[CLOSED] Cakewalk 2020.04 Early Access 1

[Noel Borthwick]

1 hour ago, foldaway said:

I've noticed that when loading a complex project only 2 cores are used for initialising VST plugins.   This can cause projects to take a very long time to load.     For this upcoming release would it be possible to increase the number of threads used to initialise the VST plugins?  If possible upto the number of cores available?

I ask as I'm now running a high core count CPU, which is feeling a little under used!

There is no way to speed up the load of a plugin from the host side. Its up to the plugin to get more efficient. Talk to the plugin vendor who are the ones who have the power to do that 

[Noel Borthwick]

17 minutes ago, Milton Sica said:

I think the arranger is excellent for those who compose / create their songs based on pre-determined loops. For me who use instruments played personally, I have not yet identified a good use. Besides, when I tested the tool, it changed the design, times and sizes of the recorded audios.

There are plenty of uses for conventional music and composing in general. Some are listed in the notes.

Quote

 

The Arranger track is an arrangement tool that provides several workflow benefits:

Easily rearrange sections of the entire project as one unit instead of moving individual clips. For example, instantly swap the positions of the first and second chorus for all tracks, or copy the first verse in order to double its duration.

Experiment with different song structures in a non-destructive and non-linear manner. For example, does your song work best in AABA, ABAB, or ABAC song form? Define time range sections and sequence them in any order without destructively moving any clip data. You can even save multiple arrangements within each project.

Create a color coded overview of the song structure, and use the Arranger Inspector to quickly navigate around the project and jump to song sections.

Create arbitrary song sections anywhere on the project timeline, then later string them together for seamless playback.

Sections provide an additional way to perform time based selections and edits of the project.

Create an unlimited number of arrangements per project, which can all be exported simultaneously.

 

 

[Will.]

Anyone find issues with rendering older projects with the new version? It leaves the song with only the effects being selected. 

[Max Arwood]

I have not noticed that with older projects. Are they edited with the track arranger? Or just opened and exported?

Max Arwood

[scook]

Old or new project nothing happens to the project with the arranger until you start working the project with the arranger tools

IOW opening old or new projects in 2020.04 is no different than opening in a prior release.

[Max Arwood]

Clicked on marker area to add to sections - crash.

Sorry - no dump & no plugin dump. I'll keep watching for this.

Max Arwood

[Daniel Ito]

14 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

We are working on a solution for overlapped notes across sections. @msmcleod already has something that improves this a lot.

Oh, I just downloaded the early access and really LOVED the new arranger at first sight!

But the problem with overlapped notes after commiting the arrangement made me think that the new feature was not as useful as it looked.

I came to this thread just to read others impressions about that, and I am really glad to know that the BandLab team is working on a solution!

Thank you so much for your hard work on making Cakewalk's new release.

Edited April 14, 2020 by Daniel Ito
comprehension

[Noel Borthwick]

13 hours ago, Peter Stiens said:

Back again, after the lunch break for no reason.

 

 

 @Peter Stiens thanks for the dump file. Its crashing when creating the step sequencer view which is odd. Did you change the Empty Project.cwt file accidentally in the templates folder? Its normally here C:\Cakewalk Content\Cakewalk Core\Project Templates

I can prevent the crash but it would be worth finding out why the template is referencing that view at all since its supposed to be empty.

[chris.r]

18 hours ago, marled said:

Furthermore I have found out that there are some risks, so if you change the order of your song, you still have to manually handle "note overlaps", i.e. notes that start a tiny bit earlier then the section or those that do overlap the section a bit. Okay, you can do this with slip edit and cross-fades for audio tracks, but it is a lot of work if you have some of them. With MIDI tracks it is even worse, because some notes that were meant to be a part of the moved section stay at the old position, when their start is a tiny bit before the section's begin.

That's why it would be better if sections could hold entire clips that start/end outside section. Let's say clip starts close to the end of Verse1 and continues a bit through Chorus1. It should entirely belong to the section that covers greater part of the clip.

[GreenLight]

13 hours ago, winkpain said:

The new functions bring up a little  issue  that concerns Keyboard Shortcut managing.

