John Bradley

Follow-up: It isn't a Session Drummer 3 thing per se, as I did the same experiment with the free version of Steven Slate Drums 5.5. Same results. Freezing any of the outputs that have sustained sounds (overhead, room, etc.) takes forever compared to the kick or the snare. It would seem that freezing these tracks is going through the (Cakewalk) Audio Stretch algorithms, for no readily apparent reason. And there's no obvious way to tell it to not do that. Of some note: If I select the output tracks and do a Bounce to Track(s), that renders all the tracks simultaneously and without any slowdown whatsoever. Which is ideally how I'd expect freezing the synth to work as well. Suppose I could just mute the synth and drag the rendered clips up to the output tracks as a workaround, though that's not nearly as convenient as freezing/unfreezing. --- Also, I found that if I set Freehand Smoothing to Jumps, and drew a somewhat-straight line connecting the two tempos, it would draw them as a series of jumps. This Freezes much faster than having a single continuous linear tempo change between the two points. (I explicitly set the TempoMapDecimationResolution to '1', which is the coarsest granularity available.) That's keen, but I'd like to be able draw a straight line in the Tempo Track and have it replace that with a series of Jumps snapped to 1/4 notes or whatever when I release the drag. The manual ( http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Tempo.07.html#2000135 ) seems to be saying that I can hold SHIFT, then click and drag a line with the Line Tool and that's what should happen. Only it doesn't for me. Holding either SHIFT and then clicking+dragging in the Tempo Track with any of the Draw tools does nothing at all, either during the drag or upon release. And clicking first and then holding SHIFT during the drag doesn't do anything different from a normal click+drag. Shift-click+drag works as expected elsewhere in Cakewalk - contrained moves in the piano roll, precision fader moves, etc. So I don't think it a case of some other program 'eating' the shift-click event. Heck, it even works within the Tempo Track itself: shift click with the smart tool does a constrained move of the nodes. It's just the Drawing tools that don't work as expected. I have Snap turned on in the Control Bar, and have both the Snap Note and Draw Note Duration set to 1/4 for good measure. Neither Snap To nor Snap By have any effect. The nodes drawn in the tempo track with any of the Draw tools just go wherever they want - they're not snapped to the grid.

I should note that continuous tempo changes were probably the cause of the initial glitching of the crash cymbals, so if I could get semi-continuous tempo changes somehow that'd probably alleviate the need to freeze the synth in the first place.

I use Session Drummer 3 as my default drum VST. Recently I noticed a problem where crash cymbal hits would occasionally glitch during playback and/or export, despite there being no audio dropouts reported by Cakewalk. So I've taken to freezing the drums, which I'd prefer not to do, but whatever. I have SD3 sending its various pieces to separate tracks in Cakewalk (kick, snare, hat, toms, crash, & ride), so when I freeze the synth it freezes the kick, the snare, the hat, etc. in that order. The weird bit: I noticed that one one project it was taking forever to freeze the crash and ride tracks. The kick, snare, hat would freeze in a few seconds, as expected, but it'd take literally minutes to freeze the crash and the ride. After much poking, I discovered that Session Drummer 3 hates continuous tempo changes in the song, but only on the sustained sounds. Why that would be, I have no idea - it shouldn't be stretching the audio of the samples just because the tempo is changing. A crash is a crash. To reproduce: Start a new project, instantiate SD3 running separate outputs as above. Paste some midi drum loop that features crashes and rides, and repeat it out for 80 bars or so. Open the tempo track and verify that there's just a single tempo point (120 bpm at 1:01:000). Freeze the synth. Should take a couple seconds per track, and finish doing all of them in 30 seconds or so, at least on my rig. Add a second different tempo point (140bpm or whatever) somewhere in the middle of the midi, say at bar 40. Have the tempo JUMP to the new tempo. Freeze the synth. Takes a couple of seconds per track, same as before. Now, set the line connecting the two tempos to LINEAR. Freeze the synth. The kick, snare, and hat go about as quickly as before, the toms are noticably slower, and the crash and ride are so slow that it looks like the program has frozen. Several minutes to freeze each of them. --- Bug in SD3? Seems like one, but who knows. Certainly it's never going to be fixed if it *is* a bug, so I'm looking for a workaround (short of "stop using Session Drummer"). Is there a way to specify the granularity of continuous tempo changes? If I could draw a linear tempo change but have it 'look' like a series of discrete tempos every 16th note as far as SD3 is concerned, that might do the trick. Though I don't know why SD3 even cares about the tempo in the first place. Yes, it has a pattern playback that syncs to host tempo, but I never use that and clear out all the patterns by default. I'm just sending it notes from a piano roll.

