Panu Pentikäinen

My CbB runs much smoother in stock Windows 10 than in my old Windows 7. Windows 10's background processes do not disturb CbB's audio streaming.

http://avaruusankat.com/duckbar/

That's possible but the Duck is still frozen in the lake. Let's hope sjoens can melt it free.

I have a simple recipe for good acoustic guitar sound: - Good room - Good acoustic guitar, tuned, new strings - Good performance - Good arrangement After that I can put 'any' mic in front of the guitar and it will sound good. Usual choices are KM184, U87, MD441, MD421 and Manley Reference Cardioid. Usually I use 4 mics for acoustic guitar: - Close mic near neck's 12th fret - Close mic near body - Stereo ambience mics. Good room + ambience mics = natural sounding acoustic guitar sound which does not need much processing.

I had similar problem with the Browser window. It happened after I had used Remote Desktop Connection. It caused Browser window location go off-screen. Two workarounds I often use in this kind of case: - change display resolution in Windows settings temporarily - after opening the hidden window, I press Alt-Spacebar, then M (Move). Then arrow keys to bring the hidden window back to the visible area of the desktop.

Sounds promising... I'm still using ancient, 15 year old Thinkpad when travelling. I have upgraded Vista to 10 and replaced HD with SSD. I also upgraded CPU and RAM to give it more years to serve . Never thought I would do any music with it but now as you say I might give Cakewalk a try!

As msmcleod said, some plugins throttle down speed and there's not much what Cakewalk can do for it. I have i9-9900k system too, and CPU usage is around 40% when exporting mixes.

Gswitz: > The gate should be 100% out of the way for the quietest syllable the user of the Mic speaks. That's why I'm very careful when applying gating on speech. In normal situations I can keep all mics on but sometimes guests speak on wastly different volumes and it may cause too much bleed on the other mics. Just for clarification: "Gating" in my case is Sonitus:Gate set to reduce ~6 dB.

I've got a typical scneraio in podcast recording: there are 3 tracks of speech, recorded by large diagram condensers. My studio has good acoustics but I still prefer to get as dry sound as possible. Each track has Sonitus:Gate. Settings are quite mild as I do now want to cut anything off accidentally. I have used to clean up tracks manually but it may get too time-consuming if the recording is long and guests speak over each other. I started thinking about using gates with sidechains. Has anyone used this in podcast mixing? How do you do that? I thought something like this: Gate = Sonitus:Gate with Sidechain input in use, duck mode Track1 - Gate1, Gate2 Track2 - Gate3, Gate4 Track3 - Gate5, Gate6 Sidechains: Track2 => Gate1 Track3 =>Gate2 Track1 => Gate3 Track3 => Gate4 Track1 => Gate5 Track2 => Gate6 As a result each track ducks other tracks. But what happens if two or more guests speak over each other? Does this work IRL? What settings to use..?

I go for a walk then.

This is another great update. Thank you Bakers! Is Cakewalk ready now?

PDC (Plugin Delay Compensation) override is helpful when playing soft synths as it reduces latency of the played sound to minimum possible. However, if you record MIDI with PDC override enabled, Cakewalk places the recorded events in incorrect position; events (notes) are ahead more or less, depending on the plugin delay which may be anything from 1 to 200 milliseconds. After recording the take you have to move new take manually to the correct position because Cakewalk does not do that automatically. How you do deal with this? Do you use PDC override? Do you move clips manually by ear, do you use quantize or do you just leave recorded take where it is? Or do you bounce project and record time critical keyboards with minimal amount of time consuming plugins and PDC Override disabled? Btw, Plugin Delay Compensation is OFF when the PDC button in the Control Bar is on. It's a little confusing but I'm talking about the scenario where that PDC button is ON.

Duck is deep-frozen at the moment. Currently my daily 24 hours are barely enough for all the duties.

