Bill Phillips

The "ctrl-click in lower have of clip" way of selecting a clip envelope still isn't working for me in 2022.11. In the attached GIF you can see that the smart tool is selected and the in-clip selections shown are being done using ctrl-click. I move the cursor while holding ctrl-clip to highlight that I'm holding ctrl-clip. No envelope selection is being made. I finally managed to do it I think by multi-clicking a single node.

You should still be able to do that. I Cakewalk preferences select the Focusrite. For all the other applications that play through the Windows sound system, I have a little speaker near the right corner of the tool tray. Clicking that little speaker lets me choose the Windows speaker output. I usually pick the PC sound card SPDIF output which I have routed to the SPDIF Aux input on my monitor controller which allows me to listen to Windows audio through my monitors/headphones. Note your new PC might have several sound cards (on graphics card for example) in addition to the one on the PC motherboard. I try to disable all those leaving me with the PC sound card outputs and the Focusrite output. By the way your Focusrite may have a loop-back feature. Mine's too old for that. But if your's does, you may actually have two Focusrite output options, one for audio output and one for loop-back.

Thanks. I missed that. Looks like I was off topic. Sorry.

You probably can for audio if the interface you want to sync with has an spdif in. I've used a combination of word clock, adat and spdif to sync several audio interfaces. I have no experience syncing midi interfaces.

Follow this link to Bobby Balow's Raytown Productions video on 7 Waves Hidden Gems to find a link to the H-Comp give away valid for 48 hours from the time the video was posted. I know many on this forum don't use Waves plugins but figure some do that might want and not have H-Comp. Happy Holidays.

Out of the blue, If the two PCs have audio interfaces, Can't you just sync the audio interfaces (word clock would be great for this) and sync the two PCs to the audio interfaces. That would be my first choice?

I think if you mute all tracks being mastered except for the one you're currently working on, you can use Exclusive Solo to toggle between the Master Bus and Reference Track to compare them.

Can't you use the Sonitus Delay that's, I believe, included with Cakewalk by Bandlab?

I'm not there yet on the mix I'm working on but I use the iZotope Music Production Suite and just updated it. I wish there was a meter on every track showing CPU and GPU load to help us understand what's going on. I know two big issues are look ahead and over sampling. So using bus and aux tracks for plugins that use either look ahead or over sampling will allow multiple audio tracks to share these resource consuming plugins. It would also be nice if the plugins with the fancy GUIs that are so useful to me had a switch to turn off the GUI (leaving just knobs and sliders) when the GUI's no longer needed.

I can't seem to get satisfactory results using MIDI keyboard entry to select harmonies. See screen shot. I added a MIDI track with my MPK49 as the input. I enabled MIDI in in the Nectar VST3 dropdown I enabled MIDI in the Harmony module. I deleted existing nodes on the Harmony XY grid. I selected Nectar 3.1 as the MIDI output. Once that was done nodes 5-8 apeared on the XY in the Harmony module but they don't seem to respond to keyboard notes played. When I play and hold a note while the song is playing I can hear that note faintly playing behind the song but I don't see any notes being added or moving on the XY grid. I've looked for but can't find any Cakewalk specific help other than a 2015 Cakewalk Forum post that told me about the Enable MIDI In option on the VST3 dropdown. iZotope seems to default to the "?" mark help screens in their videos but that help screen for me opens the iZotope Nectar help page. I did find this for setting up Nectar 2 MIDI control for supported DAWs. Looks pretty much like what I did. Ok. I went back and poked around some more. Nodes 1-4 were hiding under nodes 5 & 6. I'm guessing nodes were added each time I was able to get MIDI working. So I spread them out. I moved the MIDI fader to 127 and selected Voices only in the harmony module to better hear what the MIDI keyboard was doing. Looks like the MIDI notes set the node note values overriding the note values entered in the nodes. The nodes do glow. So it looks like it works more or less. Anybody else using this feature? What's been your experience? Are you getting the same results I am?

I had disregarded gaming models. Thanks for the insights

Thanks Jim. What about USB audio interfaces with a Thunderbolt hub?

You can do that, but it can't be the system drive as is. Starting with the operating system, Windows, then drivers, then applications (Cakewallk, plugins, etc), all software must be installed on the system drive of the computer. A system drive from one computer can not be installed, as is, and become the system drive of another computer.

