bitflipper

I've been thinking about how to dispose of my musical stuff when I die. It would be quite the treasure trove to the right person, but my family wouldn't know what was valuable and what wasn't, or in some cases even what to call it in a Craigslist ad. The last time I gifted a family member some gear, it went straight to the pawn shop.

I've just returned from what will undoubtedly by my last visit with a longtime friend, business partner and musical collaborator. He's in hospice and seriously sedated, so there was no conversation, just an eye blink to let me know he recognized me. I've known this guy since 1975, when he was my booking agent. In 1993 we started a software company that's still going, even if my heart's not really in it anymore. That enterprise bought my house, so I'll always be grateful that he came up with the initial idea. I've spent the last three nights sitting around the dining table with his wife and daughter, telling stories. The dude was a player back in the day, but I was careful to include only tales suitable for a mixed audience. I was delighted that all of my stories were new to them. We did have some adventures. Then his wife led me to the garage and begged me to identify all the stuff he had in there. A lifetime of never throwing anything away has resulted an incredible collection of musical instruments and electronics, some valuable, some not. Thousands of dollars' worth of lighting and video editing gear. I suggested Craigslist, since they live in a small town out on the coast and it's unlikely she'd find a buyer there who could appreciate such treasure. But I did bring home five microphones with me, four of which are Beyerdynamic ribbons, two of them a rare matched pair. The fifth one I've yet to identify. It looks like an SM-58 but doesn't say that, just that it's "dual impedance" - but I don't know what that means. I'll try to post a photo in case somebody here can identify it. Plus I snagged a box full of XLR cables, which I always need more of thanks to my mic-cable-eating pup. I think she'd hoped I'd load the whole mess into my van, but I'd only be transferring all that stuff from his garage to mine. Just goes to show that you can spend a lifetime accumulating cool stuff but in the end it's just stuff.

I'm inclined to trust Fleer's endorsement for this one.

Yury, please come back and update us once you've solved this mystery.

Try this as an experiment: create a new, empty MIDI track, open the PRV and hand-plant some notes. Route that to your kit and see if the problem is still present. If it isn't, then something in the recorded MIDI track is setting a filter or volume in the instrument. If the problem is still there, then there's something weird going on in the drum brain itself, e.g. a bad connection between it and the sensors. If it's something in the MIDI data, open it in the Event View. This will show you what's in there, including things like CC events that can change volume or tone in the instrument. My money's on something weird going on with the drums themselves. The drummer in my band plays an electronic kit, and when he first got it there were a lot of problems with intermittent hits. If the sensor isn't properly telling the brain what the velocity is, or if the MIDI data stream is getting interrupted (e.g. a wonky cable or a too-long USB cable) you can get all kinds of weirdness.

You might have a plugin running in demo mode. Since the 88ms dropout affects the entire mix, start with the plugins on your master bus. Even if a plugin is bypassed it remains in the circuit and still has an effect on the signal passing through it.

First thing I'd do is delete (not bypass) every plugin and run multiple test exports to see if the problem persists. If it does, then you'll know it's something in your system causing the problem. If it doesn't, then you'll know to look for something specific to the project.

I am dismayed by how loud live music has become over the last 20 years or so. It diminishes the experience, imo. Sure, the audience will recover their hearing after an hour or so, but the degradation of the musicians' most precious asset will be cumulative and lifelong. Gotta be even worse for the FoH guys.

I've always wondered if "age-related" hearing loss isn't just nature's defense against our noisy world. We now know that it isn't really age-related at all, e.g. the hearing acuity of an 80-year-old from a remote tribe in the Amazon is as sensitive as that of a young child in urban America. In a 2008 talk by a hearing specialist at NAMM, they said that current teens have the hearing sensitivity of a 50-year-old fifty years ago. They chalked it up to in-ears at high volume for long hours. And predicted that by the time today's teenagers are in their 50's, hearing impairment will have become epidemic and a major health crisis. They also noted that one of the worst occupations for hearing loss, those who lose their hearing faster than average, was mix engineers. That hit hard for the audience, who were mostly mix and mastering engineers. They didn't have to include performing musicians. We already know we're screwed.

Funny how things with "Simple" in the name can actually be complicated, e.g. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Simple Instrument Tracks. Some history for the Class of 2023: SONAR originally did not have instrument tracks. Just MIDI tracks and audio tracks. They made perfect sense, especially if you came from hardware synths and sequencers. But as usual, there were complainers who whined that other DAWs didn't make you think about MIDI and audio, just instruments, and why can't we have that? So instrument tracks were added (SONAR 8, iirc). That was soon followed by a flood of how-to questions on the forum, such as "how do I handle multi-timbral instruments?" and "how do I stack synths?". All of us old-timers gave the same advice: don't use Simple Instrument Tracks, go back to separate MIDI and audio tracks. "But that's not simple!" some complained. Well, yeh, it is necessarily more complicated when you have to think about what's going on under the hood. Synths are separate from the MIDI data that tells them what to do. MIDI can come from multiple sources. One MIDI track can drive multiple synths. Synths can have more than one audio output. Some synths can even output MIDI. Complexity is a necessary prerequisite to versatility. Simplification requires hiding features and limiting versatility. And so it is that year after year new users are forced to learn the same lesson: don't use Simple Instrument Tracks. Years from now, Jaxeed will be here relating his experience to the next batch of initiates. P.S. I do not hate instrument tracks. They can make for a tidier Track View. They can ease the transition from some other DAWs. They do the job just fine for single-voice instruments in mostly-audio projects. But I think if you took a poll you'd find that almost none of the more-experienced users here use them. OK, I've finished my second cup of coffee so time to move on to more serious stuff, e.g. pictures of cats playing guitar down in the Coffee House.

