Interview with a guy from Bandlab about Cakewalk including a new feature!

[Steve Harder]

12 hours ago, noynekker said:

But the templates can be shared after they are created. 

There is a lot of sharing going over on vi-control.net.

Here's a link to a discussion on a spreadsheet that can then be used to generate templates for daws that have articulation maps.  That spreadsheet currently contains listings of the triggering details for many libraries, so it would save a lot of work getting started.

Once we get insight into how Cakewalk maps will function I'll look at getting the spreadsheet to generate Cakewalk maps.

The power of this is one open source master spreadsheet, easily updated as new libraries come out, can used to generate articulation maps for Cubase, Logic, Reaper and eventually Cakewalk.

https://vi-control.net/community/threads/universal-daw-articulation-manager.95959/#post-4621970

Early days but I'm looking forward to help making this happen.  Finally an opportunity to put my database programming skills to work on music.

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

This is brilliant news

[Maestro]

On 9/19/2020 at 1:31 AM, Max Arwood said:

Echo on...... Yes this would be nice.  Nothing fancy, just a good basic notation. Not like S1 where you have to bounce stuff back and forth.

Studio One 5 Professional has an integrated Score Editor based on Notion technology in it now.  It's actually one of the better in-DAW score editors on the market, now.  It still round trips with Notion 6 over ReWire or PreSonus' proprietary protocol, and the integrated score editor supports a lot of the Symbols/Score Markings from Notion.

[Xel Ohh]

This is great news cant wait to see this in action myself...?

[Frank D. Baere]

Thanks for the information. "Expression Maps" This will be a huge improvement for the midi workers.

Is there a release date?

Frank

[Colin Cameron]

The articulation maps are a very helpful addition, but, having done most of the hard work, Bandlab have not finished the job.

At the moment (Jan 2021 update) the articulation map only works when playing back over the beginning of the articulation section. If you move the "now" time into the middle of an articulation section, the articulation is ignored and the last articulation is used. Similary, clicking on a note in piano view plays the note, but not in the articulation defined for that note but in whatever articulation was active beforehand.

I hope that is fixed soon. 

[msmcleod]

4 minutes ago, Colin Cameron said:

The articulation maps are a very helpful addition, but, having done most of the hard work, Bandlab have not finished the job.

At the moment (Jan 2021 update) the articulation map only works when playing back over the beginning of the articulation section. If you move the "now" time into the middle of an articulation section, the articulation is ignored and the last articulation is used. Similary, clicking on a note in piano view plays the note, but not in the articulation defined for that note but in whatever articulation was active beforehand.

I hope that is fixed soon. 

Click on the articulation section - in 2021.01 it will send out the key switch events.

Transforms are only applied during playback.

[chris.r]

16 hours ago, Colin Cameron said:

The articulation maps are a very helpful addition, but, having done most of the hard work, Bandlab have not finished the job... 

I didn't follow closely, yet, in what way Cakewalk chases the articulations when we change the position in the song. But I just checked and it's true that there is no such feature like chasing the last/current articulation (keyswitch) or I failed to find it. If that's the case then I think Cakewalk is missing out big time on this. Clicking on the articulation section is very handy when working occasionally on a single track but there's no way you would want to click manually each articulation every time you change the position in a song with many tracks containing articulation changes. There's definitely an option for 'Articulation chase' missing in the menus.

Edited January 24, 2021 by chris.r

[Steve Harder]

5 hours ago, chris.r said:

but there's no way you would want to click manually each articulation every time you change the position in a song with many tracks containing articulation changes.

I've found that some of my libraries, like VSL Synchron, need to have the Chase set to Full on all midi key events.  With that setting the articulation is correct after I change cursor position to anywhere and then hit Play.

Try tweaking a couple of artics to see if that is a fix for you.

Then you can use Notepad Replace to globally search .artmap for Chase =1 or 2 and replace with Chase=3.

Reply if you need more help.

[msmcleod]

7 minutes ago, Steve Harder said:

I've found that some of my libraries, like VSL Synchron, need to have the Chase set to Full on all midi key events.  With that setting the articulation is correct after I change cursor position to anywhere and then hit Play.

Try tweaking a couple of artics to see if that is a fix for you.

Then you can use Notepad Replace to globally search .artmap for Chase =1 or 2 and replace with Chase=3.

Reply if you need more help.

For most libraries, you really shouldn't need to set Full Chase (although it is kind of a brute force solution). Full Chase sends all the key switch events from the beginning of the track, whereas the other chase modes only send the last note or CC# that matches that articulation.

There are some libraries (e.g. Cinematic Studio Solo Strings) that do require this though, as they've combined what should be mutually exclusive parameters into a single CC event.

Is this only happening with particular types of events, e.g. Notes or CC's... and what libraries are you seeing this issue on?

[Steve Harder]

2 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Is this only happening with particular types of events, e.g. Notes or CC's... and what libraries are you seeing this issue on?

I'll spend some time tomorrow confirming how I've tweaked .artmaps for the limited number of sample libraries I own. 

But, for me, VSL Synchron needs Chase Full in order to drop cursor anywhere, just press Play, and have correct artic be played.  So far I haven't seen any negatives from using Full on the many BBOs and SynchronStringsPro that I use.

Tomorrow I'll detail other libraries that I use Chase Note on, so Synchron is kind of an outlier for me in needing Chase Full.

