Lord Tim

Imagine you and a friend each have to walk home along a very dangerous route in the city. You both think it's a good idea to hire security guards to walk with you, each from a different company. Your friend has a guard from Company W10. After every journey, he sits down and works out what could have been done to keep your friend safe and gets training every few days to fill in the blanks of his knowledge. It's more work for the guard, but ultimately your friend is much safer and the contract is ongoing too. Meanwhile, you've hired a guard from Company W7. This guard only gets periodic bits of training, so any savvy criminals were able to steal your wallet every now and then until he learned new techniques on how to stop them. Then, the guard stops his training contract so he doesn't learn anything past what he knew a few years ago when the contract expired, while the criminals have moved on to newer and more sophisticated ways of stealing your stuff. Which guard would you prefer to have walk with you through the city?

Yep, I reckon this is a big part of it all. Mac has been so ingrained in the industry, the old myths about "you can't do music production work on a PC" is still being tossed around 25 years later. The amount of times that I've posted (for example) "my hard drive has finally given out" and I've been met with the "mate, get a Mac!" "Why? The hard drive would have died on a Mac too, why switch platforms?" ".... because.... .... uhhh ... Get a Mac!" conversation is staggering. I'm not anti-Mac by any stretch but my preferred platform is PC and I've found it every bit as stable if you choose the hardware well. As for professional, just from my own experience alone, the last 2 albums we've released have hit the top10 on the Aus ARIA charts, and the last one hit #1 on the indie label charts, all done entirely in Cakewalk, and I've worked exclusively on PC for the last couple of decades doing work for clients around the world. Not once has a client received a file from me and gone "what kind of computer did you record this on?" It's entirely a non-thing, except for the people believing the myth. Could CbB stand to have a couple of features from "pro" DAWs? Absolutely. Does CbB also have a crap-tonne of features they don't have? Definitely. And you can absolutely do professional, world-class work in CbB. That's all I care about.

There should be a prompt asking "is this a cover of 'The Noise Militia (#38/76)' [yes] [no, cancel mixdown] [my song is longer than that short pop hit, continue]" ?

The most common way this happens is if you import in a WAV file that has a timestamp embedded, and you have Always Import Broadcast Waves at Their Timestamp checked in preferences. It's not uncommon to load in some sound effect or whatever that gets dumped on your timeline an hour along, and even if you delete it, there's a good chance there may be a rogue envelope node still left behind where the clip used to be. That'd certainly catch a lot of people out.

@Noel Borthwick It's at 100% but I'll give it a good test all the same.

I won't be back in the studio for a couple of days to test this, but I'm running a 5120x1440 resolution monitor, essentially 2x 1440p monitors as one big wide behemoth. Is this something that would kick in for me or is it more something that factors in vertical resolution?

^^ Killer advice! But I'll counter what Mark says slightly in that while more mics means more control, it also means more potential issues with bleed from other drums or phase issues. I'm a guy who uses a LOT of mics on a kit, and I'm not scared to try something unconventional, like close-mic'ing cymbals and all of that kind of stuff, but I definitely remember the first time I tried a multi-mic kit after coming from using drum machines almost exclusively before then... wow, was it ever confronting! "I want to turn the snare up. Oops, too much hi-hat in the snare mic! Can't." "The cymbals should be louder. Oops, too much snare in the overheads! Can't." "Yes, huge tom roll! We'll EQ and compress those to sound huge. Oops, cymbal bleed sounds terrible in the tom mics." AAARGGHH!! I'd recommend going as simple as possible and using as few mics as you can get away with. Start with a good overhead sound to get the kit itself sounding good. This is where I completely agree with what Mark said - the drummer needs to play well and very balanced, and the kit needs to sound great, so that those mics just hear a great drummer playing a great kit first and foremost. Then use the rest of the mics to fill in the blanks. You'd want a kick mic for sure, possibly a snare mic, and then work backwards, being careful that whatever mic you're adding isn't causing you more issues than what the goodness you're trying to gain. And yes, absolutely recording a sample set of the drums is really handy. We have great tools like Audiosnap and Drum Replacer that can enhance or even fix some disasters. I would go exclusively mono mics on any drum stuff, so you have better control over panning, and you're not introducing even more potential points for phase issues. Keep it simple and work up. Guitars, it's incredibly rare for me to go stereo because I normally record DI and re-amp later or run through plugins. I've been locked into a sound that I've had to revisit later for a remix or whatever and kicked myself for not having any flexibility to change anything. And stereo can sometimes really limit how you place stuff in the stereo field. But each to their own - if you're getting exactly what you want to hear out of your effects and it's stereo, absolutely by all means go that way. The end justifies the means, so feel free to ignore everything I said here if you're getting the results you're after.