Just thinking out loud...I'm wondering if there might be a bunch of garbage MIDI events at the front of the imported file, such that Cakewalk doesn't have time to process them all or is otherwise unable to handle them, e.g. a SysEx request. Events that aren't copied when you copy the track. If you look into the MIDI data with the Event List view, is there extra stuff at the top of the imported file that isn't in the copied track?

This is why so many heavy Kontakt users set aside a terabyte or more disk storage dedicated to just that VI. Just don't delete past versions and don't move the sample libraries around and you'll probably never have an issue. Another good practice is to save your own presets with names like "Song_Name_Strings.nki". This will come in handy when you want to re-use a custom/tweaked Kontakt instrument from a previous project. It will also save you if you run out of disk space and have to move your libraries to a new drive. It could have even potentially saved the OP, as long as the libraries were not from the factory content. But even taking those measures is no absolute guarantee you won't have issues in the future. That's why it's a good idea to freeze your Kontakt instruments as a worst-case precaution.

I haven't used convolution reverbs in years, but if memory serves my favorite tricks with Perfect Space were 1) playing with the reverb time and amplitude envelopes, and 2) delaying the start time. And, of course, surfing the interwebs for IRs, of which there are many and most are free to download. Note that IR files are just wav files and therefore universal to all convolution reverbs.

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is the clip lock feature.

The way that's usually done is to route every track that you want to duck to a common bus. A compressor is added to that bus, specifically one that supports an external sidechain. You then create a send on your vocal track and route it to the compressor's sidechain input. The Sonitus Compressor bundled with Cakewalk can serve in this role.

Make sure you're using separate MIDI tracks for each MIDI channel, as opposed to a Simple Instrument Track, with the MIDI channel number specified for each individual track.

Beatles geeks will already know this stuff, but this is the first time I've seen all of his contributions listed out like this. Keep in mind that something as basic as recording a part at half speed and then speeding it up was way more difficult to do back then. Not to mention old-school sampling with a razor blade and splice block.

What does "does not work" mean? That you heard no differences? Or saw no differences in a spectrum analyzer? Your intuition is right about sample-accuracy. Oversampling literally adds extra samples to the audio.

I'll admit that I hang on to previous versions for awhile before deleting them. But usually it's just the previous one or two, as insurance just in case there's a showstopper bug that prevents me from doing something. I'm also a beta tester, so such precautions are especially prudent when I know that only a handful of other people have ever run a particular build before me. In all these years, though, I've only had to roll back once, mainly because Noel & Co. are so quick with fixes. That one time, however, I was glad I'd been cautious. btw, that time it wasn't even Cakewalk's fault, but a VI vendor - and Noel fixed it anyway.

I think it'd be fine for isolating vocals or drums for the purpose of tone matching . Perhaps not so much for bass, though, as in my tests the bass lost a noticeable amount of high end. That could depend on the song and the mix, though. My tests were on some old MP3s of my own stuff that I'd lost the original projects for. Maybe it'd work better with a higher-fidelity recording.

This is so you, Paulo. It could be your signature. I know you don't want anybody diagnosing your issues, but I'm curious...do those hidden tracks stay hidden after you re-hide them? There have been changes since 2020.09 involving hidden tracks, e.g. the new "Show All/Hide Previously Hidden Tracks and Buses" feature. I'm thinking there could have been some confusion over the state of hidden tracks after the update, but I'd expect the hidden tracks to stay hidden once they've been re-designated as such. As an aside, my experience has been that rolling back more than one or two revs of any software often causes more problems than it resolves. To do it properly, you'd want to completely uninstall CW first, a drastic step that entails losing customizations. Honestly, friend-to-friend, I'd advise against it.

iZotope Rx has a feature that lets you independently adjust drums, bass, vocals and everything else. In my experiments with it, there were artifacts that made it less than ideal, but for a casual application such as tweaking karaoke files it might work. But it won't separate out every track from a full mix. Intelligent processors are coming that will take this breakdown much farther, but for now this represents the state of the art.

Panning in Cakewalk works like the balance knob on a stereo, which is two ganged volume controls wired in reverse of one another. Literally just two complementary volume knobs. So yeh, the pan knob is literally just a volume knob. But there are two of them. Although this can get weird with some stereo tracks, for mono tracks it's normally exactly what you want. You are literally adjusting the levels (volume) of the track's left and right outputs. With a mono track and mono interleave, you should always have some information in both the left and right track outputs unless the pan slider is at 100%. So normally, as you push the slider to the left, you are turning down the right until all you hear is the left channel. If the track then becomes silent, it means there was no left channel information. How can you have a track with no left or no right information? If it's mono, you normally won't. But you can if it's a stereo track that only has information on one side. And that is a frequent mistake. When you create a new audio track, it defaults to stereo. If you then plug your guitar into a channel on your interface and hit record, everything looks fine - but you are recording only half of a stereo track. When you attempt to pan it to the silent side, well, it goes silent. Maybe that's not what's happening; it's not possible to tell without the project or at least a screenshot of it.

Is the issue with a single track, or with the entire mix? Assuming a single track, the symptom you describe sounds like a stereo track with information on only one side. That can be because it was initially recorded as stereo but with audio on only one channel, or it can be caused by a mono plugin (or an incompatible combination of stereo and mono effects). If you don't want to post a test project, a screenshot might provide the needed clue.

My favorite Rush album. Yes, I know, I'm in the minority with that opinion.