Cheaper than Melodyne...!

I was much more impressed with Arturia's Tape MELLO-FI, fwiw. Wouldn't pay $99 for it, but grabbed it at the much lower intro price (free) and have been enjoying it. Even used the 'tape-stop' effect in one of my tracks.

I played with it briefly. It does a thing. Loses several points in my book for not having a wet/dry control. Even with all the controls to their hi-fi'est setting, the thing eats high frequencies unless it's bypassed - so unless you like really lo-fi, you're going to want to put it on an aux send. Inconvenient.

But Waves is having a 'sale' - today only, any plugin for $29.99! Act quick, you don't want to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

FWIW, I noticed that certain plugins (?) apparently didn't like the default "200ms" bounce buffer size in the Export dialog. I'd get weird glitching in the output file (both wav and mp3), in a non-repeatable manner. Not crackling per se, more of a stutter effect. Bumping the Export bounce buffer down to 60ms cleared that up for me. Note: This was in 2012.11. Haven't tried pushing the buffer back to 200ms in 2012.12 – why look for trouble.

It'd be helpful if *everything* in the Export dialog retained it's state from the last time you used it, at least within the same session and project. In particular, the start-end times. And that includes the settings in the MP3 dialog. Tedious to keep re-entering the same info every time I re-export the song.

Of course. View | Show/Hide Fret Pane (menu at the top of the staff pane)

That one's been in there for years, at least in my experience. To recreate: have enough tracks in a project such that a scrollbar appears in the 'tracks' pane of the Console View. Scroll all the way to the right (might not be necessary, but that's where I always am when this happens). Add a track (regular, aux, doesn't matter). The scroll bar disappears. The new track is slightly visible on the right edge of the pane, but mostly cropped off. No scrollbar, so no way to move it into the pane. Touch the track/bus divider bar, scrollbar reappears, all works as expected again.

Me too! Luckily I'm old so it doesn't come up that much these days.

Just for the record, it appears Blue Cat Audio's Oscillosope Multi is the thing I want. Live scope from multiple tracks, zoom in and measure time deltas, etc. Costs $49, which isn't ideal, but isn't outrageous, either. https://www.bluecataudio.com/Products/Product_OscilloscopeMulti/

I use BUN files to copy projects to a second machine that has a different file directory structure. Question: If I zip up the project folder (including the per project audio and other subfolders) and unzip it somewhere else on the target machine, will it work? That is, does the CWB file reference its audio files relative to the directory the CWB file is in, or does it use absolute file paths?

You need to use the Mute Tool. (Yeah, there's a Mute Tool. It was a surprise to me, as well.) The way "mute previous takes works" has been bothering me forever, to the point where I don't use it. I just manually mute the most-recent take by using the M button on the take lane, in order to avoid using the Mute Tool. But that's the way it is.

Anyone know of a plugin that will let you view the waveforms of multiple tracks simultaneously - live VST synths, not frozen - for the purpose of synchronization? (Like, a kick drum and a kick sample.) I tried Melda's MultiAnalyzer, and it came darned close to what I wanted. Plunk an instance on each track or bus, and all of them talk to each other behind the scenes. But after capturing some multitrack audio on its oscilloscope there is no way to zoom in on it, nor a way to measure the delta in milliseconds between the various peaks. Unlike a real oscilloscope.