Playing Devil's Advocate for a moment, the downside to that is if everyone gets their preferred way of working, it can either cause inconsistency in how the UI works, or eventually become feature creep, and turns CbB into some kind of ad hoc REAPER knock-off. That's not to say a lot of those ideas aren't good, or your utility isn't - there's some fantastic suggestions and ideas going on there - but there really needs to be a person guiding the ship and making some careful choices about what's in there, and unfortunately that might mean a way some of us would like to work isn't added. Using the scrollbar thing as an example, adding something in to use the middle button to pan, that might sound good on the surface but it could affect much deeper functionality depending on how that control is exposed to the UI, etc. (just an abstract example, not specifically saying this is about the middle mouse thing). If it's not hindering a the use of anything, and the thing some users would like to see added is already being adequately covered by existing functionality, the dev team would have to be prioritising features elsewhere that will make a real meaningful difference to most users. Saying something is fine as it is isn't hurting Cakewalk development necessarily. Adding something new isn't necessarily helping development either. Again, not to say that the ideas people are suggesting aren't valid or good ones, but there's got to be a priority and a plan and it may not be what we would personally like to see. I'd personally love to see a lot of additional .ini file config stuff to modify the behaviour of things, so it's out of the eye of the casual user but for those who really want to go deep, they can customise a lot of granular features to their liking. Obviously that doesn't solve every issue, but there's got to be a long term plan to keep everything focussed while dealing with a small team and finite time to add/change things. EDIT: For the record, I'm with you guys - I personally would like the menus to be better.

A dedicated audio interface is always better than a $5 built-in sound chip, of course, but it should be easily passable for listening. Mix-wise, it will be identical because all of the mixing itself happens within Cakewalk - only the "now let them hear it as it plays" part is going through the chip, so anything you bounce down to a WAV will sound as good as any interface you'd run it through. That all said, you'll have a much better experience overall with latency, etc. as well as the better listening quality if you grab even a cheap audio interface.

Come on Will, tell us how a 32 bit operating system gives you more headroom on a wave file. I'll wait. 32 bit and 64 bit BIT DEPTH certainly can affect it, but it has NOTHING to do with the operating system. You can have 32 bit and 64 bit double precision stuff happening on either a 32 bit or 64 bit operating system and the wave files will be absolutely identical sonically. It is entirely unrelated.

Beat me to it, Mark! And just to untangle a little further, the bit depth of the OS has nothing to do whatsoever with the sound of the audio files. It's two entirely separate things.

I think the big thing to keep in mind is while people like Ludwig can do incredible things with something that's basically a beefed-up toaster (and that seriously is amazing stuff!), even aside from the limitations I mentioned trying to mix with such a low-spec machine, the chance of something going horribly off the tracks increases exponentially. My crappy old machine was super streamlined, it was solid hardware when it was new and had very well researched components added in as I went along (doubled the RAM, swapped out the HDD for a SSD, etc. but I was very deliberate with what brands I got). On paper, even a fairly modern i3 would leave it in a cloud of dust without breaking a sweat. And yet there's heaps of far more capable machine that are either set up poorly, or just not spec'd to guarantee anything useful for real-time applications like audio. I can think of my video company partner when he was setting up his home studio last year. His machine that, again on paper ate my old one for breakfast, had no end of trouble and couldn't get anywhere near the track count or plugin count I could do on mine. I finally talked him into dropping the money on a custom machine and it's been entirely trouble free ever since. For that reason, I'd always suggest #1 either getting someone like Jim to make you a machine that you know will be great for audio work, or #2, erring on the side of caution and over-spec'ing your hardware to give you headroom for when things aren't necessarily the best fit hardware-wise, especially on a laptop.

I could get an insane amount of tracks out of my M620 dual core with 8GB of RAM and actually did a fair bit of mixing on there. It was a struggle at times with bouncing groups down to stems (partly also to keep things manageable too - juggling 200 tracks of vocals is crazy during a mix), and a lot of times it involved freezing things off or bumping the latency up considerably once you start loading up the plugins. Would I trade my new machine for my old one? Hell no! HAHA! But it's pretty amazing what a low spec machine can actually do when it's set up well.

For me, for such a wide monitor, the curve really helps to bring the edges closer to your vision, and stops you from having to lean in to see the edges properly. It's not quite so necessary on a regular ultrawide rather than a super ultrawide like I have, but it does make a difference. The curve isn't as severe as you'd expect so you barely notice the curve after a while, but you do miss it when you sit in front of such a wide flat screen.