Anyone using the CalDigit TS4 or other hub to allow them to use their laptop as a desktop DAW replacement? I read an article by a ProTools Expert describing how he's now able to use his Macbook Pro in clam shell mode and a CalDigit TS3 as his in studio DAW workstation and wondered how practical that would be. According to another post, it might even allow me to plug in my MOTU 828 mk2 firewire using an Apple TB2 to FW converter. All too good to be true? What are the limitations of a powerful laptop when compared to a desktop as a DAW? I also took a quick look at the Dell XPS13 which cost $2,400 tricked out and noticed that it has (2) TB4 ports and supports NVMe, OpenGL 3.0 & 4.6 and has 20 threads which seems impressive. On the down side. It has 20 PCIe lanes whereas my existing i7 6850k has 40. Don't know how important that is.

Plugins that don't have an installer (.dll, ,vst3 file extensions) can probably be copied from and pasted into the proper folders on different computers. The download files (.zip, .exe, .msi, etc. extensions) can probably be copied from and pasted into install folders on different computers, but the installers must be run on the receiving computer but that's not what I would do. I like to keep plugins up to date. So, even for the dlls and vst3s, I'd visit the source website and download the plugin or installer file from there to get the latest version on the new computer.

I used to do that but found that I'd randomly and inadvertently move input gain knobs without noticing until later causing a lot of consternation. So I began hiding the track input gain controls and using gain plugins as well and have the same problem as @Victor Flores particularly on duplicated tracks. But this discussion has got me rethinking that. Maybe I can keep the input gain controls hidden in all workspaces except for a gain-staging workspace that I use solely for gain staging. And for duplicated tracks I can use the assignable controls Groups suggestion from @msmcleod for input gain controls and other controls I tweak on duplicated tracks.

Thanks Jorge.

It's good to know that there's one expert user out there who has all the answers. Consider starting your own DAW company to fully share that expertise. ?

Thank you very much. I must be missing something. I'm going to dig into it further using your suggestions. Thanks again.

Thanks for the perspective Mark. My reason for wanting to get the Firewire working is to to use my MOTU 828 mkII to have 26 inputs available in case I need it on occasion. My Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 is limited to 18 inputs. But I admit that Firewire's days are numbered; but so are mine.? That said, the last time I was able to use my Firewire 828 mkII for mixing (no inputs and only the main outputs) it seemed to work smoothly with the sample buffer at 256 samples. When it quit working, probably due to an update, I switched the same project over to the 18i8 gen1 with the sample buffer maxed out at 1024 and was still getting dropouts. I know that Focusrite was having USB ASIO problems with the Scarlett early on. I wonder if the gen 1 Scarlett line may have some inherent problems that couldn't be solved with firmware or software updates but were were solved for gen 2 & 3 units.

Is this article any help? I had my firewire stuff working fine maybe 6 months ago then it stopped. I haven't gotten back around to troubleshooting it, but the last time I did I think the article at the link above was useful. Also, I remember some guidance on a blog from a musician that worked for Microsoft being useful, but I can't find that. I have a SYBA SY-PEX30016 firewire card. Unlike @bitflipper I've gone through a number of firewire cards, but sounds like that may have been a waste of money.

I'm using a 3840x1600 37" curved display and really like it. I chose 37" because that's what fits between my monitors. Now that I have it, I'm thinking it's a good fit for me. I usually have my Cakewalk window at about 2/3 of the screen horizontally and nearly 100% vertically leaving about 1/3 of horizontal space for plugin popups and other apps. I'd probably need to move my head around to use all the space on a larger display.

Thanks. I just did that then looked at the CBS log which shows some activity in addition to the beginning/ending messages. Looks like it also ran last evening with a lot more activity starting with Initializing Trusted Installer and a lot of TiWorker activities. Could be from updates installed yesterday. I think I was done with PC for the day when this all happened. Looks like this activity picked up again when I booted the PC this morning and continued for about 15 minutes probably in the background. I don't think I noticed it.

Bye. ?

Not so. You may be making assumptions based on your experience with another DAW. Like Will said, all DAWs have their own vocabulary. There are good tutorials showing you how to create a new project in Cakewalk and avoid the problems you're describing.