John Bradley

I concur completely. Even $99 was too much for basically a Melotron. (CZ and Synthi? No interest in either.) Throw in the OB-Xa and the $99 at least becomes something I'd think about. Wish they'd do more 'mainstream' offerings in the future, though I suppose their choices get limited once you start talking about ROMplers and other '80s-'90s synths that can't simply be emulated, they need actual copies of samples etc. that the companies still own. Korg and Roland aren't going to be in any rush to let them do an M1 or a D50 for example, as they both already sell (or rent!) their own VSTs of same.

$299 to update from V6 to V7... gee, thanks Arturia, but I'll pass on that. It's like they don't want free money from their customers.

That's just embarassing! However, the cringe does cover up the fact that the plugin doesn't sound very good, so there's that.

No, I'm not looping. I've got a region I want to record marked out with autopunch, and I've got the Now marker positioned a couple bars before the punch region. Hit 'R' to record, and if I make it all the way through adequately, hit space to stop and rewind, ready to listen to the last take and/or record another. Or hit space to stop somewhere in the middle if the take is blown, followed by ctrl-Z, a sip of coffee, and hit R again. If I were looping with an autopunch region set, as per my use-case, then one would either have the loop points extend further than the autopunch region, and hit space after passing the end of the autopunch but before looping back into the autopunch region again. On the other hand, if you have the loop set to the same points as the autopunch, yeah, you're always going to get one more (incomplete) take than you want... which you'd want to delete (and not have the other takes split oddly). Point being, if you have an autopunch region set up, and you stop recording before you get to the end of the region, that's probably not something you want to keep. But not definitely, hence an "auto undo that last take" with the option of 'redo' if the aborted take was useful in some way. But most of the time, it's not; that's why you aborted it in the first place.

I'd imagine it's not a video card issue per se (as in, a specific card or a specific driver), but if you have an older/slower video card and you zoom in further than you should during playback, Cakewalk will flood the card with "now draw this" requests faster than the card can keep up with. This causes a backlog of drawing requests to build up (they are queued, one would imagine), and the program gets unresponsive until the queue is emptied... which possibly only occurs once you're past the end of the song and there are no more waveforms to display in the track view. Or maybe never. Not that I know, but that's my semi-educated guess. Presumably there's some way for CW to know that it's going overboard with the drawing requests (some way to tell how many outstanding requests there are in the buffer?) and just stop updating the display until the buffer empties out or whatever. Or something like that.

Here's the situation: I'm in Comp Recording mode, and I've got an auto punch in/out region set up. If I screw up somewhere in the middle of the take I hit SPACE to abort the recording and rewind the transport to start point. This leaves a partial take behind which I would (almost) never want, and all my old takes are now split at the end point of the aborted take; also undesirable. What I'd like: If I stop recording before the end of the autopunch region, I'd like the new take automatically deleted ('undo') but left in the history so I could 'redo' to bring it back if I really did want it for some reason. Make it a user-setting buried in Advanced Settings or wherever ("Keep aborted takes") for folks who prefer the current behavior. Or keep the current behavior as the default and give me a "Delete aborted takes" setting somewhere. Either is good.

If you need the same effect(s) with the same settings done in the same amount on all of your guitar tracks -- that is, you want to treat the guitar submix as a single track for effecting purposes, then have all your guitar tracks Output to a guitar bus and put the effects there (in the FX Bin). On the other hand, if you want to apply the same effects with the same settings, but to varying amounts (example: less reverb on the rhythm guitars), create an aux track per effect, and have each of the guitar tracks have a Send going to each of those aux tracks. Then for mixing purposes you'll probably want to have the Output of all the guitar tracks and the aux tracks holding the guitar effects all going to a single Guitar Bus. (Or maybe two: I typically go with a 'lead guitar' bus, and an 'all other guitars' bus.) And of course, if you want the same effects but with different settings, or different effects altogether on your separate guitar tracks, just stick said effects in the FX Bins on the tracks.

That said, do whatever you want to the Staff view. I don't use it, and those who do seem to think it's broken already. At least, the vocal ones on this forum.