I know how difficult it is to address this kind of random bug. Thank you for Noel & testers & end users to finally get this fixed. It looks like the top priority of Cakewalk by Bandlab is to make Cakewalk DAW robust and preditable. -Happy user-

Helsinki, Finland

Please submit Cakewalk exact steps how to reproduce an issue. Also include full system specifications and a showcase project of your problem. You could also use screen2gif or similar screen capture program to show developers exact steps how to produce the issue. Cakewalk fixes bugs actively - just look at the list of fixes on each release. You can participate by submitting problem reports. Ranting on user forum does not help much.

Yes, unfortunately Duck is very busy at work and it's too tired after long working days to give love for Duckbar at this moment.

Ducbar Preview 2: I redesigned Waveform cache window. Now it shows green, yellow or red bar depending on the fill level of the cache. Things you can do in Waveform cache window: - Set cache size [MB] - Change cache folder location - Clear cache or - Clear cache but leave recent files intact. This is one of my personal favorite features in Duckbar as I handle lots of audio files and cache gets filled with thousands of files weekly. If cache folder size is larger than the limit then Cakewalk / SONAR fails to create any new waveform previews. Cakewalk does not warn this in any way but Duckbar is always aware of the cache fill level and notifies user if it's getting too full.

"Not something mixers typically do" - Well, depends on who you ask! I'm used to follow FabFilter Pro C2's and L2's gain scrolling reduction graph to see quickly how compressor affects waveform. Sometimes I also mix whole song to analyze it deeper in Adobe Audition. Visual inspection does not replace using ears but it's an useful aid when working with mixes in a hurry. "Old school" mixing engineers may not get any useful data from looking at the waveform but younger people get overview of the song dynamics from waveforms just by looking at them.

Duckbar is my hobby projec and I do it whenever I have time & inspiration. I'm busy entrepreneur I don't need any new work!

You may suggest anything as long as it is duck related. Other names won't work. Duckbar? Duck = Duck. Quack. Bar = Program added a floating toolbar to SONAR and it was one of the main features in program's early days. Thus Duckbar is the only possible name.

Promising news from the Duckbar factory: Today I carried out almost 50 compatibility changes and bug fixes. I have to do some major design changes because Cakewalk has evolved so much from the last time I catched up all the changes. The duck will fly again, now I'm sure.

EXE Colors and Cakewalk: I have not tested yet but if Cakewalk act like SPLAT then it won't work (goes to demo mode). EXE Colors is available for older versions, though. Just tried it yesterday and found a bug to fix.

> Please go back to the SONAR name Funny.. I like Cakewalk much more. IMO SONAR is is not a beautiful word. And maybe Bandlab may not use SONAR name. Many other goodies were left behind, like tonsof old plug-ins. Cakewalk is as well known trademark as SONAR if not even more.

Here are some Duckbar screen captures presenting Automatic crossfades button (which was present in SONAR 8 and earlier but taken away in SONAR X1). I missed that button so much I had to make my own utility to get it back. Feature requests never went thru but that's OK for me now. Crossfade button graphics is borrowed from SONAR 8.5. Longtime Cakewalkers should recognize it... Reset button: Quadcurve EQ is good EQ but it lacks all but basic features like presets (other than whole ProChannel preset). You can't even reset EQ to defaults by one button. Duckbar's Reset button gives first aid. It can reset parametric bands. Limitations: highpass, lowpass and Gloss on/off are not reset. Because there is no "Reset EQ" command in Cakewalk, Duckbar makes virtual mouse doubleclicks in the QuadEQ interface. Double-clicking knob resets it to default value. You can see how the mouse flies across the buttons. Solo button: sometimes when tweaking track's EQ you want to solo it easily. Duckbar adds Solo button to QuadEQ's left top corner to give you quick access to track soloing. Limitation: this works for tracks only - currently Duckbar can't detect if QuadEQ belongs to bus instead. There are other buttons next to the Crossfades button, too. In the screen capture Save and Save as... are shown. They can be customized but more about that later.