Feature Request - Important minor things

[Apollo Beatz]

Hi everyone! Greetings from South-Russia! I'm new here to the forum, so gotta say somethin bout me, to let u know i'm using Cakewalk for more then 20 years, since the version of Cakewalk 3.0 Professional in the 90's! Worked on other DAWs aswell, like ProTools, Cubase, Logic, FL, Reaper and got a lot of experience as an audio-engineer! So yes, dear Cakewalk team, please take my request serious! I like your DAW, and find it is or was at least the top of the list! However in most common things I do all the time in my recordings, there could be an improvement for more ease usability!
1. There could be a waveform zoom on audio clips to zoom-in in silent passages. Instead I have to cut out these silent passages, copy on other track,  then normalize to see clearly whats there, and do adjustments on the original track.... That's kinda sad.
2. There should be a waveform-pencil-tool just to quickly draw over and fix an annoying  click in the recording. And this feature should be available directly on audioclips, not in the audio-editor, which is pretty.... don't know really what for it is, with that functionality.... it's pretty lame, and nothing good for.
3. When you heavily zoom-in on any axis, like to see every single waveform-sample, and try to scroll left, right or up and down, the scrolling process goes just to wild!!! You literary  fly over to places you don't want to... how's that??? So hard to implement an adoptive to the zoom-stage scroller? 

As you see,  working with audio is pretty much pain in the a** in all of the DAWs, as they all think, they aren't audio-editors. You could be better at this, and be clearly the best for me!
Thanks for your attention and my favorite DAW! You guys are awesome! 

[msmcleod]

Cakewalk isn't an audio editor, but it's pretty simple to incorporate a 3rd party editor into the Utilities menu.

SoundForge is probably the most popular editor out there, but others use Audacity or Acoustica.

Acoustica Basic Edition v6 is free and is still available for download (under the Old Versions section) : https://acondigital.com/downloads/

@scook has written a utility to add 3rd party editors to the Utilities menu: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eiVH_I1clbbRtWFh4-3Mo7HANjCxR8SwqHJtYXy19gw/pub

This is how I set it up using scook's toolseditor:

Once you've added it, you can edit any waveform in Cakewalk via the tools menu:

 

[Apollo Beatz]

msmcleod thank you! That will do the work some more easier for me with connection of my WaveLab! Didn't know that was possible.

However, It's kinda sad that audio wise all DAWs are weak as f**k. Still wish to see some of the requested functionality in my favorite DAW! Through the years I saw a lot of changes, and how Cakewalk was leading in progress, so keep up the awesome work and hope you doin well!

[scook]

1 hour ago, msmcleod said:

but others use Audacity

Maybe a very old version. AFAIK, recent versions do not accept a wav  file on the command line. This is a requirement to pass an audio clip between Cakewalk and another program.

 

50 minutes ago, Apollo Beatz said:

That will do the work some more easier for me with connection of my WaveLab

Wavelab should work fine.

Any program that accepts a wav file on its command line may be called using this method.

 

It is also possible to add practically anything else to the tools section of the Utilities menu such as the "User Reference Guide" or any pdf. Documents will open based on their Windows association.

 

[Apollo Beatz]

2 hours ago, scook said:

Wavelab should work fine.

Any program that accepts a wav file on its command line may be called using this method.

 

Scook thank you! It works fine with my old WaveLab 6! You saved me a lot of pain, becoz the material i'm on right now has a lot of unwanted clicks that i can now fix in WaveLab faster then it would take in Cakewalk! 

[marcL]

6 hours ago, Apollo Beatz said:

1. There could be a waveform zoom on audio clips to zoom-in in silent passages. Instead I have to cut out these silent passages, copy on other track,  then normalize to see clearly whats there, and do adjustments on the original track.... That's kinda sad.

As far as I know and how I understand your point there is already a functionality like this (I use it very often)! You can simply move the dB loudness scale on the track up- and downwards. Here is an example, the same clip in 2 tracks, but in the 2nd track I have moved up the loudness display scale:

[Apollo Beatz]

22 minutes ago, marled said:

As far as I know and how I understand your point there is already a functionality like this (I use it very often)! You can simply move the dB loudness scale on the track up- and downwards.

Ah yea, ok, that's nice! Strange that I totally forgot about that, haha. Didn't need so much this feature before. Thank you 2!

[Starship Krupa]

9 hours ago, Apollo Beatz said:

all of the DAWs, as they all think, they aren't audio-editors

With respect, they aren't. I'm glad you got to the solution that's working. I, too, would dearly love to have the functionality of Sound Forge or Goldwave built into a DAW, but it's as you say.

To paraphrase Marlo Stanfield from The Wire: we want it to be one way, but it's the other way.

I guess the deal is that DAW's want to stick to what they do, which is (for the most part) non-destructive clip sequencing. I didn't understand this for a long time, but DAW's and video NLE's (like Vegas Pro and Premiere and Final Cut) are similar. What they do is read information from (usually) multiple files on a drive, and let us do all our stuff to them, and play them back with all of the "stuff" we did. They can play them back into your speakers or into a file. They're not for work that alters the original files. Having an audio editor in a DAW with a pencil tool would be like having a pixel editor in Vegas Pro.

They are supposed to leave our original files alone, and just use them to create new files.

For a time, the term for DAW was "sequencer," and that included MIDI and audio. You arrange MIDI and audio clips in a "sequence" until you get what you want, then after it's all put together, you export or mixdown or bounce, we can't seem to agree on the term for "poop out a finished song."

You probably already know all of that, and I don't mean to geeksplain it to you, but rather for other people who read the forums and don't get this yet. We (I did) expect DAW's to be able to do that because it looks similar to what DAW's do. There may even be some DAW's that can edit down to the sample level for all I know, but still, that kind of work is not what they are primarily for.

(which reminds me to grumble again about how Normalizing is still a destructive-as in it creates a new audio file-process in Cakewalk)