I would ask either

• update the menu item Key Binding reminder text, or
• Don't allow custom (i.e. multiple)bindings on default bindings

Hm, did I understand correctly: if you already have something bound for A, the new update will add the Arranger View to A so you have two functions on A?

[LarsF]

Arranger track seems really nice.

#1. Can you generate a new project from arranger setup - I think Cubase call it flatten project?

So you get a new project with all the tracks, some clips duplicated and in order as arranged etc.

That you can use as an intermediate tool and finalize without arranger.

 

#2. Can a section be jagged, and bit different from a certain track.

Thinking about that drums often has a small fill crash+tom before going in full - but want that kept with full drum track.

So define clips to be part of section could be one way of looking at it. You can always split yourself like this.

[msmcleod]

11 minutes ago, LarsF said:

Arranger track seems really nice.

#1. Can you generate a new project from arranger setup - I think Cubase call it flatten project?

So you get a new project with all the tracks, some clips duplicated and in order as arranged etc.

That you can use as an intermediate tool and finalize without arranger.

The Commit Arrangement button does this - press this button then Save Copy As to save the arranged project. You can then undo to get back to your original project.

11 minutes ago, LarsF said:

#2. Can a section be jagged, and bit different from a certain track.

Thinking about that drums often has a small fill crash+tom before going in full - but want that kept with full drum track.

So define clips to be part of section could be one way of looking at it. You can always split yourself like this.

At the moment, you can exclude tracks but not individual clips. So the workaround would be to move your drum fill to a separate track.

To exclude a track from the arranger, use the track properties in the inspector:



 

[LarsF]

42 minutes ago, msmcleod said:

The Commit Arrangement button does this - press this button then Save Copy As to save the arranged project. You can then undo to get back to your original project.

At the moment, you can exclude tracks but not individual clips. So the workaround would be to move your drum fill to a separate track.

To exclude a track from the arranger, use the track properties in the inspector:



 

How lovely, thank you.

Since the commit does what exactly what I hoped, it's not a biggy to cut paste fills or similar like that after a commit - and then mix, do automation and finalize it all. It usually takes a good while for me to feel something is missing and want a bridge/break in there and can for starters just add to the end somewhere and even make versions of that. Other longer intros are common too.

I'll probably save as copy before doing commit either way.

Incredibly good job, this is major contribution to CbB.

[foldaway]

11 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

There is no way to speed up the load of a plugin from the host side. Its up to the plugin to get more efficient. Talk to the plugin vendor who are the ones who have the power to do that 

Hi Noel,

Sure, not for a single plugin but I'm talking about loading multiple plugins in parallel which would indeed speed up loading operation considerably.   In my case 16x faster!

When using a project with 100's of plugin instances this would make a huge difference.

[msmcleod]

On 4/12/2020 at 4:22 PM, Keith Lane said:

Love the arranger, great to see song structure get some love. I'd like to be able to save and load arrangements so if I work on a 16 or a 32 bar loop, I can then load a pre existing arrangement and then start to fill a song from that as inspiration, would be nice to save and load markers too. Is this already there, and I'm just missing it ?

This is something we discussed in the early design phases, but decided to leave it out for the first release. The arranger is one of the biggest features we've developed in the past few years, and took a good few months of development. There were many other things we could have added, but we had to draw the line somewhere in order to release in a reasonable time frame.

Expect new arranger features to appear in the future though...

[ZincT]

After working on an old project which already had markers it was a piece of cake (no pun intended) to add arrangement sections and make new arrangements.

One issue has been discussed in various posts above - clips which start/end before the beginning/end of a section. 

A couple of other thoughts which came to mind while I was working on a project without any existing markers...

• I right clicked on a clip expecting to see a "Make Arranger Section from Clip Boundaries" option or similar. Maybe a future option?
• When committing an arrangement I would have liked the option to make a new project from the committed project. Although it was easy enough to "save as" I was worried that I might forget and overwrite the existing project with no way back.
• Add Arranger presets (ABA, AAB, ABAABAC etc with section length prompt) - I see Mark mentions these as a future possibility.
• ALT-Mouse Wheel doesn't zoom horizontally if the mouse is within the Arranger track. 

