Mark Morgon-Shaw

I've been helping my friend make the transition to CBB from Pro Tools and he says it's a bit mad that in certain keys Cakewalk doesn't label the notes correctly I'm more of a play by ear type so it doesn't bother me but my friend has a degree in music and many years of using PT so I am assuming he knows his stuff. He posted it in the CBB Creative Sauce group and people seem to confirm it.

Thanks for the reply, I always thought they used CC#1 because it triggers different velocity layers in the sampled instrument - I .e. a violin playing pp Vs ff is not just a difference in volume - there's also difference in dynamics and you need to be able to control that with something that's on every midi keyboard controller. I didn't realise they had broken the midi specification so it raises another question as to how other DAWs deal with it ? Adding a CC#1 to every clip would be pretty tedious with the amount of music I make each year but from everything I see & hear Kontakt is pretty much the defacto standard in the Production Music industry ( music libraries for TV & Film etc ) for sampled instruments so it must be used pretty widely and I don't see much of an outcry about this issue. I searched the NI Support site and found this : https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003479549-KONTAKT-s-Volume-Resets-When-I-Press-Play-in-my-DAW I think I tried this once before , changing the settings within the Kontakt Instrument to not respond and it didn't seem to make any difference to the instrument I was trying to use but I had only just started using Kontakt back then and was desperate to get it working so once I found that disabling the 'Zero Controllers When Play Stop' worked for the most part I just got used to dealing with hanging notes every so often. That was probably 5 or 6 years ago. It would be great if there is something else that can be done - Like David Baay mentions I think it would be useful to have more granular control over individual instruments and their controllers. NI ( glibly ) say " You can alternatively configure your DAW not to send the standard MIDI commands CC7 and CC10 when pressing play or pause. To learn how to do so, please consult your DAW's documentation. " I don't know whether that would have to be a Gobal option or is there any way it could be selected on a per instrument basis ,i.e. on the insert soft synth options ?

As many have found, if you load a new Kontakt instrument in CBB as soon as you stop playback the volume gets turned way down in the VSTi which renders it fairly unusable To get around this we can disable the " Zero Controllers When Play Stops " option in the Preferences. Although it fixes the problem however this cause another issue where certain Kontakt instruments just " hang " and by that I mean they are usually the phrase based libraries and they keep playing even when Cakewalk is stopped. I presume the two are connected and CBB is no longer sending something required to make it stop. All you can do at this point is hit the panic button in Kontakt to silence it So my question is - can anything be done to remedy this ? Kontakt is pretty popular so it's not exactly a niche instrument that hardly anyone uses

Is it possible to improve the Track Manager in the following ways:- 1. Allow it to be made bigger as currently it only fits about half a project on it 2. Have a Select All Button 3. Have a Select None Button 4 Collapse All Folders Button 5 Expand All Folders Button

Ahh okay...my point was if you can change one clip gain at a time and remain in Clips mode then it doesn't seem logical that you can't do it to a multiple selection of them . The main reason it came up is my Pro Tools using friend is switching to CBB as he can't justify the cost of updating Pro Tools, and he was a Sonar user many years back. But basically he thought it was a fairly standard thing to want to do and there's no faffing with track modes it PT you can just do it....and I think he makes a good point.

Am I right in thinking that currently it's not possible to change multiple clip gains simultaneously from the track's "clips" mode ? I can only get it to do one at a time. Only by changing it to " Clip Automation - Gain " does it seem to let me change multiple clips gains together.

I can't get it to work the way I think it would / should. Any animated Gifs might help

Wow thanks...It's awesome that you even know that - it's pretty obscure ? Maybe we can pass this idea on to @msmcleod for consideration in an update to make it more streamlined and intuitive.

Not sure if this is already a thing that can be done but if more than one clip is selected I would have expected to be able to apply multiple clip gains at the same time but it only works on the one you have your mouse over. Which means you can only do one at a time which seems a bit restrictive.

I thought the Sonar 8.5 interface was the best. It was more compact but easier to read I think part of the reason was there's a bit of pseudo 3D depth which looks clearer than the 2D flat interface we have now.

