Lord Tim

Let's take CbB out of the equation for a second. If you pan your track 100% left, then export a stereo WAV and then import that into a 2-track editor (Audacity, etc), do you see any audio on the silent channel at all? If not, I'd tend to rule CbB out of this because if there was some kind of offset going on, you'd see it. I'd look at the environment then (mixer applets, "helpful" environmental enhancement things that some drivers like to install, etc.) On the other hand, if there is audio happening in the silent channel when you look at the WAV then you can work backwards through CbB to track down when that begins.

Look down the bottom of the window where it says Basic and Advanced, and put a check in Advanced.

Today you'd just strap an L1 over the master buss and crank it until the waveform looks like a huge square wave. But as a serious answer, there's really no rules. For a lot of the non-metal stuff I do, I tend to find the chorus is naturally louder anyway because it's thicker with instruments. It's only really if things are getting lost that some parts may need to be cut and boosted, but that's really song-dependent. If the goal is to get it properly mastered at the end, bear in mind that anything you put on that final master (compression, stereo imaging, limiting, etc.) will also dramatically change what you do with any volume rides too so you might find that the part ends up sounding "quieter" in comparison because a volume boost makes the mastering limiter work more to rein it in. I think the only real answer is, does it sound good to you? Does the client like it? If yes, go "yay" and call it done.

I can confirm that I've seen this myself occasionally. 90% of the time this does work as it's supposed to but on the odd occasion it doesn't, putting in a manual tempo usually works around the issue for most projects (obviously not entirely applicable when there's tempo changes, etc.) Sonitus Delay does follow the tempo changes when it's working correctly though - I've done this a lot of times. I haven't come up with anything reproducible enough to send in to the Bakers to look at, so if you can shoot something over to support and they can solve it, you have my thanks too!

I mean, on every forum you'll see that written - I'm guessing that's what Craig is getting at. CbB is really very stable for me but you better believe that I've crashed the hell out of it/SONAR over the years, depending on the project, plugins, hardware connected - the environment makes a HUGE difference to stability. One rogue 32bit VSTi can turn an otherwise stable system into a disaster area on any DAW. Looking at the forum here, and keeping in mind that people usually only tend to mostly post when they have a question or problem, it's a pretty good ratio of happy users as oppposed to "what is this garbage I've installed?!" ones, compared to a lot of other places out there.

Yeah, Erik is spot-on there. In isolation (with a few gaps already acknowledged in this thread) I don't reckon there's a better choice than CbB overall, free or paid. You get a flagship product with a mature toolset, decent bread and butter effects that you can go from recording to final master with, active development, a hands-on dev team, and this amazing forum where even seasoned users learn a lot of stuff just by lurking here (I certainly do - you guys are awesome!) Absolutely nobody has heard any of my releases and has gone "oh... yeah, that sounds like a free Windows DAW" - the end product makes the tools to get to that point entirely irrelevant. If it sounds good and is what the client (or yourself) is after, well done. You could have recorded this on a toaster for all the listener cares. But if you do plan to work in commercial studios, having a great understanding of ProTools and being familiar with Mac is probably the smartest choice. This also goes for if you're collaborating with other people too. If 10 of your friends are using Logic and you're using REAPER, it's probably a good idea to think about running a copy of Logic too, just for importing and exporting projects, even if you might export to your DAW of choice to do the actual work. You might get somewhere the fastest by driving your Ferrari, but sometimes you need a minivan to haul all of the kids to soccer practice. Different tools for different goals.

Ah you're talking about stretching to project kind of stuff, which I agree is very fiddly. I personally never use it that way, rather I'm usually quantizing/moving transient markers around and aligning tracks that way. That's also pretty fiddly, to be fair, but you can get some pretty consistently good results if you do the prep right.

I'd say for 2 reasons: people aren't using it much, either because they don't need it, or they've found that it's too confusing or "broken" and given up trying, or what they use it for does the job well enough. For me, it works well enough to get what I need to do in it done. I've used it across large multi-mic kits very successfully, tightened guitar parts, etc. It's not broken (for most things you do on it) but it absolutely needs some stuff added to save a lot of the grunt work required to get to the powerful tool that it is at its heart. I've seen some people mention that it falls over when using meter changes and Elastique as the stretch algorithm, which has been reported to the Devs, and I certainly have put my hat into the ring with stuff I'd like to see done on it, so hopefully we get a revamp soon. But for the most part, I definitely wouldn't call it broken.