? And a Partridge in a V-S-T...

Largely broke, so anything over $50 was a non-starter. Downloaded and demoed a bunch of stuff from Baby Audio, Fuse Audio, WA Production, Overloud, and decided I didn't need or even want any of it. At least not at the moment. The deals weren't so great that they won't come around again. Wound up buying Nomad Factory '80s Spaces from Audiodeluxe ($19), as it at least filled a hole in collection. Got the UVI Digital Synsations as a freebie. Hadn't realized that the UVI thing was mostly a sample-playback thing ala Syntronik, and probably will never use it, though the Ensoniq VFX sounds are pleasing. Also picked up 2getheraudio's Rich DRUM because I demoed it on a track I was working on and I liked what it did sufficiently that I 'needed' it. Wasn't on sale, beyond their normal "it's ostensibly $50, but pay what you will" pricing. Only thing I wanted that I didn't buy (yet) was the WA Productions "Ascension 1.5 + all the patches in the world" bundle for $40 at Plugin Boutique. Would've loved to pick up Tantra 2, but even at half-price ($99) it's overpriced for my limited uses.

I don't understand NI's thinking. 50% off everything except KOMPLETE itself. It's great that they have a sale on the update/upgrades - though not a full 50% - but never (as far as I've seen) on the getting the product to begin with. I'd think they'd really like to have another Upgrade Cow they could milk for annual updates, but at $599/$1199/$1599 to get on the train in the first place (he said, switching metaphors midstream), that ain't ever going to happen. iZotope, they understand how to rope 'em in. I won a free copy of Breaktweaker years ago from SonicState. But because I 'bought' one of their products, they gave me the too-good-to-pass-up pricing on one of their bundles, and I've thrown many hundreds of dollars at them augmenting and updating that bundle since.

According to the email they sent out, offer ends October 5.

Same here. I have a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 which is the only thing Cakewalk uses. In the Windows "manage sound devices" control panel, the only output device I have enabled is the Realtek chip on the mobo, for 'computer sounds'. Everything else (most notably the Focusrite) is 'disabled' as far as Windows is concerned. To my mind, letting Windows touch your pro audio device is just asking for touble; give it a throwdown device it can muck with without affecting your work. Wish there was a way to disable some of them (nVidia High Def Audio) in Cakewalk as well, so it stops asking me "hey, a new audio device, wanna use it?" whenver my monitors wake up, but that's another matter entirely.

Excellent. After years at V6, and never finding the magical $99 upgrade to either V7 or V8, they've finally made me an offer I can't refuse. The $199 upgrades they'd been offering were too expensive for the (to me) limited usefulness of the somewhat more esoteric things they've added since V6. Only ones I wanted were the Mellotron and the Emulator II... But those plus the SQ-80 for $149 (and some other stuff thrown in for good measure), now we're talking!

FWIW, I played around with the VST2 versions of both the regular and Mk2 versions and decided they were somewhat 'iffy' and unpredictable in their behavior. Stopped trying and wrote it off as a learning experience. But that was a year ago. Don't know if they've been updated since then, but CbB certainly has been, so maybe they work better these days.

I use custom menu layouts for my Effects and Synth insertions, with everything sorted and arranged the way I like. It would be handy if one could have a specially named folder ("NEW" or "UNCATEGORIZED" or whatever) to which new VSTs would be added automatically when they're discovered during the scan. Or maybe an option to just have them added to the bottom of the list, not in any folder. The details aren't important. As it stands, whenever I download a demo or whatever I have to manually add it to my menu layout, which is slightly annoying. Moreso because (previous feature request) there's no indication in the various 'source' lists in the menu editor (e.g. "VST3 Instruments") which entries already appear 1 or more times in the menu layout being edited, and which are orphans.

Thanks @marled - that's the sort of info I was looking for. Sorry to hear it's still not working entirely correctly; hopefully CW / Celemony can work it out at some point. (I haven't made the leap yet. Looks like I'll continue on, un-lept for now.)