bitflipper

I'd encourage him to go for it. Motivation is the key ingredient for success in anything, and rather than letting him worry about the competition, suggest the benefit of being around players who are better than you. If he doesn't get in, or he gets in and finds it's not a good fit for him, he can always change course. Lots of MBAs play music and can actually afford to indulge their GAS impulses. Heck, Brian May is an astrophysicist. I wanted to be a paleontologist. Your natural path will find you.

Bass, too.

All of the above recommendations are good. MeldaProductions' MTremolo is my favorite of the bunch, as you can go nuts customizing the LFO waveform. If you want to try something unique for grins, check out the free Darvaza plugin. It's a tremolo effect but with multiple sound-mangling features such as pitch-shifting. Also lets you tempo-sync left and right channels independently.

Last night he thought he was being sneaky, chewing on a cardboard box in my cord bag. Except that's the box my tambourine came in, and I still use it so the jangly things (yes, I know, they're called "zills" but nobody ever uses that word so I don't either) don't get bent in transport. So I'd tell the dog "NO" and then turn back to my computer. After a couple minutes, I'd hear a little "ching" and he was busted. But the pup can actually be motivationally helpful. I've been procrastinating buying some new shoes, but now I have to.

ASIO vs. WASAPI doesn't seem to matter with Cakewalk. I had been using ASIO for a long time, only switching to see if it made a difference. It didn't. I don't think I've ever run Windows audio and Cakewalk at the same time. But I have had used them sequentially while both applications were open, e.g. pulling up a new export in WMP to check it before closing the DAW. What's weird is that my problems are intermittent and seemingly random. I can go a week with everything working flawlessly, then suddenly have the interface go silent for a couple seconds or start distorting while playing a video game. I still haven't decided if it's a hardware or a software issue. Software problems tend not to be truly random. Randomness usually suggest a hardware problem, e.g. a leaky capacitor that mostly works most of the time, or a poorly-seated edge connector. But sometimes what seems random isn't; sometimes it's combination of factors so rare or obscure that correlation is extremely difficult. If I buy a second interface, I'll probably get another Saffire. Then, if the old interface proves to be the problem I can more easily swap it. And if it isn't the problem, I'll have a capable mobile (ok, semi-mobile) rig with enough inputs to record live multitracks of the band.

I've been troubleshooting software and hardware for a very long time. I've learned to play the percentages. I usually assume initially that it was my mistake. Even knowing that's not always true, the percentages remain in my favor.

Press CTL-End on your keypad to see where Cakewalk thinks the end is. Base 57 is right: you can display measures way beyond the project's end.

Hi, my name's Dave. So now you can say you know somebody who has never had these kinds of issues with Cakewalk, either. What I'm saying is that any software can make you pull your hair out from time to time. Go ahead and switch to Cubase. A good friend of mine did exactly that back when Gibson kicked us to the curb, and he's pretty happy with it. But don't think that's going to guarantee you won't ever have future issues. Software just doesn't work like that. In all probability your freeze probably wasn't even the fault of the DAW, which, generally speaking, really isn't prone to hangs. Drivers and drives, OTOH, are. For that reason if I were you I'd be very curious to know what caused the problem, lest my next cry of frustration merely moves to the ProTools forum, or the Reaper forum, or the Cubase forum. When the hang occurred, did you check for any clues, e.g. Windows logs, Task Manager for other processes hogging resources, memory usage or network activity? Yeh, I get it, you were angry and frustrated in the moment. But hangs are often hardware-related. You'll want to know if you have a failing hard drive before enduring the pain of switching to another DAW.

Using very large buffers can also be a contributing factor. The buffer has to fill before playback can start. But this delay is usually half a second or less. Still long enough to notice. And it's not only your I/O buffers that do this. A large Kontakt project can do it if you specify large preload buffers. I imagine even effects could do it, too, if they use large buffers internally (e.g. a convolution reverb). A clue would be if you experience this 2-second lag on a new project with minimal data in it.

I've always heard that experience is the best teacher. I disagree. What kind of teacher gives you the lesson after the test? My left hand has been programmed to do three things almost autonomously: play bass lines, CTL-S and CTL-Z. To address the original question...sometimes, you can recover a project (or at least most of it) but only after certain types of crashes. If the program takes a handled error on close, Cakewalk will offer to try (no promises) to recover the project. This has actually worked for me on at least one occasion I can recall. But if the project has never been saved and the program aborts due to an unhandled error, then there's nothing to recover. Personally, I do not use automatic saves because I want to choose the save points myself. Like right after nailing a difficult take. CTL-S. Sometimes I hit it twice because I don't remember doing it the first time, that's how automatic it is.