Yeah, that's a crazy price - no doubt! Actually in my case it was worse: I was originally using a 3840x1080 49" super ultrawide but a freak accident with a flicked cable smashed it a couple of weeks ago ? I was right in the middle of several deadline jobs so I had to scramble and get a new one fast, and I kind of bit the bullet and thought about all of the things I didn't like about the old one (aside from it being smashed and me being out of pocket for a stupid amount of money ?). 1080 is definitely not enough vertical height for such a big monitor and the colour accuracy was horrible. Definitely night and day with both things on the new Samsung! For me, I have extra screens wall mounted for the video link that goes through to the studio live room and soffit monitor speakers so the "half height" thing is ideal for me, but it's certainly not for everyone, especially at that price. But if you need that colour accuracy and you're doing the whole dual monitor thing already, or sharing it amongst several computers (as I do) it's actually not a terrible investment.

I'm using one of these guys: Samsung CRG9 49" Super Ultrawide It's basically 2x 27" 2560 x 1440 monitors joined together with a 1800R curve. Fantastic colours, super crisp resolution, and does HDR1000 in 10 bit if you want to game on it or watch HDR content. Needs a fairly beefy video card to drive it if you crank up the settings, but I can tell you now, having CbB up on this screen is just insanely good. You have so much screen real estate to see tracks or a full console view or you can leave the inspector or browser open and really not miss the space, saving you time changing views all the time. Not cheap, and you need a pretty big desk to sit it on, but I fully rate this one.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but I have a memory of Ron really pushing against VST (or was it ASIO?) for CWPA back in the day, in favour of more open standards, but it became too much of an omission not to add it after a while.

Yeah, it was always recommended to use a Texas Instruments chipset, and even then there were variations that still caused glitches for people. I'm the same as you - when I had my Mackie Onyx, it just tended to work on anything I plugged it into but I definitely put that down to luck more than anything else.

I'm going to counter that and say that Aggressive (3) can really make some systems really unstable, since it's still an experimental option. On my particular system, it does nothing under regular load but when I'm really trying to stress it at low latencies, it improves things a lot for me, so in my case it's great. But it's not for everyone. I'd suggest to try 2 (if it's not set by default) rather than 3 first. 3 is worth trying of course, but don't be surprised if you get worse results from it.

But this is exactly my point - just because they've done that doesn't mean this is the way to make sure this is in the system. We're lucky when our posts get noticed and logged, but it's no guarantee because this is a peer-to-peer forum. Contacting support is the way to guarantee it. There's nothing at all wrong with what you're posting, in fact it's a great way to get people to corroborate your results. And if you're lucky, one of the devs will also see that. But you just never know how far it'll go. Exactly right - 100% agree with you. I do think it's a lot better now than it was in the past on the old forum but we all do need to be a little mindful of not being jerks I think. It's even easy to have what you write be interpreted really wrong, even when you're not trying to be a jerk on purpose, let alone someone who is going out of their way to be abrasive. It doesn't take much to be a decent person, even if you disagree with someone. Definitely on the same page with you there.

I will say this though, nobody should feel like they shouldn't be able to bring up problems with CbB here at all. CbB most certainly does have bugs, and certain environmental settings can expose them or make it look like it's a CbB thing. Nobody should feel like this (or any) software is above criticism just because someone else isn't experiencing the problem. It's never going to be better if we just stick our head in the sand, right? Let's be methodical and constructive so we can be helpful before anything else. And definitely don't discount the usefulness of Support. As peers here, we can only do so much, even the experienced users.

I'm not really defending or condoning anything here, just to be clear - everyone's post and the tone of their post is their own. But the point he was making kind of is correct, regardless of how the tone is presented. But again, the videos can only go so far. That's showing that something isn't working correctly, not WHY. This is a peer-to-peer forum and we're lucky enough for the devs to stick their heads in fairly frequently and help when they can, but nothing we say here gets put into the system unless a dev happens to see it and log it. Just looking at the bug list Noel was talking about from the last 3 years, if there's been thousands of long standing SONAR bugs addressed since then, think about how much is in the backlog they're getting to. If something isn't in the system and being allocated and prioritised, you don't know if anyone has logged your issue from a video on a user forum at all. Maybe it has? You just don't know. Again, sorry if anything I've posted is coming across as antagonistic or patronising at all - it's really not the intent. I just think there's other avenues you need to go down before you up-end your desk and write stuff off.

