No sustain pedal while playing

[Alrik van Eijkelenborg]

Hi,

I am new to Cakewalk and I like it a lot. My setup is this:

• An old Roland Piano 4500 with midi out
• Presonus Audiobox iTwo with USB out.
• Headphone connected to the Presonus Audiobox.

The problem I can not seem to solve however, is that I do not hear the sustain pedal when I'm playing. It does however get recorded and it is working fine when I play back a recording.

I have tried many things I have found about sustain pedals on this forum, including testing the CC commands with MIDI-OX. A screenshot is attached to this post.

I'm also trying out FL studio 20 and I have used Studio One Artist 4 in the past. The sustain pedal works fine in those DAW's.

What am I doing wrong?

As someone else said on this forum. Playing the piano without sustain, feels like playing guitar with a sock tied around the neck

Regards,

Alrik.

-- edit

Reading back my own post, it must be related to the "CC: All Notes Off" signal. That's the only explanation that makes sense. Now to find a solution for that.

 

Edited September 4, 2020 by Alrik van Eijkelenborg

[Alrik van Eijkelenborg]

To follow up, there is a MIDI FX plugin that will fix it at

http://www.tencrazy.com/gadgets/mfx/TcMfxSustainFix64-40.zip

But now I found out that none of my MIDI FX plugins are working in Cakewalk?

They all say they "this plug-in is missing or improperly installed on your system"  (Windows 10), even after doing :

regsvr32 TcMfxSustainFix64.dll as administrator.

I give up for now.

Life should not be this hard..

Edited September 8, 2020 by Alrik van Eijkelenborg

[LarsF]

I had this on a Roland synth once, and I tejped down top key before recording. Just adhesive tape holding the key down.
What happend was that Roland sent AllNotesOff as all keys were up, suddenly while playing.

Another fix is to filter out AllNotesOff if there is such a filter plugin in Cakewalk.
I think Tencrazy plugin do that.

[Alrik van Eijkelenborg]

That is a brilliant and creative fix!

I'm still evaluating FL Studio and Studio One, but I might just come back to Cakewalk now.  If only I can fix the MIDI FX plugins again.. 

Funny thing is, I had it working for a few minutes, but then my audio interface disconnected and I never got them back. If I find the Windows cause, I will share it here.

I just want a midi piano that sounds good without having to pay a lot just for VST Plugin support or features I don't need (yet).

[LarsF]

Glad it worked.

Don't know about Windows 10 and DX, but if to try anything would be the location you register it, if UAC matters later when using it or something.
Some other disk than OS disk, or under c:\Users\yourusername\Appdata\MyDxPlugins or something, is there a Roaming folder in between too maybe. Just a wild guess.

[LarsF]

I only have a windows 10 (1909) laptop, that is rather blank on daw stuff, but installed a Sonar on it and also did register PortDiag and TrackDiag which are the MFX I use the most. I found no issues - I could open in Sonar without anything funny.

Looking at the message you got, I wonder if there might be a missing vcredist for visual studio these mfx was built with. And just a lucky coincidence I had other software so this was already there.

Look at top of page, http://www.tencrazy.com/gadgets/mfx/ and text the "redistributable from Microsoft" - that is the vcredist I mentioned. Run that and it will be fine, I think.

[Alrik van Eijkelenborg]

Hi LarsF,

I wanted to mark your sticky tape holding the key down as best answer, but I can't find how to do that on this forum. About that. I noted I only need the tape trick for the "SI Intruments suite" (installed as add-on). The TSS-1 has a working sustain pedal without it. Don't know why, but it does.

Anyway, as for the MIDI FX dll's problem, I just give up. 

Things I have tried so far:

* Disable UAC
* Move this plugin folder from to C:\Program Files\etc to C:\
* Reinstall the vcredist 2013 version
* Remove all present vcredist x86 versions
* Install Sysinternals Process Monitor
* See what's going in Process Monitor on when I click any MIDI effect.
* Completely reinstalled Cakewalk from scratch

The Proces Monitor output showed that the midi fx dll's are loaded in the stack. It's just when they are clicked, cakewalk is running something called nullproxy.dll. I have no clue how to troubleshoot that further. I'm guessing the DLL installation is fine (otherwise they would not load). It's just something in Cakewalk preventing them from being called when they are added to a track. 

The cakewalk uninstaller doesn't seem to uninstall much by the way. I found a lot of remaining registry keys and folders, both in program files and my user profile.