That's nice and all, but if you want to rebind the mouse operation to be more in line with how other DAWs do things, then kindly go use those other DAWs and leave Cakewalk alone. I live in the PRV, and don't need 20+ years of muscle memory broken just to have my DAW behave more like some other things that I don't use nor care about. Sort of like how the idiots doing Photoshop development these days just arbitrarily decided one day "hey, scaling by dragging a handle should be proportional by default, and shift-dragging should be 'freeform' -- the complete opposite of how it had been since forever". It was a move that didn't much matter to new users either way, and royally POed all their loyal 'power users'.

Wanted Dead or Alive More '80s, though in a less synthy vein than normal. This one goes out to all my fellow Italian cowboys from New Jersey! (Full discloser: I'm neither Italian, nor a cowboy, and I try to avoid the blighted hellscape that is New Jersey as much as possible. Also, I've never ridden a horse, steel or otherwise. But the point still stands.) Drums: Session Drummer 3, as per usual. Bass: IKM's MODO BASS "flame bass" model, for what little that matters. Doing the amp/fx thing within MODO. Percussion: Several TX16Wx's playing various samples from my library (shaker, ride bell, a different bell, and a tambourine). Strings: Two instances of SI String Section playing the low drone that goes on throughout the acoustic guitar hook. One Spitfire Epic Strings providing the string section that comes in on the first chorus and continues through the rest of the song. Synths: Arturia's Moog doing the high 4-note line that opens the song (and recurs a few times). Arturia's DX7 doing a similar but warmer sound that leads into verse 2. Arturia Pigments for the Prophet'y 'sync' sound that leads into the guitar solo. Another Pigments doing the wind effect that opens and closes the song. Native Instruments FM8 doing the windchimes at the very beginning of the song. TruePianos Cakewalk for the 4 notes of piano that lead into the guitar solo. Guitars: The acoustic riff is double tracked, panned hard left/right. The left is just the raw piezo, the right is going through a Taylor impulse I got from somewhere or other. There's a third acoustic, playing whatever would be playing on the low 3 strings of the guitar, but up an octave. The real version is played on a 12-string. I don't have a 12-string, nor a second acoustic that I could leave set up in Nashville tuning, so we do what we need to. Two distorted electrics come in with the guitar solo, panned hard left/right, and a third guitar does the solo. All three were played on my '85 ***** Strat, recorded direct and processed through Blue Cat's Axiom. Vocals: Single track lead vox running through Nectar 2 (gate, de-esser, eq, compressors, mod+delay (16th), saturation, and another delay (8th), as well as a CA-2A for limiting, Blue Cat's freebie Chorus, and Breverb. There's a single track of backing vocals going though Nectar 2 (gate, de-esser, eq, harmonizer (2 unison voices panned out with some pitch/time variation), compressors, and mod + delay), another Blue Cat Chorus, and Breverb. And Melodyne 4, because it's more convenient than having a singer living in my house. Effects: GW MixCentric for extra 'yum' on the master, followed by an Ozone 8 doing something useful, one would imagine.

A common enough problem for Men of a Certain Age.

Random guess: in Windows, Settings | System | Display do you have "Change the size of text, apps, and other items" set to something other than 100%? There's also another scaling thing (might be the same thing shown in two different places) under Settings | Ease of Access | Display. Set that to 100%, if it's not. Possibly also related to the text size in Settings | Ease of Access | Display. Drag the slider all the way left if it isn't.

Question for anyone who has Falcon: I see it comes with a huge number of internal effects, including SparkVerb; is there any way to use them outside of Falcon, or alternatively have Falcon act as an audio effect host (rather than an instrument) that you can drop in the FX bin? 'Cause that'd be a nice selling point to help rationalize the need for a $350 synth.

I looked at the website design and the UI and said "meh, I'll pass". Then I foolishly played the video.

On many interfaces (Focusrite Scarlett, Behringer U-Phoria, etc.) you will get an audible click when the sample rate is changed. If you're using a single interface for both your Windows sounds and your DAW, set the default in both to the same sample rate.