Looking at how fast the Bakers have gotten to squashing a lot of the legacy bugs lately, it's definitely worth opening up a ticket and reporting this and seeing if you can get to the bottom of it. You only need to have a quick scan over the forums to see Noel, Jon and Mark hopping into threads or even starting remote sessions with people to sort out a problem. If you ask me, the strongest thing that we have here that most other DAWs don't have, let alone free ones, is the active dev team. Honestly though, taking personal preference and workflow out of it (which I still think is the most important thing for choosing your DAW), feature for feature plus the hands-on dev presence here, I don't reckon anything else touches CbB these days. But definitely report your issue!

What is "best" ? For me, yeah - absolutely it's the best. But I've been well locked in with the Cakewalk ecosystem for years, it does what I want and it's super solid for me. There's obviously things I'd love to see added and various bugs/shortcomings that I'd love to see addressed, like we all want to see, but for me it's the best. On the other hand, ask on, say, the Tracktion forums and I bet you get a very different answer. The best DAW is the one that lets you get the job done the fastest and easiest, no matter which one it is. That's really it.

Bounce to track requires you select the MIDI and Softsynth out, select the region you want to bounce, ensure no other tracks are selected, go through options to make sure you're not including any Bus FX or any of that kind of thing. Then you need to archive the original tracks. If you want to make any changes, you have to delete the new bounce, unarchive the original tracks and go again. Freeze requires clicking the Freeze icon. To unfreeze, click the icon again. I know which one I'd rather do all day.

You'd really get most of the way there for the basic track export thing by having the ability to either export the arrangement or export the sections in the arrangement, so you'd end up with exports named something like ProjectName-Arrangement-SectionName for each slice. Even aside from mastering, this would be a huge workflow enhancement for sound design or dialog exports.

I hate it! HAHA! It's just so.... not Cakewalk, and it hurts my brain having to work out how to zoom in on things or copy effects from one track to another. But fantastic tool, ultimately - it does everything I need for releases. If you're deep in the S1 way of working, I could see how this would be really fluid. My thinking with the additional section metadata was to kind of keep it out of the way and throw it into a sub menu for each Arranger section. So in the context menu, you already have sub menus with the colour, Section Type, etc. Maybe have another sub menu under Section Type for Section Metadata where you could sneak in the art, title, artist, ISRC, etc. Cluttering stuff is bad for everyone, so sneaking things away so advanced users can take advantage of them easily enough, but getting them out of the faces of people who don't need them is a good idea.

I don't want to speak for Colin but I had a FR idea ages ago where we could extend the functionality of Markers where they could be designated as as Track Indexes and contain other metadata like ISRC numbers, and that kind of thing. But now we have the Arranger track, and better yet, multiple Arranger tracks, that makes this far more powerful than my original idea. Going to assume we're on the same page with this (please tell me to pull my head in if I'm wrong, Colin! HAHA!) but I would approach it like this: Have a Mastering Template where there's at least 2 tracks dedicated to importing in whole songs as clips (2 tracks so you can do crossfades/overlaps, etc.), have the Browser open on the Notes tab, and the routing for those 2 tracks going to a Master out. You'd set up the project Notes tab in the Browser with the Artist, Album Name, Album Artwork, UPC/EAN number, and all of the usual additional stuff like publisher, copyright info, genre, etc. Then you'd set up Arranger sections for each song, with the ability for additional metadata to be added to each section: Song Title, Artist (sometimes you want to do compilations rather than using the main album artist name), ISRC, composers, genre, copyright, album art (if different to the main Info album art), etc. Obviously at that point you'd be free to move the sections around as you please, and the CD Track ID of the numbers would update automatically. Master as you see fit. Then you'd have the option in the Export Module to export each section as its own WAV/FLAC/MP3, etc. for a digital release, or the entire thing as one big WAV compile, or export to DDP for replication (which would include all of the necessary RedBook standard lead ins, etc. automatically). Studio One does it more or less like this in the Project tab, but I think using Arranger sections would make this FAR more powerful ultimately. Combine that with some nice metering and you've got a pretty damn powerful mastering environment! The main idea with this is that we're extending on what we already have rather than adding anything new. That all said, this sounds like it would be a pretty massive job! Just being able to export each Arranger section as its own file automatically (ie: if you have 5 different sections, exporting all 5 as their own file) would be really handy too.

Yeah, I'd +1 this - those lists can get pretty crazy long.

