the control rate to the tick rate, so a very steep change skips a lot of values but generates output on every tick. So at 120bpm I could attain a 192Hz limit if I reduce the ticks per quarter note to 96, but I think that's too coarse. I think I want the timing of percussive events to be more accurate than the spacing between controls. I'm now trying to solve it with a thinning .cal file of my own.

I'm using the current Cakewalk. When I draw in the controller pane of the piano roll view, it seems to generate every single 7-bit value for the control, sometimes even generating duplicates, even if that translates into thousands of messages per second. This is insane. How do I limit the rate to something reasonable, like 200Hz? The few provided thin*.cal utilities are too stupid, since they're not based on time. Is there a setting for this somewhere?

Excellent! And the setting made in the PRV also applies to the Notes track view. Thanks.

When I select MIDI notes in the Notes track view, or in the Piano Roll view, I can easily select specific notes while leaving out others. But even as I'm being choosy about which notes to select, it always selects Sustain footswitch controls that begin within the time range of the notes I've selected. (It may do this for all controls--I'm only using Sustain.) How do I select only the notes, so that I can cut them and paste them into a different track, without cutting and pasting the controls, too?