Lord Tim

You need the Theme Editor, which was an optional element when you installed Cakewalk. Use the Cakewalk Installer and put a tick in Theme Editor in the Add-Ons section, then have a good look through this awesome forum: https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/forum/31-ui-themes/ Of particular interest is Colin's excellent Theming guide:

The whole point of the Cakewalk Installer was to take the pinch point of Bandlab Assistant out of the picture. @scook can probably tell us exactly when in-app updates became available and the Cakewalk Installer was featured on the product page, but both things have been in there for a long time now.

OK, first uninstall Bandlab Assistant from the Add/Remove programs control panel in Windows. Then follow the instructions HERE for a clean install: https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034066393-Clean-Install-Cakewalk-by-BandLab You don't need Bandlab assistant anymore as it's now covered on the first installation by the Cakewalk Installer (which is linked to in that post). Use that to download Cakewalk by Bandlab, set up an account and from that point onward, any updates are done inside Cakewalk itself.

Your system. You probably have a bunch of stuff running aside from Cakewalk that you don't even know about that's sapping your CPU cycles. Task Manager is your friend, don't have anything running that you don't need to have running when you're trying to play busy projects. Your system *should* be able to run your projects quite fine, I was doing similar stuff on a much lower powered machine for years, but I was also running a proper audio interface (which is the real answer here), and I ran it extremely lean. Nothing was running that didn't need to be running and I squeezed every last bit of juice out of that thing. I still needed to freeze off CPU heavy effects. I'll reiterate what everyone's said so far - the gear you have isn't made for professional audio. That's not to say it won't work, but you can expect a huge performance hit because of it. This will be compounded by a system not set up to run audio specifically. And you can mitigate the problem somewhat by finding the tracks that have the most CPU heavy effects on them and freezing those tracks, basically taking those effects offline, and freeing up CPU cycles. The real answer is a proper audio interface will help this problem substantially, and you can get a decent one for under $150.

OK, this is a heavy lot of effects for the kind of system you're running. Bias and TH3 will bring an older i5 to its knees if you have a bunch of them in your project, and that's 100% compounded by not having a proper audio interface, and all of the other junk running at once. I'd almost guarantee your system is also running a bunch of other stuff that's sapping CPU cycles too, and not properly set up for audio recording. The previous 2 replies aside from mine are right on the money. If you clean it up, you'll be in a much better position to do what you want, but you'll still definitely need to think about freezing tracks to take the effects offline, especially the amp sims and, depending on what you have running inside Snap Heap, those too.

Yeah, that guy goes alright! HAHA!

Dodgy hardware aside, if your performance meter is in the yellow and then pegging to the red, that means your machine is struggling to keep up with what you're doing. What effects are you running in your project? Are you running any other software when you're trying to record? (This also goes for stuff running in the background too, like any streaming gear, gaming stuff, etc.)

^^ Yep, this is definitely a big smoking gun as far as crackles goes, as well as shifting things through VoiceMeeter. OK, try this: take the ticks out of everything you're not planning to record with in the Input Drivers, and untick everything except for Speakers (Realtek) in the Output Drivers, press OK. Then you want to find where your tracks are routed to inside your project (perhaps to a master bus?) and make sure the output of that is pointing to Speakers (Realtek). Like John mentioned previously, you likely aren't actually running your tracks into the correct output in your project, By only having the Realtek selected for Output drivers, you're kind of forcing its hand a little to only use that (or at least give you a warning you don't have an output selected). This should get you sound. Will it fix your crackles? Hard to say, but I'd be looking next at the USB mic if not.

^^ do this, we're still kind of guessing what you're seeing here.

This place is also a fantastic resource for learning about room acoustics: https://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=3 I can say without question that the reason my studio sounds so good (and therefore my mixes translate well) is because of that forum.

I don't necessarily think *more expensive* monitors are the answer, but ones that are not hyped like home stereo ones are so it's not prettying up the sound too much. On the other hand, there's never a downside to room treatment. If your room is working against you, you could have the best monitors in the world and you still won't be able to make the correct mixing choices because you'll never know if it's real or not. I'll go so far as saying that THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in your mixing chain isn't your DAW or your speakers or your outboard gear, it's your room. And then I'd look at the speakers after that if you're finding them lacking.

