Rick Rickoff Posted March 4, 2019 Share Posted March 4, 2019 I downloaded and installed Cakewalk by Band Lab on my Windows 7 64 bit laptop computer, which already had Sonar 6 Producer installed. I'm wondering why I can't use many of the items that I could access in Sonar 6, like Lexicon Pantheon reverb (it appears the Pantheon.dll file is missing), or any of the several soft synths. The Band Lab documentation says this version is actually Sonar Platinum, so I would expect it to be even better than Sonar 6. I tried utilizing the Cakewalk TTS-1 soft synth, as it was shown in the instruments drop-down list under General MIDI, but the audio track with TTS-1 input causes the transport to freeze. If I delete that track, the transport runs again. I want to use the TTS-1 because it has a great sounding Acoustic Bass, so if anyone has an idea that would help then please respond. Thanks! p.s. - I do like the transport pause button and rewind/fast forward buttons, which Sonar 6 did not have, but miss having a way to instantly get back to the song's start. Also, why does the transport keep going after it reaches the end of my tracks? I'd like to see it stop there. Am I missing something? Any hints would be appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msmcleod Posted March 4, 2019 Share Posted March 4, 2019 I wonder if it's trying to load the 32bit version of TTS-1. Is there more than one entry for TTS-1 ? As for your other synths/effects, you need to make sure that their location is included in your VST scan path. Also, note that whilst BitBridge can load 32 bit VST's/VSTi's in Cakewalk, 32 bit DirectX plugins (such as the TTS-1 that came with Sonar 6) will not work and will likely crash. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Rickoff Posted March 4, 2019 Author Share Posted March 4, 2019 Thanks for the reply, msmcleod. I assumed that since the Band Lab Cakewalk program is only for 64 bit operating systems, that the TTS-1 synth that came with it should work, and there is only one TTS-1 listed. I noticed that, in trying differing driver sets (ASIO, WDM/KS) and differing bit and sample rates, this resulted in differing problems. With ASIO drivers, 24 bit, and 192khz sampling, I couldn't even load in TTS-1 tracks. I would get an error message stating that the program might not support my settings, but unfortunately it didn't say what settings are supported. That was my first clue as to what might be wrong. After some more experimenting, I tried WDM/KS with 24 bit and 44,100hz sampling. With those settings, the TTS-1 became enabled and the transport worked fine with it. There was still a problem, though, in that with the TTS-1 window open, if I click the Edit button above my Acoustic Bass, or any other sounds I have loaded, the smaller settings window appears but I can't do anything with that to make changes. In Sonar 6, I could click the ON/OFF button beside the Tone controls in that window to alter settings, such as boosting the bass level. I can click the button and it will light up, but when lit the instrument sound I am editing can no longer be heard when clicking the Preview button. Now I'm just wondering if everyone else has that same problem. Do you? If you don't have that problem, could you please share what driver, bit depth, and sample rate combination you are using. That would be most helpful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msmcleod Posted March 4, 2019 Share Posted March 4, 2019 The TTS-1 that comes with CbB is 64 bit, but I was thinking that because you had Sonar 6 installed it may have been trying to load the 32 bit version. It sounds like you've got things working of a fashion... Have you tried running Cakewalk as Administrator? As far as the transport is concerned, to automatically rewind, set this option in the track options: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scook Posted March 4, 2019 Share Posted March 4, 2019 TTS-1 never supported anything higher than 96kHz. It runs at 44.1, 48 and 96kHz only. At 96kHz the plug-ins must be set to light load mode which is a per-instance session setting. There is a bug with the on/off button in the tone section. Pretty sure it has been broken for some time. This plug-in was made in Japan by Roland. Cakewalk never had the source code so BandLab does not either. You could try installing the 64bit TTS-1 bundled with SONAR 6 and see if it works better. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toddskins Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 From Track View > Options > check "Stop at Project End". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Argo Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 On 3/4/2019 at 12:50 PM, Rick Rickoff said: p.s. - I do like the transport pause button and rewind/fast forward buttons, which Sonar 6 did not have, but miss having a way to instantly get back to the song's start. The default shortcut to rewind to beginning of the song is "W" . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Rickoff Posted March 6, 2019 Author Share Posted March 6, 2019 Thanks, everyone, for the tips. It is so much easier getting started with a new DAW when one can rely on advice from experienced users. For example, it might have taken me several hours to figure out what scook showed in his above post concerning the TTS-1 "Light Load Mode," and without that check-marked when using 96kHz the instrument sounds are very distorted. I have used Sonar 6 Producer on my desktop computer for several years, which is a 32 bit install on Windows Vista, and the TTS-1 Edit window button beside the tone controls in the 32 bit version worked fine, allowing alteration of those control settings. I also had Sonar 6 Producer installed on my laptop computer, but had only used that for playback of recorded tracks, and it worked great for that purpose. I just recently bought a Behringer UMC404HD recording interface unit to use with my laptop, Thinking that this 64 bit TTS-1 problem might only occur with Band Lab Cakewalk, and after reading msmcleod's last response, I decided to have a look at what is found in my TTS-1 folder. There was only one instance of TTS-1 found there, and the TTS-1.dll file's date of 3/13/2018 was a dead giveaway that this wasn't the Sonar 6 version. Incidentally, while the Help button in TTS-1 does not function, and gives an error message saying, "Cannot find the help information," one can click to open the index_e.htm file shown above, which will show the TTS-1 help information in a browser window. If I remember correctly, the index_e.htm file wasn't in this folder view, but I copied it there from the Help folder thinking that maybe this is why the help could not be found by Cakewalk. That didn't make any difference, though. Looking into this further, I discovered that when I had installed Sonar6 Producer on my laptop, the installer had utilized the 32 bit version, rather than the 64 bit install that was also an option, as the installation went into my Program Files (x86) folder. Next, I tried installing Sonar 6 Producer 64 bit to see if that would overwrite the Band Lab Cakewalk TTS-1 files. What I found was that it wouldn't do that, probably because it saw the newer dated files so retained them. Then I tried renaming the TTS-1 folder as "BandLab TTS-1" and then doing a Sonar 6 uninstall/install. This time the Sonar 6 TTS-1 files were installed correctly, with the TTS-1.dll file dated 9/11/2006. Although it is now using the Sonar 6 TTS-1.dll file, the problem still persists when clicking the button in the TTS-1 Edit window. The 2006 Sonar TTS-1.dll file works with Band Lab Cakewalk, but did not resolve the discussion issue. Thus, it would appear that all 64 bit versions of the TTS-1.dll are faulty. That's too bad, as it would have been nice to use the extra features that are available in the 32 bit version. It's also a bummer that the TTS-1instruments can only be used at 44.1 or 96kHz. Does anyone know of a VST plugin that features a good sounding Acoustic Bass that can be used at higher sample rates? One good thing about re-installing Sonar 6 Producer on my laptop is that some of the features I had used extensively, such as Lexicon Pantheon, are now usable in Band Lab Cakewalk. So, things are definitely improving! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iRelevant Posted March 6, 2019 Share Posted March 6, 2019 In my experience, it is a bit problematic to combine 32-bit versions of sonar with the x64 bit version of SPLAT/CbB. I think the easiest solution is to just install the x64 bit versions. Scook helped me sorting out some mess some time back, so that I could have both the 32-bit & x64-bit version of SPLAT installed at the same time. As far as I remember it involved some kind of register / *.ini file voodo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted March 18, 2019 Share Posted March 18, 2019 On 3/6/2019 at 12:34 PM, Rick Rickoff said: Does anyone know of a VST plugin that features a good sounding Acoustic Bass that can be used at higher sample rates? I can't help but wonder why you are setting your projects at 192 and 96 and so forth when you are using older virtual instruments. 192 and 96 are usually for people capturing cymbals with expensive tube condenser microphones and the like. I never go higher than 88.2 myself, and since the strain on the storage space and other system resources is higher, I just go for 44.1 and I think it sounds fine. Of course, I may be half deaf and/or deluded. Anyway, here's a Swiss Army Knife workstation VSTi that will give you over 2500 sounds, including several acoustic basses that are better than the one in the TTS-1, IMO: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/64-Virtual-Instrument/1560-Xpand-2 Another option, one you should probably just jump on anyway because it's free, is Native Instruments' Komplete Start bundle: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bundles/komplete-start/ Among the many, many sample instruments it comes with is a killer upright bass. I was just playing it and it's so much fun. If you play it really fast on your keyboard, it throws in finger noise and stuff. Lastly, if you have a Cakewalk Command Center account, you can download and install Home Studio for free, and it comes with Rapture Session, which, in addition to tons of amazing sounds, also has a great acoustic bass. Your options are many. Whatever you do, get Komplete Start and Rapture Session. 