Lord Tim

How did you go following the advice about the redistributables that a few of us posted? Did that help?

That said, things just shouldn't disappear like that either. I'd be inclined to run a good virus / malware scan, and disk error check too just to be on the safe side.

Sounds like a corrupt system library. Have a look at my reply and @msmcleod's reply in this thread and see if that helps you:

Where is your master output routed? It sounds like all of your drivers are in place and set up, so it's got to be either a global mute/solo somewhere, or incorrect routing. Maybe a screenshot of your main window (with your master bus open) would help.

My gut is telling me either Windows has "helpfully" updated your audio hardware drivers and changed stuff around, or some hardware has been unplugged or changed since then and Cakewalk has tried to redetect it and sent it to the wrong place. What audio interface are you using (if any)? And if you look in Preferences > Devices, and Driver Settings, do you see it there? If you do, have a look to see where your tracks are being routed to in your project (eg: a master bus). Is that bus sending the output to the sound card you expect? If this is all as expected, grab us a screenshot so we can see if you have some kind of global mute or solo active.

Pretty odd! I'm using one of those myself with no issues on multiple machines. If Cakewalk has crashed, you should get a crash dump generated which you can send to support to see what happened. Have a look at this thread for some information:

I find 1440 is my sweet spot for 27". I'm currently running a 5120 x 1440 curved monitor and it's great, and the resolution complements the 17" 1080p panels on the sides well.

Actually these days they recommend -1dB for online stuff so when it's transcoded it doesn't peak out, so that's not a bad rule of thumb for your own stuff either I think. For WAV, so long as it's not peaking, it's fine (I usually aim for -0.1dB on my masters intended for CD). But if you do intend for this to go up online, definitely drop to -1. One tip you might want to do is to "pretend" master in CbB first so you can predict what will happen once you take the mix into Samplitude. Mastering usually involves some kind of limiting, and if you plan to give it a good whack of limiting (some styles really benefit from being smashed like that) then you'll often find your mix will have a radically changed balance once all is said and done. So one way to kind of predict what will happen is to strap a limiter over the master bus in CbB and squash it as loud as you think you'll be limiting later. Adjust the balance of everything again to suit it having a limiter on, and then TAKE THE LIMITER OFF and export that mix into Samplitude. It'll sound weird and poky until you start doing the actual mastering but you'll likely end up with better results. A lot of mastering guys ask for stems as well as the stereo mix just for this reason, so if anything gets lost in the processing, you can bump it up in the mastering suite rather than ordering a new mix from the client.

That might be a better question for Bandlab, the company (the people who run the music social network) than here, which is focused on the Cakewalk application specifically (of whom Bandlab are the owners of Cakewalk, but separate to the social network). But go on any YouTube comments section and you'll find those kind of people all over the place there too. And Twitter. And Facebook. It's pretty awful. Here, at least, we have a fairly proactive team of moderators making sure this place is as inclusive as it can be, while trying to keep some kind of order in general. They don't always get it right (as no moderators can ever do) but I think most people here would agree it's a pretty friendly and productive space. Your best bet is to contact the Bandlab company directly here to voice your concerns: https://help.bandlab.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404926548121-How-do-I-contact-BandLab-

This sounds like a long hall or plate reverb to me, maybe around 4 seconds or so? Perhaps longer. It's definitely high passed, and it's low passed too with a very steep decay in the high end once it gets past a few seconds. You can emulate that a little bit by just rolling the high end off, but I suspect this may actually be a convolution reverb IR of a real space (or actually a real space!), or a pretty accurate hall algorithm. I'd agree with most of what Teegarden wrote there, other than in this case this actually is quite a long reverb tail. But everything else regarding pre-delay and sidechain, etc. is good advice. Start simple though, see if you can find a good reverb to match first, and then start seeing what needs to be done after. The easiest thing is the EQ shaping and then the pre-delay. I'd wager that'll get you pretty much where you need to be, but if that fails, ducking the reverb while the vocal is loud with a sidechain is a great way to add clarity.

I think there's an argument for both pre and post fade, but in argument for pre-fade, imagine you have a live multi-mic kit. Each drum will be as loud as it is, and those room mics will pick up the kit as a whole. Then when you get the multitracks of the kit into your project, you might find you'd like the hats quieter, the kicks and snare louder, etc. so you'd adjust those on each kit element, but the room mics wouldn't change - that's baked into what the room "heard" so to speak. Of course, this isn't a real kit, so you don't have to put up with the limitations of live mics either. You might find the kit sounds great in the room but the cymbals are way too loud, so you have to jump through a bunch of hoops with de-essing, EQing, etc. to tame it all. For a fake room mic, just turn the send down on those elements, so do it as a post-fader send. It's ultimately whatever works for the track, really.

