Lord Tim

OK, so scanning through the thread so far, I have a few thoughts on this all. First of all, MANY THANKS to all who came in and indulged my questions and replied respectfully and thoughtfully! Anyone that's been on a busy forum will know that's not always the expected outcome, especially when there's been a big shift in the payment model of a product and emotions are running a little hot. You guys are awesome So what I'm gathering is this: For a lot of us old-timers, we're not noticing a lot of the problems because we just use it. It's all so second-nature to us that we either work around the issue or just know not to do a certain task to ever encounter a certain clunk that some other (especially new) users might find. A lot of the things people are calling "clunky" are shortcomings in their knowledge of CbB to a point. EG: Complaining you need to change Track Edit Filter to Clip Gain to adjust gain rather than just holding down CTRL and dragging from the top of a clip, or thinking you have to put in nodes to adjust an envelope section rather than doing a time range selection and dragging down from the clip top. This bypasses all of that assumed clunk and makes it just as fast as other DAWs who have a similar paradigm for envelope adjustments. There's a bunch of other great examples through the thread like this. DAWs are complicated, and the fact is if you're new to DAWs in general, or even CbB specifically after being used to the workflow elsewhere, there'll be a learning curve while you get used to where everything is. This isn't entry level software, it's a full flagship grade product. I'd argue that this would be the same for ProTools, Cubase, Studio One, etc. as well. New users do get tripped up by some of the non-standard Windows conventions used for things, eg: lasso selection in one view with the Right Click Drag rather than Left Click Drag like in Windows to select items, or adding or deleting notes in the Piano Roll View with the Right Mouse Button rather than bringing up context menus. There's a very good reason these things were introduced, and they actually *do* speed up workflow substantially when you understand them, but if you come in expecting it to work like traditional conventions, it becomes what feels like unnecessary clunk. No matter what a fan of CbB you are, even the most ardent supporter knows there's areas that could absolutely be better and refined, with some amazing examples in this thread. Some hold-overs from the old CWPA days that have persisted through the change to SONAR and then into CbB, just to keep things familiar for legacy users. As much as I appreciate it, being a legacy user, I also realise this has to evolve and improve too. Some things look like they're already on the Baker's to-do list but it's a hell of a job to do it. EG: vector based UI. I'm actually shocked that this went ahead, honestly, because changing the entire function of a bitmap based UI to a new model and then ensuring it will work at different resolutions and still feel familiar to us old-timers can't be understated. Some companies NEVER attempt this kind of work on such a long-running product because the time needed is entirely disproportional to other lower hanging fruit that might benefit the general user base. But in this case, I think there's most definitely an eye on the future and a commitment to the long-term goals rather than keeping upper management happy this month. This makes me super optimistic about other requested stuff, EG: External Inserts, Scripting Language, etc. The Bakers are listening. They wouldn't be in this thread chatting about it with us otherwise. This speaks volumes to me. This is really eye-opening for me reading all of the replies and perspectives here. We obviously have to keep in mind that this is a Cakewalk forum so a lot of things are skewed in Cakewalk's favour, of course, but there's been some genuinely great suggestions and comparisons so far. I think all of us want our preferred DAW to be the best it can be, so I'm taking this thread - criticisms included - as being something really positive. But don't stop here, I'm sure there's plenty more ideas you guys have!

HAHA! Aren't forums great sometimes?

Just to be clear, I'm not knocking you at all for wanting to stay on a version, John I just think that there's a bit of confusion in general about how this model could work. People hear "subscription" and go "NO FREAKIN' WAY!!!!" and don't dig in any further, and that's fair too - most subscriptions are rubbish. I hate them too. But if they do use the Gibson model, I think it's probably the fairest way to do anything like this.

OK, that's fair But let me ask you this, did you get any updates past X3? Like, did you get any of the stuff that came in with SONAR Platinum? This is no different to buying Sonar 2024 outright for that year (and getting those 12 months of updates) and staying on it. Then in 2027 you think "you know, that new feature actually looks pretty good, I'll grab that!" and you buy Sonar 2027 and associated updates. It's pretty much exactly what you did with X3.