I think this is the simplest and most easy to understand method of stacking VSTi's , and whilst it would be cool if CBB had this built in , you can do it easily with a 3rd party plugins such as Bluecats Patchwork or if you want something more advanced Akai VIP 3 ...Years ago whilst still on Sonar 8.5 I had another plugin that did it too and if I recall it was free but I stopped using it at some point when I got Patchwork and don't recall what it's called now. I use VIP these days which came free with an M-Audio keyboard but you can stack 8 instruments with 4 FX sends and it allows you to transpose each one as well as control the more usual vol - pan etc. The patch browser combines all your VSTi's into one database so you don't need to open them individually although not every instrument has a map available.

It's designed as a sub bass synth for Hip Hop...apart from kicks there's no other kit sounds

There's many ways but changing the sample you have probably isn't the best way. You could layer a sine wave underneath from another plugin/synth and add the sub element. But like the other guys have said there are loads of other samples or 808 plugins floating around you could use. My own favourite is 808 Studio II which isn't free but sounds great and is very flexible with many flavours of 808 built into it's presets.

Folders still seem to be automatically expanding even after I have deselected the option Or have I misunderstood perhaps ? When I put in a FR I meant when I drag/drop that I don't want it to open ...maybe you have have only changed the right click 'move to ' option ? Can it not apply to both ?

Yeah it's your lucky day. You can have the latest greatest version of what was Sonar , now called Cakewalk by Bandlab completely free with no strings attached.

Any chance you could look into changing the default behaviour when a track is dragged into a collapsed folder ? Currently it expands the Folder - this is a nightmare when trying to tidy up a session. Folders expanding all over the place when all I'm trying to do is just drop every track into it's correct folder, it's like folder whack a mole when you've got 50 - 60 tracks to sort out. Thanks

Yes I have noticed and mentioned that this release seems to crash a lot more when moving midi around generally. I can't say I've tied it down to once specific action or had anything repeatable but having made a bunch of tracks since it came out it's the least stable it's been in a good while so I suspect something is up somewhere. Hopefully they'll find it.

Yeah I find it odd that after being bought by the company that has highly popular music making App , this is still the state of affairs. I thought they would be all over that stuff. We don't even get a regular column in SOS magazine any more despite the author being a regular around these forums. Whilst "lesser" more niche DAWs seem to. I've been bangin' on about this ever since Cakewalk got rescued, whilst I love and understand it pretty intimately this is not the case for the younger generation of music makers. The way people make music has changed. They want fast and easy ways to make Trap and Hip Hop beats and manipulate sample packs for starters. Give them that and they'll probably stay around but as it stands other platforms took the lead years ago and it's as though Cakewalk don't even want to cater for them. As it stands I think professional users look down upon Cakewalk ( wrongly IMHO ) and the younger generation haven't been given the tools they need so it's stuck in this kind of nowhere mans land in the middle full of balding middle aged guys making terrible prog in their spare rooms just to get away from the wife. It's not just about marketing, it's about fulfilling the need of the end user. You have to work out who that is first.

I have already reported point 2 on the thread for the latest release ...maybe go to the thread and reiterate this bug On point 1 are you sure you are not accidently telling CBB to put it in there I've not come across 3 as yet.

Real time feedback whilst moving the quatanise sliders - I would also include humanise too...being able to see what it is doing to the notes in real time is a huge benefit

I disagree , I use multiple folders on every project and rarely have every track in a Folder routed to the same bus. It's actually one of the benfits of using folders that it allows you to group simlar tracks together that are routed to disparate buses. This is key for printing stems if you have that requirement in your deliverables. Making a Folder a bus would ruin it. They have different uses.

I think I am doing the same actions as you said but it didn't crash. Maybe if you can post a GIF it would help - but the issue sounds like it could be related to mine.

I have had similar but I couldn't nail it down to a particular set of circumstances so I thought it might just be me or a rogue plugin. But certainly since the new update I've noticed quite a few crashes whilst editing midi ...moving or transposing groups of notes around en masse. It's not repeatable though - the same action doesn't make it happen again.

Good man. One other thing I find a bit annoying - especially now we have subfolders, is the auto opening of Folder tracks when you deposit something into them. This can be particularly annyong when you're having a bit of a tidy up after a writing session and moving all the tracks into your folders and subfolders. When you have a project with lots of tracks and folders it's a PITA that they just pop open by themselves and you have to repeatedly close them in quick succession. I don't know if there is a neater solution but my thought process is if I want it opened , I'd much rather click it myself than have CBB do it automatically for me as 80% of the time I need it to stay closed.

You can kinda do this with the midiFX quantize plugin , but it would be cool to have it built in and visible on each track There is space...here..