So after 5 late nights of troubleshooting, I finally decided to quit and continue with Studio One 4 and just upgrade to version 5 (which now includes VST support).

Thank you for all your help. I hope it will be the solution for someone else.

Edited September 14, 2020 by Alrik van Eijkelenborg

[LarsF]

As I understand it you got rid of the message doing the vcredist, or?

Not sure why you remove vcredist stuff, where that came from - it's doing no harm.
The x86 versions may be running 32-bit applications via WOW3264, or what it's called. A bridge windows use for WindowsOnWindows as they call it.
I mean any other software you run that is 32-bit, may need the x86 versions of vcredist - and once installed them probably!

vcredist is needed for when compiling some software that use common files like msvccrt or vcomp which are C-Runtime libraries and multiprocessor stuff OpenMP.
It does no harm being there unless software is started that look for them. And takes virtually no room, just let this be there.

New registration of mfx(or any DX based plugins) is needed if moving it, so if you documented all you did in your text - that might be a problem just moving it.
Part of running regsvr32 is taking it's location.

And not all clear - which error still remain for you?
On Cakewalk level I mean, what exactly happends.
Does plugin gui load?

This kind of stuff is frustrating, I know. I had other things with Cubase that made me leave etc, every hour uptime of windows - Cubase restarted audio engine, and if in middle of recording that stops etc.

When I tested, I have 1909 Windows 10 version(not running Cakewalk, just old Sonar Artist to test mfx as such). Seen people having issues with 2004 version, not in Cakewalk as such, just in general.

Computers.....just feed us what exactly happends now to get you running.....and if possible, more than a week in between in conversation is a bit long, if possible come back every day at least and we will sort it out somehow.....

FYI, I just moved in february back to Cakewalk from StudioOne 4.5x - because of their odd handling of midi creating automation from recorded midi at all times. In Cakewalk this is an option if you want that. Default is to let midi be as recorded.

What happend is I turned on leslie of hammond 2 bars into a clip - StudioOne interpret this as "ok, this is first occurance of leslie on, so I intercept that as initial value of this midi and move it and send at beginning of clip instead". So leslie went on at beginning of clip instead of where I used it. This f-k up all realtime midi treating it like this. So total showstopper for me. I tweak all kinds of knobs in realtime on synths and stuff and it has to be sent when tweaked - not at beginning of clip.

Both Cubase and Cakewalk has this as optional - converting to automation - not so in StudioOne.

[Alrik van Eijkelenborg]

I agree, I could have left the x86 vredist versions installed, but I wanted to make sure they were not conflicting with the same x64 versions. They came from some old games I don't play anymore, so I really don't mind.

I don't have the exact screenshot of the error that happens when clicking a Midi FX while a project is open, but I can share the similar one that pops-up while loading.

Thanks again for your help, but the cakewalk discovery journey ends here for me.

Like I said before, "life just should not be this hard"..

The recent update not installing automatically, did not help restore faith either.

Cakewalk is just not the DAW for me.

To be complete, I did do the regsvr32.exe thing, even un-installed before installing after moving. And also Run as Administrator.

regsvr32 /u /s Arpeggiator.dll
regsvr32 /u /s ChordAnalyzer.dll
regsvr32 /u /s EchoDelay.dll
regsvr32 /u /s EventFilter.dll
regsvr32 /u /s Quantize.dll
regsvr32 /u /s TcMfxSustainFix64.dll
regsvr32 /u /s Transpose.dll
regsvr32 /u /s Velocity.dll

regsvr32 /s Arpeggiator.dll
regsvr32 /s ChordAnalyzer.dll
regsvr32 /s EchoDelay.dll
regsvr32 /s EventFilter.dll
regsvr32 /s Quantize.dll
regsvr32 /s TcMfxSustainFix64.dll
regsvr32 /s Transpose.dll
regsvr32 /s Velocity.dll
 

Edited September 15, 2020 by Alrik van Eijkelenborg

[LarsF]

Cakewalk plugin manager has path to where to expect things to be, as scanned - each plugin, which goes for mfx too, never had issues with it since 2005 doing Sonar 4.
Damage might be when registering same dll on other place, not sure if that duplicate things in registry.

Reset and rescan plugins is probably needed after any changes like move of plugin.

You got off to a bad start and it just continues....

Edited September 17, 2020 by LarsF