Never remove the 'default' sound device. If you do, Windows will "helpfully" pick a new one for you, seemingly at random. I've got the Realtek chip on this computer plugged into some crappy computer speakers and set as the default audio device both for regular audio and telephony. I connect/disconnect a Focusrite Scarlett Solo as needed, and only use that for Cakewalk and standalone audio programs (e.g. Bias FX, Axiom, etc.). The windows sounds continue to come out of the Realtek always, and the default never changes.

FWIW, I think it's more likely to be a video card and/or driver thing rather than raw CPU performance, given that people can get it to happen on simple projects with very low CPU requirements. We all know that if there's one thing that can reliably lock up a machine, or blue screen it, it's the video driver. I get it (or at least did, until I learned never to touch the zoom control while the DAW is playing!) on my system, which is based on a Core i7-950 (3.1GHz) from a decade ago. Video: I'm using an Nvidia GTX750 Ti, driver version 432.00

Hey, but it's only $1468 per year if you want to subscribe! ?

The Scarlett 2i2 is a perfectly fine interface. Been using one for 6 years. John Vere's suggesting a slightly more complicated routing that would have you send the output of the mixer into the input of the 2i2, which would give you the ability to plug things into the mixer and record them, but let's get basic functionality up and happening first. I don't see anything obviously wrong in your pictures, so let's just troubleshoot and take it one step at a time. Unplug everything (other than the USB) from the 2i2. Turn off the DIRECT MONITOR switch. Get Cakewalk running, using the Focusrite as the audio i/o device, load up some project, and loop some section of it. Play. Plug headphones directly into the 2i2. Do you have audio? Good! Unplug the headphones from the 2i2. Plug a pair of 1/4" cables from the back of the 2i2 into the LINE IN inputs on channels 1 and 2 on the mixer. Set the black gain knobs to the -10 mark, set all EQ to the 12 o'clock position, FX to -Inf, and pan channels 1 & 2 hard left and hard right. Set the white LEVEL knobs on 1 & 2 to the '0' position (12 o'clock), and do the same with the MAIN MIX knob. AUX RETURN to -Inf, PHONES to -Inf, and all three pushbuttons in their 'up' position. You should see the meters bouncing in time to your audio, and if you have amplified speakers hooked up the main l/r outputs, you should hear audio. You should also hear audio if you plug your headphones directly into the mixer's PHONES output and turn up the PHONES knob. Continue looping audio in cakewalk, and hook up the Soundblaster line-outs to inputs 5 & 6. Play a Youtube video or something else. Assuming your Windows audio settings are set to use the Soundblaster i/o (they should be!), you should now have output appearing on the channels 5/6 of the mixer. Turn up the 5/6 LEVEL knob and you should hear both audio streams simultaneously, both through the speakers (if hooked to the mixer's main l/r outs) and the headphone jack on the mixer. Adjust to taste. You can plug your headphones into either the 2i2 or the mixer. Plugging into the mixer lets you hear either (or both) audio interface in your headphones, which may be desirable.

Wait, midi take lanes even exist? I thought take lanes and comping were audio-only dealies. Learn something every day.

Awesome! It's been a while since I've bought any VSTs I don't really need, but can't afford not to at these savings!

Unfortunately, DrumMic'a doesn't get you anything in the way of upgrade offers. Though it's nice to have if you don't already have Addictive Drums or similar, and the price is right. Been trying to get onto the KOMPLETE merry-go-round for years, but they never seem to have the substantially less-than-$600 pricing it'd take to make that happen. And I own $300 of things that appear in KOMPLETE... those don't help, either. It's as if they want to keep the riff-raff out. ?

Should've guessed! I don't think there's anyone under the age of 40 on this forum. ? But yeah, stick a CD in your drive, and then File | Import | Audio CD and select the tracks you want to bring in. And if you want tracks you don't have on CD, you can buy single tracks (as MP3s) from Amazon.

Same here. It says 'Untitled' at the top of the PC in the Inspector. If I put my mouse in that textbox the load/save preset icons appear.

Valhalla Delay - $50. Does virtually everything you could want out of a delay, except that doesn't look like an old piece of hardware. Which is a feature, in my book.