Lord Tim

I have to say I was one of the biggest Stamp My Little Princess Feet Angrily guys when it came to wanting a Ripple Edit and Crossfade indicator on visible buttons - those little things can really add up to a lot of saved time if they're in front of your face, rather than hidden in a menu where you'll accidentally destroy a project because you didn't double check them. So I'm totally on board with the visual indicators thing! Keyboard shortcuts are definitely my go-to otherwise, although I have made a bunch of buttons in the Custom Module to save me menu diving or just being out of habit. I have Save and Save As on there just because if I'm using the mouse, sometimes it feels easier (mentally easier?) to click a button than CTRL+S it. I also have Cut Special, Copy Special and Paste Special in there, in case I'm deliberately wanting dialogue boxes, and for no menu diving, I have Reverse Clip, Open Meter/Key view, Insert Meter/Key, and Tile Projects in Columns (I have a 5120x1440 monitor so opening up multiple projects side by side to copy over tracks or settings is easy at the click of a button). What I'd love is an extension of that of that module to have icons instead of text labels and have more of them available rather than 9, so that way if anyone was coming from a "I love my toolbars" kind of UI experience, they could effectively recreate it in an entirely optional module. Best of both worlds then. You've got me wondering when the big shortcuts overhaul happened now, Mark! I was sure it was 8.5 to X1 but it might have been during some of the first iterations of the X series when it happened. X1 was a pretty rocky start but it came together really well in no time!

Hold up, when did the keyboard shortcuts change? I'm remembering it as from 8.5.x to X1 but was that actually later?

Not really, honestly. I was like you - the X series really was a hard one to get used to initially so I tended to default back to using 8.5.x but I eventually bit the bullet and went all-in on the Skylight interface and I have to tell you, going back to pre-X SONAR felt like a massive step backwards once you work out how flexible it can be. The biggest thing to get used to is not having Every Damn Button Ever right in front of you in the toolbars - that felt to me like I had a lot of stuff taken away from me, but when you realise it's completely unnecessary depending on how you have your Smart Tool configured, or what you have in the Browser or Multidock, you really don't miss them at all, and you have a far less cluttered UI as a bonus. You can remap keyboard shortcuts to suit 8.5.x if you like, but I'd definitely recommend getting used to the defaults - they're MUCH more well-thought out (eg: B for Browser, I for Inspector, D for multiDock, C for Control bar, etc. etc.) If you're running 64 bit Windows and 64 bit SONAR + plugins, it should all import in fine. If you're running 32 bit DX/DXi plugins, they won't transfer over because CbB is 64 bit only, and, of course, if you're on 32 bit Windows, you're kind of out of luck. In 2023, you probably shouldn't be running a 32 bit OS for anything though. X1 was.. what... 2010? 2011? ( @scook help me out here!) so a lot of us who jumped on board have had more than a decade to get used to it all now, and I can't see it leaning back towards the 8.x style GUI in any way at this point, but you can go some ways to customise colours, button icons and layouts by using different themes, which you can see a few amazing user-created ones HERE. I actually think a 8.5.x theme would be pretty cool But yeah, my biggest advice is stick with it - give it a few weeks to get used to the new ways it works and the new keyboard shortcuts and I'd say you'll get on board pretty fast.

Wow, I haven't heard them called bell-bottoms since I was a teenager - that definitely got traded out for "flares" here since then! Then again, being Australia, I'd almost expect there to be a swear word in there somewhere ?

Guys, first of all thanks so much for the great feedback on Truth Always Hurts by My Whisper that I posted a while back. I shared the comments with the duo and they are absolutely stoked and asked me to pass on their thanks to you all. Once again, I can't take credit for the writing on this one, sadly, but I have my greasy mits all over the production, keyboards, drums and video clip. (I should probably wash my mits. ?) This was definitely very 70s hippie influenced, and for all of you music nerds out there, see if you can count the number of modulations in the middle-8 section - completely insane and yet actually sounds like music rather than theory-flexing! Anyway, put on your flares, start up your tape flangers and have a listen. Hope you guys dig this one too. Interested in the video trivia? Click here:

Check to see where the track is going - if it's going to a mono effect or a mono bus (check the Track Interleave button to see if it's set to mono or stereo everywhere along the signal path) then panning will just basically change the volume, based on what your pan law is set to.

Cheers, Danny - I appreciate that! Ironically, the processing that I did on that is pretty much textbook "What NOT To Do" when sending stuff out to a mastering engineer, but I really intended it as just some final polish to make it more "radio ready" so to speak, with just Cakewalk bundled effects. It gets the job done but when I do any proper mastering work, I certainly approach things a little differently. For a mix, less is definitely more when you're at this part of the process!

We'll, no. Free or not, this works correctly on every system I've tried it on, and you can see by just looking at the forum that there's no other people complaining about this issue - the forum would be full of complaints if this scan path issue was a general "but it's free" thing. Bear in mind that an uninstall is different to the clean install instructions that @scook shared - if you can't specifically choose your VST path when you're reinstalling CbB then you haven't done a clean install. If it actually was a clean install and you're able to let it use the correct defaults the installer provides, and it's still scanning everything, then something is seriously wrong somewhere.