There's nothing wrong with venting when things aren't working for you - we all do it - and it's certainly fair enough. I've seen you post enough stuff around the forums to definitely not discount what you're saying as a troll, or the rest of us just sticking our fingers in our ears and going "lalala not happening, this guy doesn't know what he's doing." I believe you're genuinely having some issues there, but I also think that because you're frustrated that you're not taking all of the steps to fix stuff either. Not having a dig or trying to be insulting here, apologies if it comes off that way. There's been a few guys with some horrible problems that a lot of us haven't seen before that weren't able to be reproduced, but if you have a scan through the product release threads, because they were reported and documented correctly (not just videos, but environmental settings such as hardware, drivers, installed software, etc.) then it was sorted out - you'll even see Noel mention how he's hopped on to a Teamviewer session to to run tests to get to the bottom of it all, and yes - sometimes this HAS turned out to be an obscure bug or something else that's exposing a problem that most of us aren't seeing. I don't know any other DAW company that does anything like that without charging you a crazy premium for it. Showing the result of something only helps so much. "Check it out, when I press Alt+A the entire screen turns purple - this is buggy!!" only shows that - yes, that's really weird and looks like a bug - but not WHY. I think this is what @bdickens was getting it - if you don't work with support to get to the bottom of it and just complain about the outcome, how could they know what the issue is? That sndfile.dll Waves issue I mentioned was a good one. On first glance, CbB is rubbish because it's not able to copy over a file properly and you have to tell it to skip a file during installation. Looks like a bug or horrendous UI programming. But in actual fact, it was a bug in a specific product that is only triggered by a certain sequence of events, and it it's actually getting fixed by the people who can actually do anything about it - the CbB team have no control over it. You see what I'm getting at? You have real problems there (outside of certain shortcomings with things that need to be looked at, eg: Audiosnap, CAL, etc.) but whatever is going on in your environment won't get fixed if all we see is the result, and not able to get to the cause. Like I said, I'd be gone if my system was anything like you're experiencing, and if CbB was the app I would really prefer to use, I'd be making Support absolutely sick of my name in less than a week. (Reiterating again, I'm not trying to poke the bear or be patronizing or anything like that here!)

Pretty much what John and Noel said above - if CbB was anywhere near as buggy as you wrote in the OP, Craig, I'd be either sitting on a street corner with no clients and no money or I'd have moved on years ago. I simply have no time at all for buggy software - it's literally my livelyhood. Just looking at the percentage of people complaining about problems on here is about as common as most of the other DAW forums out there, and I think if anything is hurting Cakewalk at all, it's the minimal marketing, not the stability. Has CbB got bugs? OF COURSE it does. You can't use software as frequently as I do without coming across any, and I've reported my fair share over the years. Many have been fixed, and some things, I've been told, are on the "we hear you, it's in the queue" list. I have a laundry list of features I'm more than happy to bore everyone with if you ask me about them that I'd love to see incorporated too. But at least on all of the systems I've ever had CbB installed on (with a couple of very rare exceptions) I'd actually call it some of the most stable software I've ever used. Certainly far more robust than a lot of NLE packages I've had over the years. The places where I've had the most issues are on setups that already have big problems with the system or hardware or some super buggy plugin or something. I'm certainly not implying you're not having a horrible time at all - it sounds like it completely sucks - but there's got to be a reason for it, and why it's vastly different to a lot of us. Ultimately though, you have to make a decision here. If you enjoy using CbB, and this isn't just a rant, you have the CTO in your thread listening to your problems right now, and a team of really hands-on devs who want to help. Nobody wants to hear their software is crap, it's in their best interests to fix it. You can either work with them to see why you're not having the experience a lot of us are, or you can cut your losses and move on to something that works for you and your environment. No software is worth this kind of stress, seriously. Edit: FYI, that sndfile.dll problem was a Waves issue they're sorting out. There's a sticky thread at the top of the forum about it. Reboot your machine or kill that process before you update. This is what I'm saying about the bugs stuff - haven't got that version of Waves? No issue. Wasn't previously running CbB before you updated? No issue. But for someone doing either thing, you get that error and it's from a bug in a 3rd party product that CbB had no control over. The environment is the biggest factor here.

It *is* but it's problematic. Those plugins need to be hacked at the DLL level directly to change the bitmaps, and only some can work without breaking anything. I've done a few tests and gotten some pretty good results, but the big problem is that with any update that CbB gets, those files tend to be overwritten, so you'll need to keep copying your modified versions back over the top of the updated ones. Here's some VERY quick edits I did, with the original Sonitus EQ there as a comparison. Some things, like buttons and sliders, can't be changed so it's very limiting. I do think the dark ones look better, but ultimately I think the solution is the Bakers update the UI internally. These plugins are real workhorses and I use them everywhere, so it'd be nice to see a facelift one day!