^^ Great advice! To expand on what Mark said. I'd also tend to make sure your reverb is set to a "room" kind of sound rather than a big hall wash, then set up a pre-delay on it if the reverb plugin has it (or put a delay in the chain before the reverb plugin with 100% wet and a delay time of 50 - 200ms), and then I'd use EQ to sculpt the sound a little, rolling off the highs especially, and more than likely everything below about 200Hz too. The idea of that is that sound takes a while to travel to another part of a room and reach the room mics there, so you'd want to add the pre-delay in to give it the illusion of it travelling. Some people like to time-align their room mics to be in time with the initial drum sound when doing live drums but that always makes it sound much smaller than if you just left it alone, I reckon. The reason I'm suggesting a room kind of reverb rather than a hall or plate or anything like that is it's generally more dense sounding, so you get that "boxed in" kind of room feeling, and EQing it will make it sound further away and stop it from clashing with your direct drum sound. There's nothing wrong with adding a send on that room track to a bigger reverb if you want it to sound like the space is bigger, but I'd definitely start there. I'd also tend to experiment with maybe adding some saturation to the room track as well - the Pro Channel Tape Emulator is a good one to throw on there to give it some thickness and grit, but you'd definitely want to have this all fairly low in the mix if you go this way unless you're purposely going for a trashy kind of drum sound (which sounds killer, but it won't work for everything).

I never really found the -18dB level thing to be true, personally. So long as you're hitting with the level in a decent range (and understanding how that relates to the gain structure of that particular plugin is being affected) then it's all good. Honestly, most plugins really don't care how hot you're hitting them, even into clipping - internally the math takes care of that pretty well - you can see that with null testing. But dynamic or distortion type plugins definitely need to be more considered when setting this up. Not that -18 is bad, mind you - if that works for you, then great! Going out to outboard gear, on the other hand.....

I haven't, but check out the Tutorials forum here - there's a great series by Cactus Music that goes really in depth right from the very beginning to really getting in deep with Cakewalk.

The rule really is work from the clips onward - think about it like building blocks: 1. Record your audio properly with good levels (if you're doing the recording yourself). 2. If the audio isn't the level you're aiming for, use the Track Gain control to adjust it. You can also use Clip Automation envelopes to adjust the individual clip level on your track to (say you have 5 different clips on a track and one of them is particularly quiet, you can boost the one up using Clip Automation). You're really aiming for -12dB to -3dB maximum. 3. Add in any track effects. 4. Adjust the Track Volume. You'll rarely be leaving this at 0dB - drop that down to at least -6dB initially to give yourself some breathing space. There's nothing wrong with then pushing that up to 0dB (or even more) if you need to, but don't start there. 5. Repeat that for every track. 7. If you've sent those tracks to busses, check to see if the busses are peaking out. If they are, turn your tracks down so they're not. As a tip, you can select all of your tracks you want to turn down, and then, while you're holding down the CTRL key, adjusting the Track Volume on one of the tracks will turn them all down at once. Do that until your bus is no longer peaking. 8. Add any bus effects. 9. After you've sent your busses to your master, if that's peaking, turn your busses down, just like you did with your tracks. 10. Add any master bus effects. 11. If that's clipping then, turn that down - this is the most important thing in the chain, if the master is clipping, your mix will distort in the export. If you take that kind of methodical approach to it all and get it right as you go along, you'll get into the habit of just knowing roughly where to set your initial levels and it'll all come together really fast by itself. Obviously don't sacrifice your actual mix by watching your levels too much - take a bit of a "fix the issues as they come" approach to it all rather than treating any of this as a set in stone rule - don't mix with your eyes, use your ears. Like I said, having stuff peaking along the way isn't a show-stopper. Try to avoid it, but if it happens, it's not a massive problem until it gets to your master. Do not clip that.