In general, for songs where I would use the Arranger I would try a modified workflow. I would create an "Arrangement" Project and record only the basic sections without any fancy additions. For example, a song with 2 verses and a chorus is unlikely to have two identical verses (the second one might have some kind of lead-in to the chorus) but for the purposes of an Arrangement Project I would not include any embellishments on the second verse or if I did then it would be labelled as a different type of verse. I would then create my arrangements by putting together different combinations of the sections. In this way I would use the Arranger project as a parent project to spawn multiple committed projects with a basic song structure, each one saved separately. I wouldn't use the arranger in the committed projects but develop them as I would have done before there was an arranger track. If I later decide that I don't like the arrangement then I could go back to the Arranger Project to add a new arrangement or alter an existing one to create a new committed project. This is just initial thoughts and I might change my mind after I have tried this out in practice. 

Edited April 14, 2020 by ZincT

[msmcleod]

20 minutes ago, ZincT said:

• I right clicked on a clip expecting to see a "Make Arranger Section from Clip Boundaries" option or similar. Maybe a future option?

Once you've clicked on your clip, right click on the arranger track and select "From Selection" - right clicking on the Time Ruler and selecting "Create Section from Selection" does the same thing.

 

23 minutes ago, ZincT said:

• When committing an arrangement I would have liked the option to make a new project from the committed project. Although it was easy enough to "save as" I was worried that I might forget and overwrite the existing project with no way back.

 

23 minutes ago, ZincT said:

In general, for songs where I would use the Arranger I would try a modified workflow. I would create an "Arrangement" Project and record only the basic sections without any fancy additions. For example, a song with 2 verses and a chorus is unlikely to have two identical verses (the second one might have some kind of lead-in to the chorus) but for the purposes of an Arrangement Project I would not include any embellishments on the second verse or if I did then it would be labelled as a different type of verse. I would then create my arrangements by putting together different combinations of the sections. In this way I would use the Arranger project as a parent project to spawn multiple committed projects with a basic song structure, each one saved separately. I wouldn't use the arranger in the committed projects but develop them as I would have done before there was an arranger track. If I later decide that I don't like the arrangement then I could go back to the Arranger Project to add a new arrangement or alter an existing one to create a new committed project. This is just initial thoughts and I might change my mind after I have tried this out in practice. 

Both of these were discussed in the design phases, and were decided they weren't for the first release. The main reason being that it seemed more appropriate to think in more generic terms of "Project versions" rather than something that is arranger specific... so maybe something that we'll do in the future.
 

[msmcleod]

@winkpain - just to clarify with the resizing issue...

The resizing will now be clamped so that resizing the start cannot go beyond the end time.

However, part of what you're seeing is expected behaviour when using "Snap By" rather than "Snap To".

In your video, your snap settings were set to "Snap By 1/1"  -  so your start time would be changed in decrements of whole measures.

To better explain the difference between Snap By / Snap To, take a section that starts at 3.02.000  with a snap setting of 1/1 (whole measures)

Snap By will decrement the start time by whole measures as you move the start nearer to 0.... so you'll get 3.02.000, 2.02.000, 1.02.000

Snap To will snap the start time to whole measures, so as you move you'll get 3.01.000, 2.01.000, 1.01.000

 

[Noel Borthwick]

2 hours ago, foldaway said:

Hi Noel,

Sure, not for a single plugin but I'm talking about loading multiple plugins in parallel which would indeed speed up loading operation considerably.   In my case 16x faster!

When using a project with 100's of plugin instances this would make a huge difference.

@foldawayAh I see what you are saying. I'll look into the feasibility of this.

[winkpain]

6 hours ago, GreenLight said:

Hm, did I understand correctly: if you already have something bound for A, the new update will add the Arranger View to A so you have two functions on A?

Technically, yes. But only the one function will....well, function. CW permits binding multiple keystrokes the the same functions and permits multiple functions to be bound to the same keystrokes. If there is a "by design" reason for this, I don't see it, nor has it been explained.

I do know that it causes a lot of confusion