Misbehaving MIDI

[abacab]

26 minutes ago, Kevin Perry said:

Not include it?

Better yet, maybe an up to date replacement! For example Steinberg HALion Sonic SE and Studio One Presence can play GM sounds and respond to program changes.

I understand the limitations of an end-of-life Roland product without fixes and maintenance.

I have even seen other products that include an internal sound font engine for General MIDI playback. There are a few GM sound fonts available that could be used.

 

Edited January 31, 2021 by abacab

[sjoens]

.

 

Edited January 31, 2021 by sjoens

[John]

I'm not a fan of the Monkees but just for fun I wondered what I would like to hear of the song. So here is my version.

I'm a Believer 2.mp3

[Michael McBroom]

Hey guys, just thought I'd check back in real quick. I upgraded my PC a couple of days ago, which always seems to end up being a marathon event for me. And I'm still running. About the only applications I have up and running are Chrome and Cakewalk. Waiting to find the time and the arrival of additional hardware before I launch into the reinstallation of things in a big way.

I've just caught up in the comments. I'm very intrigued by what you guys are doing, comparing the venerable old TTS-1 with all sorts of other products, most of which I've never even heard of (I don't get out much, I guess). So I'm gonna have to give things a listen, and maybe even contribute.

But that might be a while yet. An important CW file has just disappeared without a trace -- my Plugin Menu Layout (.pgl) file, which had dozens of VSTi's listed. It's just disappeared, which doesn't make sense because I installed CW onto a clean new SSD. The old drive is still in the system and I've gone into the CW directories in that drive and the file has disappeared. Very strange. I even did a file search for the entire PC and got no hits. So I'll have to rebuild the file before I'll have access to certain important files.

Oh, just in case you might be interested, I went the mid route with my PC upgrade. I chose an Intel i5 3.5GHz processor, which has the same number of cores and is only 0.1 GHz faster than my 12yo AMD processor. But I'm counting on the more recent technology benefitting me in various ways. The "new" refurbished motherboard is an ASUS Z87-K. It has PCI slots, which is something I still need., and a high-resolution HDMI port, which I need for my 34" wide LG screen. I loaded it up with 16 GHz of memory and also  installed a 1 TB SSD, which holds the OS and so far the few applications I've  installed so far, including CW. New 750w power supply, but old case. I like this old case. 

CW sounds great on this new platform, even with my 20 year old sound card.

[scook]

The custom plug-in layout path is specified in preferences

The default location is "%appdata%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\Plug-in Menu Layouts" 

[Steev]

On 1/21/2021 at 12:24 PM, Michael McBroom said:

 

At  last count, Cakewalk sez I have over 460 VSTs, but of all those VSTs, some of which I bought, by the way, I find only a very small handful to be useful. And even those are seldom better than the sound quality I can eke out of TTS-1. I find many of TTS-1's patches to be very realistic sounding, especially when a judicious amount of quantization  and EQ is applied.

 Recently I bought an entire package of symphonic instruments. Quite disappointed. Their features don't work as described and they are CPU intensive, so I can't use many of them, or as many as I would like. I can't afford Kontact.  Or at least I won't. I'm not going into debt for a software package.

I did use the "brute force approach," namely I set the instrument I wanted for that track at the beginning of each track's Event List. The way I still see it, though, the way I laid  out the tracks, these problems shouldn't have occurred because there were no conflicts. The way I normally assign a patch to a track, that is using the menu selection in the console view, which is how I do it, should have been enough -- and usually is with almost every other piece of music I've written.

This piece has eight different versions. The first version has a melody track, a guitar track, a bass track, and a drum track. Only the melody is MIDI in this first version. In all other versions, all tracks are MIDI. They have melody, bass, piano, guitar, and drums. I assigned five instances of TTS-1 to the versions, each instance of TTS-1 being dedicated to one of the previously mentioned instruments. In some versions I substituted other instruments for the piano and guitar. Shouldn't matter. Each version was located consecutive to the others along the track  view. That is, version one runs from, let's say just for the sake of using even numbers so it's easy to count, it runs from measure 1 to 102. Version 2 runs from 100 to 202, version three from 200 to 302, and so on. So except for the two measure overlap, there are no points where any instance of TTS-1 has more than one instrument playing. And in every case, I made it a point where the same instrument was not being used by the two voices that were overlapping, with two exceptions -- bass and drums, which by the way, did not have their voices switched, interestingly enough. Although, in a few instances, I had set them for different instruments. E.g. fretless bass to replace acoustic , or analog drums to replace the standard set. So I don't know how I could have set things up any cleaner. Yet TTS-1 decided to do what it wanted to with the MIDI voicing, which is what I don't understand. Especially reverting to Piano 1 for every single version's melody, and refusing to budge from it.

Hmm, perhaps you are overwhelming your computer's recourses? Have you tried "Freezing" the instances of the TTS-1 you aren't working with? It really a pointless use of energy and computer recourses to keep synths and massive amounts of audio plugins running on line even if your CPU can handle it, it still creates an excessive workload and heavy traffic in the PCI buss. And one seemingly simple small movement with a pitch or mod wheel can send 100's of MIDI messages per channel.