I know there's a few people here on the forum who use Ozone 8 without any issues, so I'd suggest it's something local to your system or the project has somehow gotten a little tangled. But with that said, something in your project might also be exposing either a bug in CbB or some problem in Ozone that the devs would be interested in having a look at. It says it's created a dump file, which is good. You'll be able to send those kind of files to support to diagnose your issue. Have a look here: In the short term, though, just to get your project to open, hold down SHIFT when you open it next. You'll be presented with a YES/NO dialog to either load or skip the plugins in the project. Say NO to Ozone EQ and you'll be able to get it open and use a different EQ plugin. Obviously not an ideal situation, but it can mean getting on with the job and not losing any work.

It's possible you'll need to do a clean install. Give this page a look over: https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034066393-Clean-Install-Cakewalk-by-BandLab

Can confirm that BBCSO Core works the same re: not being multitimbral, which surprised me a little bit at first. It's a hell of a resource hog, but I've taken a leaf out of the book that a lot of virtual instrument composers do and create new tracks with the most common articulations I think I might need for each instrument, rather than playing around with keyswitches. I don't do all of them, and generally have a "Aux Articulation" track that I set up with something uncommon, but it's a very fast way to work, but very much at the expense of system resources. (Needless to say this is a VERY BAD IDEA on my retiring M620 dual core machine with just 8 gigs of ram ) From what I could see in the interview that Jesse Jost did recently, articulation maps will make short work of fiddling around with keyswitches, which will be wonderful. I've always disliked using keyswitches and trying to remember what was assigned to what and where, so having an Arranger-like track with it written there it front of you will be, well, a Cakewalk. I'd be surprised if there isn't already an articulation map available for BBCSO somewhere that could be imported or converted.

Yeah, this is fantastic work!

I think it's common knowledge by now that Steve is really a rogue subroutine written by Greg Hendershott that somehow became sentient, and learned how to post replies on the forum.

Roughly around every 6 months, so this isn't typical. I'd make sure you're updated to the latest version, then follow the instructions here: https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=NewFeatures.32.html#:~:text=Double-click the BandLab Assistant,desktop to start BandLab Assistant.&text=Click the Apps tab.&text=Under Cakewalk by BandLab%2C click,being activated by BandLab Assistant. That *should* sort it out.

The only time this has happened to me was when I had a disk failing. I've been using Cakewalk stuff for decades and never had this happen other than file corruption on a dodgy disk. I can definitely say that it absolutely SUCKED losing files and having to rebuild things before I realised what was going on, however. ? Like Bill said above, I have to ask though, who did you ask for help with this? You only have one post (the OP), which means it hasn't been anywhere here on the forum, and there's a LOT of very knowledgeable and helpful people on here that could have given you some great advice. I'd start with a disk scan first and work backwards from there. If that comes up clean, I'd still suggest troubleshooting with a different disk for your project files to rule that out entirely.

Essentially what you have here is the equivalent of walking into a fully kitted out recording studio. If you've never been in a studio before, how could you possibly expect to know how the patch bay worked, or how to set up the correct gain structures or any of those kind of things without learning how it works? And even if you are fairly well versed with a particular recording studio, walking into a different studio with different gear and set up puts you almost back at square one. Cakewalk is a professional program that gives professional results if you learn how it works first, which is why it can seem not user friendly - any complex thing like this must have the basics learned first. With that being said, I've helped a few people get started on this who have tried out other software packages in the past and after the initial getting to know how it all worked period, they all found things extremely easy compared to a lot of other apps. Like Millzy mentioned above, you can hide quite a lot of the more advanced stuff to concentrate on the things that matters to a novice user. By default, Cakewalk guides you to using the Basic workspace, which is far less busy and shows far less of the stuff that a seasoned user may need. If you're not set up to use the Basic workspace, you can learn about them HERE. But for obvious mandatory things like recording, opening and saving files, choosing instruments, etc, this is something that every DAW does more or less the same but also in their own way. You'll find a lot of fantastic tutorials, especially for new users, in the Tutorials section: https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/forum/35-tutorials/ THIS THREAD especially is a great place to start. I'd wager that after a couple of hours going through this stuff and trying things out yourself, a lot of the "what am I even looking at?" factor will just fall into place, and you'll be able to cruise along at your own pace for most things you'd want to do.

I'm running a 49" super ultrawide here so this kind of thing would be super useful for me too. Ideally, I'd love for the UI to be similar to, say, the Adobe suite where you can dock anything pretty much anywhere you like, even as sub windows to other windows.

^^ What he said.