For anyone not in the loop or doesn't remember it properly, the Gibson model worked like this (if I'm recalling correctly!): They offered Memberships. Basically subscriptions under a different name if you want to be pedantic about it all. These were different to regular subscriptions though. In a regular subscription, if you stopped paying at any time, you lost the use of your software, no matter how long you've been paying for it. The Gibson model, however, came in a couple of different flavours: Rent-to-Own: This is a traditional subscription model for the first 12 months. You stop paying, it goes back to demo mode. However - and this is the big difference - if you kept paying for 12 months, the software essentially becomes a fully paid item. If you stop your subscription at that point, no - you didn't get any new program updates - but the program doesn't fall back into demo mode either. You can continue to pay your subscription from that point onwards to keep getting updates. Buy 12 months in advance: If you pay up front for those first 12 months, you more or less buy the software. Then you can continue to pay monthly or yearly after that. Now I mentioned this earlier in this massive thread, but let's compare that to a traditional "buy outright" model. Just plucking figures out of the air here, so don't take any prices as correct at all. Buy outright: You pay $200 (or whatever price) to outright buy a version of a DAW. Typically the lifecycle of that daw is about a year. In that year you'll get updates. But when the next version of the app comes out, you no longer get any updates to your version, and you have to upgrade to the new version to get updates going forward. Gibson model: You pay $200 for a year's membership and get SONAR (or CbB or Sonar, etc.) outright to use. This includes 12 months of updates. After that 12 months is up, instead of being forced to buy another version, you can choose to buy another year of updates (ie: like a new version upgrade) or you can pay monthly. Or... instead of having to fork out the $200 up front to buy this software outright, pay $20/month for that first year to get the same benefits but you're paying it off over time rather than that initial lump sum. It's kind of semantics at this point. You're kind of getting the same thing as an outright versioned software purchase, but with the additional benefit of being able to pay in increments if you want. I have no idea if this is what they plan to do going forward with Sonar and Next, mind you, but if it's similar to this model, it's win-win as far as a paid product goes. FWIW, I'm no fan of Gibson on any level, and what they did still gets my back up when I think about it. But this was one of the better things they did.

To me, if this was the only way to adjust fades and all of that, I'd call THAT clunky because in CbB you can do a lot of things right from the Track View. As it is, there's a lot of this in the Clip Inspector. Some good ideas in that, though!

Yeah, agreed - this is all Feedback Loop section stuff and we do see the Bakers in there fairly often, but I'm thinking this is probably a timely thing for all of us to have a look at in the main forum since it gets most traffic, in light of the payment model changing and lots of comments - both real and perceived - suddenly being thrown around over the last few days. I'd rather get some facts from people than letting the FUD take hold and people going "well it's paid, X person said it's not as good as THIS OTHER software so I might as well pay for that one if I'm paying at all" and not realising this was either pilot error or the method in CbB is different but just as easy as any other DAW once you know it.

Would you, however, pay for a new version every year, like we used to do back before any talk of memberships or subscriptions?

Yeah, this all looks fine to me. Weird! Re: the 64 bit thing, some effects really don't like the extra bit depth and misbehave, but that shouldn't affect latency. I'd still recommend turning that off for troubleshooting all the same. I'm trying to remember if the compressor has lookahead enabled, which could cause some issues. On your Control Bar at the top of the screen, have you got that PDC button engaged at all? That bypasses the automatic plugin delay compensation which lets you monitor live without plugin latency (for most cases) but it'll also cause tracks to go wildly out of sync later because it's basically saying "ignore whatever delay these effects are adding and just stream the audio" and, depending on which effects are in your project, it could be anywhere from negligible to horrific. If this is all good, this is certainly not typical for people using Focusrite interfaces here. I wonder if the sync is set correctly in the Focusrite control panel software? That can also have a bearing. Perhaps try a different USB port? Failing that, I'll defer to the Smarter Person Than Me of the forum! Like I said, quite a lot of us have Focusrite interfaces so if this is a thing, someone would have bound to have noticed something by now.

This all looks good. Sorry, one more screenshot, can you get me Preferences > Audio > Sync and Caching What have you got going in your project? Just audio tracks? MIDI too? What effects if any?