 Another One of the great thing about freezing tracks is besides saving enormous amounts of computer resources, it helps keeps your tracks/parts safe from accidental OOPSIES. And if you want to make any changes later on, you can always "UNFREEZE" them.

I absolutely LOVE the Cakewalk TTS-1 and have been ever since it was introduced, I believe back in 2004 with SONAR 4, and still use it today and it doesn't take any hassle to get it to sit great in any mix with any modern 3rd party VST 3 synths from Native Instruments, XLN Audio, etc. and of which I have many, including the latest release Propellerhead's Reason 11 Studio version which runs flawlessly  as a VSTi synth rack in Cakewalk.

1st off, the TTS-1 is a DXi synth, not a VSTi. And being as such it may look a bit cheesy, but it is ALL Roland GM/GS SoundCanvas synth engine under the hood.

 I know this to be true because I also own a now vintage Roland Fantom X which has been collecting dust for over a decade. And as great as the Fantom X sounds, it's still only a 16 bit synth. The TTS-1 runs at the same native 24 bit/48 k/Hz PER TRACK sound quality as I have Cakewalk projects default to.

 And THAT'S what makes it superior to a hardware Roland synth it can be configured for 4 stereo or 8 mono audio tracks in Cakewalk's mixer without ever leaving the digital domain. I.E. it will ALWAYS sound as good as your soundcard.

 And the TTS-1 responds EXCELLENTLY to my Novation Impulse 61 MIDI keyboard controller and is NO PUNK playing thru my Focusrite Scarlett 18i10.

[Steev]

1 hour ago, Michael McBroom said:

Hey guys, just thought I'd check back in real quick. I upgraded my PC a couple of days ago, which always seems to end up being a marathon event for me. And I'm still running. About the only applications I have up and running are Chrome and Cakewalk. Waiting to find the time and the arrival of additional hardware before I launch into the reinstallation of things in a big way.

I've just caught up in the comments. I'm very intrigued by what you guys are doing, comparing the venerable old TTS-1 with all sorts of other products, most of which I've never even heard of (I don't get out much, I guess). So I'm gonna have to give things a listen, and maybe even contribute.

But that might be a while yet. An important CW file has just disappeared without a trace -- my Plugin Menu Layout (.pgl) file, which had dozens of VSTi's listed. It's just disappeared, which doesn't make sense because I installed CW onto a clean new SSD. The old drive is still in the system and I've gone into the CW directories in that drive and the file has disappeared. Very strange. I even did a file search for the entire PC and got no hits. So I'll have to rebuild the file before I'll have access to certain important files.

Oh, just in case you might be interested, I went the mid route with my PC upgrade. I chose an Intel i5 3.5GHz processor, which has the same number of cores and is only 0.1 GHz faster than my 12yo AMD processor. But I'm counting on the more recent technology benefitting me in various ways. The "new" refurbished motherboard is an ASUS Z87-K. It has PCI slots, which is something I still need., and a high-resolution HDMI port, which I need for my 34" wide LG screen. I loaded it up with 16 GHz of memory and also  installed a 1 TB SSD, which holds the OS and so far the few applications I've  installed so far, including CW. New 750w power supply, but old case. I like this old case. 

CW sounds great on this new platform, even with my 20 year old sound card.

With All due respect Michael, you didn't upgrade to today's tech, at best you went sideways. The Z87-K chipset only supports up to Intel Gen 4 which was released in 2013. Intel just release gen 11 CPU's running on the Z 490-M chipset.

[John Vere]

I think he made this mistake by shopping for a mobo with the pci slot. They are hard to find  

But at least it’s a fresh clean install  and overall will run faster with the SSD drive alone  

Michael one small word of advice if I may   Do not install any 3rd party plug ins until the day you need them  

I just redid 2 computers and life is so much better on a clean machine  you’re going to enjoy your new ride .
When I find I need the VST I can pull it in a few seconds from my backup files or for some I go directly to the web site to grab updates  

And for the most part avoid installing any 32 bit version of any plug in  I uncheck all but the 64 VST versions  

 

 

 

Edited February 1, 2021 by John Vere

[Michael McBroom]

Steev, part of the beauty, I've found, with TTS-1 is how easy it is on resources. Yes, when I began this project I wondered if my 12 year old PC could handle it. It could, in fact, and those little bars up in the little Performance window that showed load per core (hence four of them) never got much above idle -- when the machine was behaving itself, that is.  That was a 12yo Win7 machine. Just a couple days ago, I upgraded to a Win10 machine and when i run this same file, I see essentially no difference. Just a guess, but I think that, when a track is idle, it is truly idle. No resources being used on it. In contrast to the subject piece, I have a  few others that place much greater demand on the hardware. One piece I've written has over 20 voices. They do not all play at once, but there are a couple of areas where they get close. And these pieces, even when using TTS-1, are putting a much more noticeable load on the machine.

incidentally, I tried simplifying that piece. It didn't turn out well. The problem was the overlap. I was still having to use multiple versions for each track because of the overlap. And then I suddenly had to deal with mixing and gain issues. So I just tossed that attempt out. Although apparently unwieldy, once you get the hang of it, it's not difficult to navigate through.