Yep, turn down the tracks. I don't think I've ever done a mix where I've just left the faders at zero. Basically, you should set your input gain up to be fairly hot (somewhere between -12dB and -6dB preferably, but not passing 0dB ever) so it's delivering the right level signal into any effects on your track. How your compressors and saturation effects especially react to your track is tied directly to how loud the signal fed into them is, so get that right first rather than trying to mix from the input gain - use that only for prep. Then, after all of your effects are on, a good starting point is about -6dB volume for every track and then cut or boost as you see fit. Then, if you get it all sounding great and your master is peaking, and you don't feel like adjusting everything else (which I'd suggest you should do first so you're sending the right gain into the master bus) then just simply turn down the master. Things won't clip internally inside Cakewalk, so you can have things peaking out everywhere and it really doesn't matter if you're just summing tracks - so long as you don't clip the final output. This goes for any busses you're summing to as well, so if you have 12 guitar tracks going into a Guitar Bus, and that's not clipping, but then when you add that together to your Vocal Bus, your Drum Bus, your Keyboard Bus, etc. and it's clipping your master, turn the busses down. Of course, if there's effects involved and you have your levels too hot, you might end up with unwanted distortion or weird compression and that kind of stuff, so try to get the gain right first at the track level, then watch how loud you're going into your busses to avoid that issue. As I said, it's not the end of the world if you're too hot into your busses, so long as the final out isn't clipping, but if it's something crazy, you should really sort that out first.

^^ good idea This is what I did for ages on my old machine purely because it didn't have the resources to do everything in the one project. I'm a little more lazy now on simple projects since my current DAW has lots of power, but stuff with heaps of vocal layers, choirs, etc, I still use this method. Great to keep things clean, and a good backup strategy in case of a rare project corruption.

Go nuts and use a multiband compressor, you can crush, shape and de-ess all at once! ? ... You know, I've never actually done this but now I think about it, it's not the worst idea I've ever heard ?

For the EQ and compression, it's kind of what you want to achieve with it mostly. Let's say your vocal has a lot of muddy frequencies in there, or you have a very bassy voice. If you run compression first and then EQ to fix that stuff, the compressor will be working extra hard on stuff you'll just be throwing away later. In that case, I would put the EQ first to correct any problems and then the compressor. On the other hand, if you like how the vocal sounds when it's compressed, but you think "maybe it could use a bit of air" then I'd do EQ the high end boost after the compressor so I'm not messing up the dynamics or having the compressor make the boost affect the vocal's sibilance. Reverb, definitely after the compressor, and I'd usually put it after the EQ too, although be careful of the reverb itself - it can also muddy up a good vocal sound. Have a look in the reverb plugin itself for EQ settings and try rolling off the highs and lows. You'd be surprised how much you can take out without it being noticeable, but it'll make the vocal sit in the mix a LOT better.

I had similar specs to that on my previous laptop and was able to do reasonably large productions on it, but it wasn't fun. And it definitely benefitted from having an SSD rather than a spinning hard drive, like you have. The moment you start getting the audio track counts up (if you plan to do audio work rather than MIDI) you're going to run out of steam pretty fast. 8 gig of RAM is very slim. You'll need to get used to freezing off effects tracks and synths so it plays everything. It's doable, but not a great experience, honestly. But like Mike said, asking questions here or dropping into the Tutorials section will give you a good idea of what's possible for how you plan to use it.

Windows may have possibly broken a system library. See if this thread helps:

OK, this smashed a couple of wish list items for me! Sensational! ?

Workspaces can save keyboard layouts. You either want to save your current Workspace so it keeps the keybindings or go and untick that in the Manage Workspaces menu. http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Lenses.2.html

Be methodical about it - open the project in Safe Mode and say no to everything (obviously don't save the project over your existing one in this state). If it exports correctly, it's almost certainly a plugin. See if this exports OK with every track archived - it'll give you a blank export but if it doesn't crash, that's a good sign. If the archived trick works, archive only the first half of the tracks in the project. If it crashes, it's in that batch. Pair that down to half of those and see which one it is. Eventually you'll be left with the problem track(s). Before doing that, I'd say investigate turning off the double precision engine in Driver Settings, and/or Use MMCSS in Playback and Recording and see if that has any bearing - some plugins and drivers have a bit of a cry about this stuff.

Not really sure why you're seeing deleted effects being loaded, but try loading the project in Safe Mode: Open Cakewalk and then when you select the project you want to open, hold down shift. You'll be presented with every effect in the project that you can say yes or no to. Say no to everything except for Groove Player (this is the Metronome) and that should give you a clean project to save. If you see any effects after that, that would be very weird. More information and screenshots, etc. would be useful to help you troubleshoot that.