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Rickoff Posted March 23, 2019 Author Share Posted March 23, 2019 Thanks for the suggestions, Starship Krupa. I downloaded Komplete Start last night, which seemed to take an unusually long time seeing as I have a fast fiber optic connection here. I'll look for their upright bass on Monday. The reason I was looking for an acoustic bass sound is because our bass player just recently passed away and I have been recording new material by either playing bass lines on a MIDI controller keyboard or writing them in. I remembered having used the TTS-1 acoustic bass and having found that to be reasonably close to what I wanted if I tweaked the sound a bit, but it bummed me out that it couldn't be tweaked in the 64 bit version. In regards to your question about my recording preferences, I typically use higher bit rates and sampling rates for recording because to me it definitely sounds better. I do realize that as I get older, and my hearing suffers, I probably won't be able to discern much difference between a 16 bit 44.1kHz recording and a 24 bit 192kHz recording, but I'll enjoy it in my home studio while I can, and hopefully the standard format for audio players will be hi-res in future years so that we needn't mix down to 44.1kHz to distribute material to listeners. I'm not too concerned about the increased file sizes that are necessary, because hard disks available in terabyte capacities are quite reasonably priced and can hold a lot of audiophile quality recordings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abacab Posted March 23, 2019 Share Posted March 23, 2019 The Kontakt Player (included in Komplete Start) comes with several decent basses in the free factory library. Two electric basses (classic and funk), and the upright bass. The sound quality should easily exceed that of TTS-1. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Rickoff Posted March 24, 2019 Author Share Posted March 24, 2019 Yes, I see the classic, funk, and upright basses listed in the Kontakt Factory Selection/Instruments/Band folder, with the Upright Bass at the bottom of the list. Thanks for helping me locate it. Not knowing yet if there are other upright basses in the bundle, I'm wondering if this is the same one that Starship Krupa had mentioned above. I'll be sure to give it a whirl tomorrow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abacab Posted March 24, 2019 Share Posted March 24, 2019 (edited) 1 hour ago, Rick Rickoff said: Yes, I see the classic, funk, and upright basses listed in the Kontakt Factory Selection/Instruments/Band folder, with the Upright Bass at the bottom of the list. Thanks for helping me locate it. Not knowing yet if there are other upright basses in the bundle, I'm wondering if this is the same one that Starship Krupa had mentioned above. I'll be sure to give it a whirl tomorrow. Yes the Kontakt Factory Selection "Band" folder (a cut down lite version) is included with the free Kontakt Player in the Komplete Start bundle that was recommended. There are only a limited number of instruments in this package, as it is intended to be a sampler for the full product. That one upright bass is the only one I have seen included with the free Player. The instruments that are included are good quality! Anyway before spending any money on Kontakt, I would follow Krupa's suggestion to check out the AIR Music Tech Xpand!2. Xpand!2 is a handy plugin to have for quickly adding instrument parts. I think it sounds better than TTS-1. Included in the 2500+ sounds, it has 5 acoustic bass presets, including hard, medium, and soft. It is only $12.59 with code "GROUP", in the cart at JRR Shop: https://www.jrrshop.com/air-music-tech-xpand-2 The full Kontakt ($399) factory library only has two upright basses in the "Band" collection: Kontakt Factory Library Manual I don't see any additional upright basses in the available Kontakt add-ons either, but if you want to browse the selection of available add-ons, these NI "Powered by Kontakt" instrument libraries are available separately for Kontakt Player: Powered by Kontakt Quote All KONTAKT instruments from NI run in the free KONTAKT PLAYER. Edited March 24, 2019 by abacab Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Rickoff Posted March 24, 2019 Author Share Posted March 24, 2019 (edited) Thanks for the additional info. All I want, really, is the Upright Bass, so the free one should do the trick if it is better than the TTS-1 acoustic bass. Once I realized that the Kontakt player is a Vst plugin, I located the Kontakt.dll file, which was found at C:\Program Files\Native Instruments\Kontakt\Kontakt.dll , I created a "Kontact Player" folder inside the C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Vst plugins folder, and copied the Kontakt.dll file into that folder. I then opened a test project, set the MIDI track's output to Kontakt 1, set input to Cakewalk's virtual controller keyboard, and called the Kontakt player into the FX pane of an audio track. I realize, of course, that this information is nothing new to any of you who have done this already, but thought it might help someone else in getting started with the Kontakt player. Everything worked fine, and I did a quick sound test of the Upright Bass. It does have a realistic sound, and with a well defined attack that seems more prominent than the TTS-1 acoustic bass. Tomorrow I will load it into the MIDI track of one of the tunes I have been working on recently so that I can readily compare it with the TTS-1 acoustic bass in the overall mix, and will report back on how well that goes. Thanks again for everyone's assistance. Edited March 25, 2019 by Rick Rickoff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abacab Posted March 25, 2019 Share Posted March 25, 2019 3 hours ago, Rick Rickoff said: Thanks for the additional info. All I want, really, is the Upright Bass, so the free one should do the trick if it is better than the TTS-1 acoustic bass. A question now comes to mind, though. In the Komplete Kontrol Preferences dialog, under MIDI, there is only one choice available for MIDI input, which happens to be the