A lot of us here are using Focusrite interfaces with great results (myself included) - they have solid drivers that work well in Cakewalk. Are you able to take some screenshots of a couple of pages in Preferences for us? We'd need Audio > Devices, Audio > Driver Settings, and Audio > Playback and Recording. The other thing you might want to check is if you're using any effects that are introducing latency (eg: convolution reverbs, limiters with lookahead, linear precision EQs, etc.) - that could possibly be tripping you up, especially if you've accidentally hit the PDC Bypass button up on the Control bar. But let's have a look at your prefs first to see if anything is up at the basic level first.

Yeah, Ryan really knew what he wanted when he got Ignite to make that sim - it's actually really similar to his real amp in his studio, in fact. That said, there's a few genres that it doesn't suit that well without a bit of tweaking. He recorded a black metal band that I produced the first couple of albums here at SLS Studios and while the amp sounded fantastic as its own thing, it was much too... good? for that style. The tone needed to be quite a bit uglier than what he pulled up IMO. But for death metal or any djent or tech stuff, it's superb! Sounds pretty good backed off for rock styles too, actually.

^^ Good advice. And if the amps still sound kind of meh after that, delete/bypass the cabinet sections and use an IR loader and a good Impulse Response. I personally use NadIR: https://www.igniteamps.com/#nadir And here's a good place to start researching IRs: https://makemusicwith.me/best-impulse-responses-for-metal/ EDIT: Not sure what genre of metal you do, but if it's extreme metal, you can certainly get some pretty brutal sounds out of TH3. This is all entirely TH3, including the cabs:

For me, when it does happen (as I said, it's rarely for me), it can be pretty much any older style menu, eg: File / Edit. Or even a context menu from right-clicking. I don't really have a repeatable recipe, unfortunately.

Ah, sorry! Yeah like standard Windows dialogue boxes rather than custom controls. Think of like the menus that pop up when you click on File / Edit / Views, etc. - those standard grey Windows ones, as opposed to when you right click in a FX Bin and you notice the text is different, there's colours for different VST types, etc.

The shortcomings in video is definitely a reason a lot of film composers do recommend other DAWs to do the tasks, like being able to shift the video on the timeline without resorting to changing rendering engines, and putting in SMPTE offsets and all of that kind of stuff. As much as I'd love to see it, going too far with the video features is just asking for wasted resources when it makes more sense to use an actual NLE for a particular job, but I do think things should at least reach a minimum parity with the other DAWs that people are using for scoring/games work now.

I do definitely agree that the video part of CbB needs an overhaul, but I think that falls a little outside the scope of a lot of what we're talking about here, which is refining the existing tools to get rid of the real (or perceived) stumbling blocks when using a function or performing an action. Video view.... yeah, that's going to need more than a little tweak to get it on par with a lot of modern DAWs. I've scored stuff to it, and it's worked, but the moment you need to step out of some very tight restrictions, the wheels fall off pretty fast, unfortunately. And when we think about the percentage of users who would put that as a "priority feature" for their work (which I am one of those users), it's quite small compared to more general stuff that would benefit more of the userbase I think.

I mean, if nothing else CbB installs a little easier on Windows than Mac software does...! HAHA!

It does.... but the way the different clips overlap was pretty different in Layers. Both have their pros and cons, but I do think the current Lanes is probably a little more powerful and it's probably closer to the way other DAWs implement it (every DAW has its own thing going on though, of course).

I've been using it all day today with zero issues at all. I'd suggest starting a thread in the main forum and describing your problem and I'm sure someone could help you figure it out.

CTRL+M by default should open the Melodyne ARA panel when a clip is selected. I don't think it actually does anything when nothing is selected? But yes, M is the default for dropping a marker

Ahh Cakewalk by Bandlab is a HUGE upgrade from SONAR, especially when it comes to workflow. Have a good look through this page: https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk/whats-new?lang=en

No, Workspaces changes the layout and menus, etc. - what you're thinking of is Mix Recall.

In fact, if you untick Ask This Every Time then you don't get a dialog, and you'd get that back with Paste Special. I think this is again another powerful option that's hidden in a Shell Game. We do have the Help module (press Y to show that) which does the same thing, and if you do ALT+T you get a Tempo track at the top of the Track View, so we already have those features. Why are people saying they miss that from other DAWs? That's the big question for sure!

Really elegant We have maybe 90% of that already with multiple Arranger arrangements, but the sync mode and split screen is definitely nice!