Regarding your latest msg, hey I don't know from gens. What I do know is the motherboard has a 2017 manufacture date, which is recent enough for me, the way I use my gear. And I figured I was getting something recent just because I can plug a new Intel i5 into  it. Way to rain on a guys parade.  Hey, I had to have a mobo with PCI slots, and this was the best one they had at Newegg with PCI slots that carried a "reasonable" price tag. Still cost me well over a hundred bucks.

Hey Scook, I know the location.  In both my previous and current installs of CW, in that folder there's only one file: defaultCat.pgl.tmp. I guess I couldn't find anything within CW because of the .tmp extension, which I wonder why this is. But more importantly, in my previous install -- that is, on the drive I was using until just a few days ago, the file I'd created that had my customized set of VSTi's is gone. And I don't understand why. It's not a huge deal. I can rebuild it. I just wonder why it happened.

John, thanks for the tips. I already have a lot of 3rd party plug-ins on this machine on the drive that previously held all of Cakewalk's data. I haven't pointed this current install of CW's plug-in manager at them yet, though. But sooner or later I'll have to. There are some that I make almost constant use of.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[scook]

8 minutes ago, Michael McBroom said:

In both my previous and current installs of CW, in that folder there's only one file: defaultCat.pgl.tmp. I guess I couldn't find anything within CW because of the .tmp extension, which I wonder why this is. But more importantly, in my previous install -- that is, on the drive I was using until just a few days ago, the file I'd created that had my customized set of VSTi's is gone. And I don't understand why. It's not a huge deal. I can rebuild it. I just wonder why it happened.

The tmp files in the layout folder are created by the "Sort by" layouts supplied with the DAW and are built on the fly as needed.

User created layouts have a .pgl extension.

The "Sort by Category" modifications are stored in %appdata%\Cakewalk\library\library.db

[Michael McBroom]

Okay, good to know, I guess. Still, it doesn't explain what happened to my 'user created layout.'

[scook]

There is only one way user layouts are deleted in CbB, by clicking the delete button next to the Save button in the upper right of the Plug-in Manager.

[Michael McBroom]

Obviously

[Steev]

Yes, TTS-1 is super easy on computer resources. And I honesty have to say I'm not a big fan of all it's sounds and voices, but I can't say that about any one particular synth.

 I never was a fan of Roland's pianos and drum kits which are very much close enough for rock & roll, but I've always preferred my Kawai -K11 1st. and Yamaha's 2sd as far as vintage hardware synths go. But now I'm very fond of XLN Audio's Addictive Keys for recording. But for just about everything else the TTS-1 shines. Very authentic horns and strings provided you don't play out of the various instruments octave ranges.

I really like Cakewalk Studio Instruments. Another bundle of very cool stuff that goes generally overlooked and seldom used because they are free. (?) I honestly do believe that they have tons of very cool and extremely useful sounds to add to the pallet that can be found IF YOU give them a chance and work with them long enough to see what they can do..

Like Cakewalk by Bandlab. I'd be willing to bet there are STILL people right here in this forum that are still over suspicious and will go out of there way to find fault with it simply because it free. I still have the last release of SONAR Platinum installed, most because of all the extra ProChannel modules I purchased and licensed 3rd party plugins that came bundled with it that I don't want to live without, and I spark it up every once in a while to compare performance. SPLAT is not only about 10-20% HARDER on computer resources, it doesn't have any of the new WAY TOO COOL features that were added since Bandlab took over. ??

Same goes for Windows 10 too. Too many people held on to Win 7 for so long they didn't even realize that that was the bulk of their problems. Win 10 CLEARLY runs more efficiently with much less problems then Win 7 did. especially when it come to OS upgrading. No more manually searching the web for drivers, no more manually having to SPEND WEEKS  reinstalling ALL YOUR SOFTWARE. And last but not least, Win 10 WON'T install if it finds a problem during upgrade installation, it will automatically roll back to the last successful boot. That happened to me once, it was a pretty scary and unnerving hour or so where I seriously considered hitting myself in the head with a board for not manually backing up my system config.

But Win 10 did that automatically, it created an image of my c boot drive right before trying to upgrade.

 And as a 30+ year user of Cakewalk, I think I qualified to say that it just keeps getting better and better, and I do believe the continued support and development is without a doubt equal to 12 Tones & Roland, and MUCH BETTER then Gibson's. ?

 I do believe the #1 reason sampler synths are typically perceived to sound more authentic is because, being that the samples were recorded/made from the actual instruments, you CAN'T exceed the limits of the actual instruments octave range so you don't or won't get any cheesy, unnatural, or unauthentic sounds from them. 

[John Vere]