You know how you'd be running a reverb or delay or something and you have the tails continue when you press stop? Sometimes when you stop the transport and start it again, you'll get a pop of sound from the previous decay play when the track starts. Pretty annoying when you're doing a bounce down and you have this rogue reverb tail start it off. Flushing the plugins empties out the buffers so you don't have any random effects tails turning up. Some plugins hate that though, and will crash, so turning it off will stop that from happening. I haven't had the need to turn mine off with the plugins I personally use, and it's saved me HEAPS of time having to redo bounces because of stray left over tails, so I leave mine always on.

@Kris Sutton Acecore.dll is part of Microsoft Office, and shouldn't be in your scan path at all. If you go to Preferences > File > VST Settings, what do you have in your VST Scan Paths box? It's possible you have the entire Program Files or Program Files (x86) folders listed in there rather than specific VST directories, so it's scanning everything and giving you this problem.

Excellent - that'll definitely help track the issue down faster, hopefully it gets sorted out for you soon

@Light Grenade, if you go into your Preferences > File > Initialization File and set the Option of ExceptionHandlingSeverity to a value of 7, OK and restart CbB, you might be able to get it to give you a crash error rather than it just going away. When it crashes, you should be able to capture a dump too, like Noel talks about here:

Cheers, all - these comments are great! I'm passing them on to the duo and they're stoked. New one drops in 4 days, hopefully you all dig that one too!

I think I know what you're talking about, re: "clashing" chords - there's some harmony vocals and keyboards that are intentionally playing against the guitar chords, kind of creating stacked poly chords. When we laid it down first, I was inclined to make it "correct" but the more we listened to it, the more we dug the slight dissonance to it because it made it more interesting.

... thanks, I think ?

Not directly, but what I do is select all of the tracks in the project you wish to import, save those as a track template, then copy all of the track data. Then, in the new project, import in that track template and paste the copied track data into the imported tracks. Not the most elegant way to do things, but it does the job. I find it's best to open both projects and tile the windows side by side so it's easier to see where things are being copied. I'd love a more direct solution where we can import in other projects to new or existing tracks so it cuts this middle step out of the process, but this works in the meantime.

32 bit plugins can be fine but if there's going to be any point of instability, that's one of the first places to look. This doesn't sound like there's instability, though, just latency. Latency wise, you generally don't get more from 32 bit plugins vs 64 bit, though. What plugins are you using? Some require look-ahead buffers, like limiters or linear phase EQs, and some require sample buffers, like convolution reverbs. Both of those will definitely introduce latency into your projects.

Yeah, that was a shocker! Decent return to form (although it probably needed some editing to cut out a lot of redundant parts) but wow, the mastering was diabolical ? I suspect that was under direction from a certain drummer, however...

I tend to squeak from playing guitar but only when I'm playing REALLY fast, and it's not coming from my hands ? ** This post sponsored by Depends Undergarments for Guitarists ™ **

Does it sound good? There's really no rules other than if you're sending stuff out to a third party mastering engineer, don't crush it so much they have nothing to work with. It's actually really common (especially back in the old analogue days) to add some glue compressors to the mix bus, so have at it, I say!

Doesn't seem to something that's widespread, so I'd suggest it's environmental to your setup in some way, most likely a plugin or a driver not releasing. You can help the Bakers track down the cause by getting a crash dump when it hangs next, zipping it, uploading to a file sharing service (eg: Dropbox, Google Drive) and getting it over to support to analyse. Info here:

This was actually all filmed in front of a green screen to playback and click so we had a solid foundation for any timing (which we did NOT have for the upcoming clip - on that we used a little Bluetooth speaker on location and nobody could really hear it, but it still looked pretty great despite everyone kind of guessing where the beat was!) So long as we lined up the click count-in on every take, the edit was straightforward to get it to all work, and their miming was pretty good. We could have shot this in front of a white cyc room, really, and saved me a few days of comping in post production but I wanted to at least have something there to give the idea of depth in the scene so when we did any dolly shots into them, they didn't just get bigger in frame, you could see the horizon drop off as the camera changed angle, etc. It's funny, we had the option of putting anything behind them and I did try a few things, but we kept coming back to mostly white. Sometimes simple is best.

Cheers, Tom! The irony is the guitarist is actually a phenomenal bassist, a cross somewhere between Steve Harris, John Taylor and Flea, and used to play in my band back in the 90s so he definitely has all the chops and then some, so I love cranking his bass loud whenever I get a chance, but at the core of it, this is an acoustic duo so we're trying to be as respectful as we can to keep the "innocence" of that, while still adding all of the production to make a full mix of it. The bass is definitely a deliberate stylistic choice on this. But man, I love it when that guy cuts loose, it's a real treat to watch and hear!

Cheers! Their new one is dropping in about 10 days - really 70s vibe this time. I'll make sure I give it a plug on here too.

It's likely you have some other process locking the file you're trying to save to, possibly an antivirus app (eg: Windows Defender) that's scanning the file at the time, or it's being indexed by a file sharing app like One Drive or Dropbox. If you temporarily disable any of those things, can you save? If not, are you able to save to some other filename or location? Expanding on what @Promidi said, it could also be a permissions issue. It's not a great idea to run Cakewalk as Admin, generally, but it's a useful troubleshooting step. If you are already running as admin, unless you have a really good reason to do that, don't. Run it as a regular user or you run into all kinds of wacky stuff like being unable to drag and drop things from File Explorer to Cakewalk, etc.