You mentioned "send the last note", Synchron typically requires 2,3, or 4 keyswitches to trigger their menu layout.  So my maps typically have 3 or 4 note events in 1 artic.

I can pm you some .artmaps if you want them ...

 

[msmcleod]

12 minutes ago, Steve Harder said:

I'll spend some time tomorrow confirming how I've tweaked .artmaps for the limited number of sample libraries I own. 

But, for me, VSL Synchron needs Chase Full in order to drop cursor anywhere, just press Play, and have correct artic be played.  So far I haven't seen any negatives from using Full on the many BBOs and SynchronStringsPro that I use.

Tomorrow I'll detail other libraries that I use Chase Note on, so Synchron is kind of an outlier for me in needing Chase Full.

You mentioned "send the last note", Synchron typically requires 2,3, or 4 keyswitches to trigger their menu layout.  So my maps typically have 3 or 4 note events in 1 artic.

I can pm you some .artmaps if you want them ...

 

By last note, I mean the last occurrence of that particular note...  so if you had several instances of the same articulation that sends multiple notes (e.g. C1, C#1 & E1 ) it would send the last C1, C#1 and E1 combination it found before the start time.

CC events work the same - if you've got lots of CC64, it'll send the last one it finds before the start time.

With Full Chase, it sends every C1, C#1 and E1 from the start of the track, and every control change from the start of the track.

But like you say, some of these libraries are fussy about the order of things... so maybe full chase is best for them.

[Edit] - just had a thought... maybe the other chase modes aren't respecting the ordering of the notes within the articulation map. I'll look into it further.

[chris.r]

4 hours ago, Steve Harder said:

Try tweaking a couple of artics to see if that is a fix for you.

Thanks. I've found what was causing Cakewalk to not chase the articulations in my case. It was the Vel/CC set to 0 (default).

I was testing on Scarbee Jay-bass keyswitching and I've set the articulations to the correspondent notes, Play At: Start and Chase Mode: Note. In my case the articulations was called out correctly when playing back from the beginning, even with Vel/CC set to the default 0, but didn't want to work if played anywhere after the start of the articulation. Had to set the Value to anything above the 0.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

On 9/24/2020 at 4:58 PM, Maestro said:

Studio One 5 Professional has an integrated Score Editor based on Notion technology in it now.  It's actually one of the better in-DAW score editors on the market, now.  It still round trips with Notion 6 over ReWire or PreSonus' proprietary protocol, and the integrated score editor supports a lot of the Symbols/Score Markings from Notion.

How does it measure against Digital Performer's and Logic's auto scoring ones?

[msmcleod]

6 hours ago, chris.r said:

Thanks. I've found what was causing Cakewalk to not chase the articulations in my case. It was the Vel/CC set to 0 (default).

I was testing on Scarbee Jay-bass keyswitching and I've set the articulations to the correspondent notes, Play At: Start and Chase Mode: Note. In my case the articulations was called out correctly when playing back from the beginning, even with Vel/CC set to the default 0, but didn't want to work if played anywhere after the start of the articulation. Had to set the Value to anything above the 0.

FYI - a MIDI Note On message with a velocity of 0 is treated as a Note Off (as per the MIDI spec), so if you want a Note On you need to specify a value > 0.

CC values of 0 are fine though.

[chris.r]

7 hours ago, msmcleod said:

FYI - a MIDI Note On message with a velocity of 0 is treated as a Note Off (as per the MIDI spec), so if you want a Note On you need to specify a value > 0.

Thanks, I realize that. Question is, why is Cakewalk triggering the keyswitch (Note) at the beginning of each articulation when Vel/CC is set to 0? There must be a reason for this inconsistency.

BTW, wouldn't it be better to set the default velocity to something like 100, for the Note kind of keyswitches?

Edited January 24, 2021 by chris.r

[Steve Harder]

My experience has been that each brand of sample library may need a different tweak in the artic map.

If you read threads about Cubase expression maps on other forums you will find they also have to tweak case by case between sample libraries.

I just tweak and test when I get a library from a new source.  Usually the tweak works for all their libraries.

But artic maps are a tremendous new feature for me.  Once I've got a map that works it really streamlines my creative sessions.

[msmcleod]

OK, I've checked the code and my suspicions are correct:

Articulation MIDI event chase is working in exactly the same way as standard MIDI event chase. So if your articulation is sending out multiple MIDI events, and set chase to Notes or CC, the events are sent out in note order / CC# order during chase - not in the order they're specified in the articulation.

Full Chase mode doesn't suffer from this issue, as the all events are sent out immediately in the order they're encountered.

I know what needs doing to fix this, but its not trivial, so in the meantime, if your articulation sends out more than one MIDI event, and they need to be in a specific order, set the articulation to Full Chase.

[Steve Harder]

40 minutes ago, msmcleod said:

, if your articulation sends out more than one MIDI event, and they need to be in a specific order, set the articulation to Full Chase.

That reminded me of a symptom I saw when I was first troubleshooting VSL.  Seeing totally unrelated artics being selected in certain situations.  And then Chase Full fixed it and I moved on.

Glad it has a temp fix that works for the time being.

[Maestro]

13 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

How does it measure against Digital Performer's and Logic's auto scoring ones?

It is just as good.

The Articulation Map implementation is extremely barebones, though.  Cakewalk is actually superior, there, as PreSonus' implementation feels like something they threw in to say "Look, we added this feature you asked for."