OK, it's both simple and complicated to answer this. I remember the first "proper" demo my band recorded back in the early 90s. Up until that point, I'd done everything myself in my own dinky home studio with whatever gear I'd accumulated, and mixed it on speakers connected to a powered PA mixer. To me, that sounded great (narrator: it was NOT great) and really didn't translate to any other system well. We went half way across the country to do our proper demo in a real studio and I walked away from there thinking we did OK... until I played it on my gear at home. It was thin, the reverb and delay levels seemed weird, the balance of everything was out... what was going on? How does reverb level change on a bus ride home? ? It was at that point I learned the difference between a treated room and an untreated room, and the difference between Yamaha NS10 speakers and my listening environment. It blew my mind! The other wake-up call I had was when we did our first full album. Absolutely moronic mixing decisions by me aside, this was all done in a very expensive studio with a bunch of vintage gear, and then taken to one of the best mastering houses in the country. We were all fairly onboard with the overall sound of it by the time it got to mastering, but then we put on reference material as a comparison, and now that reference material sounded small and pokey. Our album was MUCH fatter sounding, MUCH more high end sizzle, the snare was MASSIVE compared to this stuff. The mastering engineer did his job based on our suggestions as for what kind of sound we wanted to go for, and we all went home and got on with our lives, not really obsessing about the album much for a while, being happy to listen to something else for a change. By the time we came back around to listening to our album, it sounded like a dumpster fire. Why was the low end so muddy? What was all that fizzy high end? Dear god, why is the snare so fat? Mind blown again! The lessons from this were perspective and environment, and ultimately experience. The first thing is environment: If your room isn't treated well, or your speakers aren't accurate, you have NO IDEA what you're listening to. And even if your room IS treated well, different speakers bring out certain elements more than others. For example, I absolutely HATE NS10s because the upper mid bump they have makes my ears tired in no time at all, but other people swear by them because they're so unforgiving. So you need to be familiar with your speakers and listen to a bunch of reference material on them to understand how they're going to react to "properly done" pro mixes, so you can be objective about it all. And if you find that when you sit in your mixing position all of the bass goes away or you're not getting a lot of positional clarity for certain instruments, it really means you need to look at your room acoustics. Perspective: Our brains lie. That fizzy guitar sound? Listen to that for 8 hours straight and I bet when you listen to a good guitar tone it sounds flat and boring. That huge low end you have in your mix sounds absolutely fine if you've listened to it all week and it makes commercial releases sound thin. But I also bet that if you took a break from those things and came back to them later, it'd sound like garbage. Unless you're stopping for sanity breaks, which means time away from a mix, and regularly listening to well-mixed reference material to reset your ears, your brain will slowly get more and more skewed with that you think is good. This also plays into the environment thing too: Even if you're having sanity breaks and doing everything you can for a good mix, this environment can also trick your ears into thinking it sounds good when some room modes are comb-filtering out really important information that you're trying to compensate for. You need to know your room, and understand the limitations of it so you can trust that the reference mixes you're going back to for sanity checks work. Your room doesn't have to be perfect (few are) but you need to at least know what's going on in it so you can make a proper decision. And that leads me to experience: How do you know how your speakers sound compared to others? Listen to great mixes on each of then. How do you know if there's any holes in your frequency spectrum in your room? Listen to great mixes in there and compare that experience to other places that sound good. Maybe even get hold of some acoustic measurement software and go through and properly treat your room if it's definitely not working well. The more variables you can take out of this, the better. How does a good mix sound on your studio monitors? How does it sound on your little boom box speakers? In your car? On your laptop speakers? On your phone speaker? They all sound VERY different, I bet. But the trick is to understand that if a pro mix that you think sounds world class sounds that way on all of those speakers, so will yours. There's really no one-size-fits-all mix, only your ideal listening environment, and experience telling you what you need to do to compromise to have it work on the other places. So my advice: Listen, listen, listen. Get something you know sounds fantastic that was commercially released that you love the sound of. Play it EVERYWHERE and really pay attention to how it sounds on each system. You'll find it will probably sound radically different. And then take it back to your studio monitors and get used to how it feels in your room. REALLY listen to it. Take some notes as to how you think it differed on each system - was the snare too poky and loud on your laptop speakers? Did the vocals get a little lost when you listened in your car? This happens, and you can't really do anything about each listening environment, other than understanding how it changes. If this is a commercially released pro mix and it's doing this, you can feel fairly safe that it's going to be comparable to other commercially released pro mixes, so if you're aiming to get yours to compromise in the same way across each system, then you know you're on the right track. Don't obsess over the minutiae - if you're worried about your reverb sounding quieter or your kicks not being as deep on some systems, and it's doing more or less the same thing as a pro mix is doing, it means your brain is starting to lie to you. Refer back to the pro mix for a sanity check. Get as familiar with your room and speakers as possible with pro mixes and then use your judgement of how your mix sounds in comparison to theirs in that environment. If you can get it in the same ballpark, then take it to a proper mastering engineer for the final touches. You're already 80% there at this point, but the final EQ and compression that an experienced mastering engineer can give it will help it translate even better across systems. It will NEVER be perfect, and it isn't for ANY mix, but this can at least ensure you're actually comparing apples to apples with everything else when they're played back on different systems. So yeah, that's a lot of words to say that "yes, it's supposed to sound different, and get some experience" but it honestly takes years for the lightbulb to truly switch on. Be methodical but also give yourself a break too - you need to train yourself to understand when your brain is just being a jerk to you. We've all been there! (Some days, I still am ?). Good luck!