I use a Saffire Pro 40 too, and have had enormous MIDI-only projects with no issues. So it's not that. However, I have had the Focusrite go nuts on me with horrid distortion that sounds like buffer starvation - but only when watching YouTube videos or playing video games, not with Cakewalk. Not having a second interface to substitute, I tried reverting to the onboard Realtek audio for a day, using my monitors' built-in micro-speakers. Never heard a problem, except for it sounding tinny and quiet. I am using WASAPI Shared within Cakewalk, so the difference isn't the driver. Kinda looks like it may be the interface, but I don't want to spend $$$ for a new one only to find out that wasn't the problem, either. OTOH, I have been thinking about putting together a mobile rig to record my band live...

Would be, except you haven't asked me for any vocals yet.

Yeh, sounds like your default template is too long. Try creating a new template. Choose "Blank Project" from the New Project dialog, add in everything you want to have in there by default, and then save it to the templates folder as Default. Custom templates are very handy. For example, if you always add a reverb bus or a drum bus, include them in the template.

Yeh, I'm sure you guys are right about it being a Native Instruments licensing thing. Although NI is very secretive about their licensing, I do know that it's based on how many copies are sold. Or in some cases, vendors have to estimate in advance how many copies they expect to sell. Some developers have been unhappy with that arrangement, so they may not do that anymore. Like I said, NI is secretive about it and even make licensees submit NDAs. I'm guessing Project SAM is only going to sell as many licenses as they've already paid NI for. Although it seems to me it'd make more sense to just keep selling product and re-brand it as "Full Kontakt Required". There was a brief time when some vendors offered both Player and Full versions, with the former being about 20 bucks more. Those of us who own full Kontakt would appreciate not having to pay the license fee.

Yes, it's usually a plugin that's at fault. But with a large project it can be quite time-consuming to narrow down just which one it is. If Cakewalk aborts with no error message or dump file, you can tell it to be more verbose in its error reporting. By default, many routine error conditions are not reported. To make it less obtuse, there is a setting in CAKEWALK.INI named ExceptionHandlingSeverity. This tells the software what kinds of errors to complain about and which ones to let slide. Set this value to 5 or 7 for troubleshooting. Warning: it can get wordy when told to report everything, so you might want to revert it back to its default value of 1 once you've figured out your problem.

Kenny, when I first saw that video I thought someone had sent me a pic of my own dog. He looks almost exactly like that, jet black with a white stripe and little white tufts on his toes. Yikes, I guess they're all 3D-printed now from a standard set of plans.

I'd called the nearest tuner to me and got his voicemail, left a message but he never called me back. On to the next one on the list.

What do they do, delete one copy from the server after every sale?

Spent the day bonding with the puppy. So cute. Only cost me 50 bucks...ordered a pack of 2 just in case I have to puppy-sit again.

I don't bother with hunting down stray events anymore. Instead, I place a marker where I want the export to end (creatively named "End", with a corresponding marker called "Start"). Then, in the export dialog, I select everything from Start to End. Select "Time Selection" under the Range dropdown. Click the ellipse button to select a marker as the time range end. Cakewalk will remember these settings, but they don't automatically move if you move the marker.

All of these songs are available on CD or MP3. I bought one titled "Songs Around the World 10 Year Anniversary (Remastered) Edition". It's been my falling-asleep music for the past few nights. Good stuff. My favorite cuts are the not-so-familiar tunes, e.g. Biko. However, last night I awoke with a start after realizing they'd altered the harmonies on the chorus of "All You Need is Love". Specifically, they took out George Harrison's descending part. It's a small thing, but I don't think I can fall asleep to that one anymore. It's like having one dark pixel on your display: once noticed you cannot un-see it.

First day puppy-sitting on my own. I had this idea that I'd leave the door open to my garage/office/studio and he could freely wander in and out. Preferably mostly out. Too many things to chew on in here. So there's the door wide open but where does he choose to take a dump? On my carpet, of course. At least he's been running around cleaning up all the cobwebs from the far corners of the room. Yeh, I could bring in the shop vac, but my theory is that cobwebs, if allowed to accumulate, provide additional acoustical absorption.

Remember that cute kid back on page 3? Probably figured she'd be a monster grown up. Yup.

Fearlessly overcoming such obstacles is inspiring. Makes me think that I, too, could prevail despite having less than a thousand plugins.

Credit to bapu for the mix. There's a lot going on in there. In truth, when he first presented this one to me I declined to contribute, saying it would be better to approach it as a power trio seeing as how it was already so dense. Kudos to Ed for refusing to take "no" for an answer and figuring out how to create a space for me so I could channel my inner Jon Lord. Actually, because Jon is still alive I should have said "channeling my inner Keith Emerson". But in truth I'm not that good.