MIDI in for my Behringer audio/MIDI computer interface. That makes sense if I plug a MIDI keyboard into that input, but what would I need to do to use my Cakewalk MIDI scored bass line, or Cakewalk's virtual keyboard as the input? Cakewalk routes the output for the MIDI track to my interface's MIDI out. Since I can't assign the Cakewalk MIDI output to the Kontakt Factory's Upright Bass as can be done with TTS-1, does this mean I'd have to plug a MIDI cable into the interface's MIDI out (the Cakewalk MIDI output), and plug the other end of the cable into the interface's MIDI in? That wouldn't seem to be a good idea to directly interconnect in that manner, as I believe it would create a continuous loop. Just use the VST plugin version of Kontakt Player, or Komplete Kontrol, in Cakewalk. Add the plugin by using the menu "Insert > Soft Synth" or insert an instrument from the track view or synth rack. Then the MIDI inputs in Cakewalk, or MIDI clips in the Cakewalk track. will use the instrument track in Cakewalk the same way as with any other virtual instrument plugin, such as TTS-1. No need to use the external standalone version of Kontakt or Komplete Kontrol. You won't see MIDI or audio preferences in the VST plugin version, as all that is supplied by the plugin host, which in your case would be Cakewalk. Those settings reside in Cakewalk preferences. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted March 25, 2019 Share Posted March 25, 2019 Nice, Rick. Isn't it astonishing what we're getting for free these days? Cakewalk and the Kontakt Player and all those sounds. There is a good Rhodes and a couple of decent drum kits, and there's even Sennheiser's DrumMic'a instrument for the Kontakt Player. 5 or so years ago Sennheiser went into a studio and mic'd up a drum kit 4 different times with various models of their microphones, doing multi-velocity samples, then took the samples and made a Kontakt Instrument with this amazing GUI that lets you click on which individual mic you want to use for each piece of the kit. There's a mixer with built-in effects and you can split it into 8 individual outputs. Download it for free from Sennheiser's website, register it, and you have the best drum VSTi for the money I have heard. Sorry to hear of your bandmate's passing. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted March 25, 2019 Share Posted March 25, 2019 Oh, also, with stuff as big and complicated as Native Instruments' stuff, I usually prefer to either go into the settings of the NI download app and tell it to install its plug-ins where Cakewalk can find them or I let it install them and then gointo Cakewalk's preferences and tell it where to find them. Sometimes the plug-in has dependencies other than just the .dll that it can't function without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Argo Posted March 25, 2019 Share Posted March 25, 2019 1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said: Nice, Rick. Isn't it astonishing what we're getting for free these days? Cakewalk and the Kontakt Player and all those sounds. There is a good Rhodes and a couple of decent drum kits, and there's even Sennheiser's DrumMic'a instrument for the Kontakt Player. 5 or so years ago Sennheiser went into a studio and mic'd up a drum kit 4 different times with various models of their microphones, doing multi-velocity samples, then took the samples and made a Kontakt Instrument with this amazing GUI that lets you click on which individual mic you want to use for each piece of the kit. There's a mixer with built-in effects and you can split it into 8 individual outputs. Download it for free from Sennheiser's website, register it, and you have the best drum VSTi for the money I have heard. Sorry to hear of your bandmate's passing. https://de-de.sennheiser.com/drummica Registration here : https://www.sennheiser-service.com/drummica/?lang=en 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Rickoff Posted March 30, 2019 Author Share Posted March 30, 2019 Sorry I didn't get to report back on my Kontakt Upright Bass trials as soon as I thought I would. My younger brother, age 62, passed away unexpectedly. Finally, today, I did get around to using the Upright Bass in a bass line that I wrote for a blues song we had recorded with guitar, harmonica, and vocal tracks. I'll include a short segment from that so folks who haven't tried it yet can hear what the Upright Bass sounds like. At first I was puzzled at why it seemed like only about half of the notes I wrote weren't playing, but I soon discovered the cause. With the TTS-1, I always wrote in Staff mode using the 8va option on the bass clef so that notes would fall mostly on the staff, but sound an octave lower, which is how it is normally done. It turns out that Kontakt's Upright Bass should be written on the staff without the 8va option, as it already sounds an octave lower than written. Thus, when one uses the 8va option it places many tones below the instrument's lowest tone, which of course is E1 in standard tuning. By the way, I found that one also has to change the setting for the instrument's low range to an E1 because for some reason it starts off listed as C2. Anyways, I was pleased with the results. The pronounced attack of each string "pluck" is better than with the TTS-1, as I think the recording proves. Thanks again to all for your assistance and suggestions. Entire Mix (Bounced) (Bounced, 105).wav Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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