I'm going to take a guess at this and say you have a Realtek sound chip that's built into your motherboard, and it sends sound out through the Line Out (headphones). In a lot of cases this will default to SPDIF rather than the actual output, which is not what you want. Either that or it's defaulted to your HDMI monitor audio, which is definitely the wrong thing to use. To save any further guesswork, open Cakewalk and press P to bring up Preferences. In Audio > Devices, in the Output Drivers section, make sure there's ONLY a tick in Realtek Speakers 1/2. Press Apply. Then go to Audio > Driver Settings and make sure that selection appears in the Playback Timing Master. Press OK. If I'm wrong about the type of audio chip you have, or you're having no luck, go back into Preferences > Audio > Devices and take a screen grab of what you see and post it here. We're pretty much flying blind with any advice without knowing what hardware you have available (other than selecting the right kind of driver model, like Mark mentioned earlier).

There is absolutely nothing wrong with making music just for the pure enjoyment of it, or even uploading that for people to hear/buy. It's sort of refreshing doing that, actually. I personally hate the marketing side of things, it seriously takes all of the joy out of it for me, despite the knowledge and experience I have from doing it for so long. Luckily our bassist thrives on that and looks after the bulk of it for our band and our label. Honestly, if you're not planning to do stuff on a commercial level like we do, save yourself the headache and focus on what you love instead, IMO.

^^ agree with this stuff - I'm still learning (and big props to the community here for the free education I'm getting!), but if you mean "how long until I'm able to do anything useful on it" then like all pro software there's a learning curve, and some stuff will click with you better than others. Start here with these excellent video tutorials, this should get you up and running really fast:

If the file is set up to be looped already, drag in it, select the clip and do CTRL+L and that should round off the corners of the clip and allow it to be dragged out in time with the tempo.

Channel Tools is super handy - I use it either for spreading things out (although I tend to prefer Waves S1 for that), but it's also great for narrowing the stereo image (say you got a live drum mix and the overheads were panned hard right and left and recorded as a stereo track, but it feels like it needs to be a little more intimate - it's easy to drag the width in), or swapping channels, or purposely screwing with phase alignment... Like Erik says, there's probably better tools for certain tasks out there, but this is built in and does the job just fine in lieu of having them.

Ha, thanks! You can blame the lyrics in the thrash band on the other guys - I was kind of added as a guest that somehow got promoted to vocalist when their last guy left. Hell of a tongue-twister band, I'll say that much! LORD is fairly straightforward for the most part, with a few fun curveballs. If nothing else, we love to rip out a fun cover, and I have to say that stuff really makes you think about production in a very different way, and how you can apply it to other styles. There's been a lot of "but what the hell are they even doing?" moments that have turned into "a-haaaaa" learning moments for me over the years.

The other thing that John mentioned is a good place to look too: antivirus. If you haven't excluded your audio directory, every time you stop the transport, your AV may be being over-enthusiastic and treating the audio files as modified and scanning them.

This thread bump let me give this a bit more thought for my "accidentally bump Y and open the Help module" annoyance - why not just remap Y to something else? I'm usually in the Smart Tool so I just bound it to selecting that, so it essentially does nothing. Good job, me! (Mind you, I still think there should be a Close item in the docking menu)

Check out the Arranger track: https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Arranging.02.html When I write, I do pretty much exactly that - work out a tempo, pull up a metronome, then go off and record my riff/backing ideas in sections. Then I define an Arranger Track section for that part. Once I get a bunch of these done, you can go to the Arranger Inspector and put them in whatever order you like. It's *extremely* quick to build up a song structures this way, or even play with multiple structure since nothing is locked in until you commit the arrangement.

I did "Women" for a movie soundtrack once and I have to say that it was a hell of a job matching the original production - it was all about nailing the reverbs (many of them), delays and modulation, and the crazy number of backing vocals and sneaky tricks they used to get them to sound that big. The arrangement itself was relatively simple but man... that was a difficult mix to get right!

Photography used to be a nice hobby for me but I keep annoying myself by turning hobbies in to part of my various day jobs ? At least the dream of one day being a chicken sexer or recreational proctologist is still on the cards... ?

You and me both, my friend!

I don't think anyone here is having any fun at your expense - I'm certainly not at the very least. If you're having a crappy time of it, the Coffee House is a pretty good place to come and have a laugh and take your mind off of it, right?