Prevent new takes from chopping up other clips?

[Starship Krupa]

I have a problem that happens all the time, and I'm sure it's preventable with the right configuration settings.

I tend to record a lot of my stuff as a solo performer, recording in Loop mode, doing 3 or 4 takes and then selecting the best take or comping.

I have my Project/Record settings set to Comping, with Store Takes in a Single Track,  Create New Lanes On Overlap, and New Takes on Top.

Now as we all do, I sometimes abort takes shortly after the start due to early flubs, or not feelin' it, or whatever. This leaves a stub clip in the take lane(s) of whatever track(s) I'm recording. That's fine until I hit W to top it and R to start recording again, at which point I'll get a new take lane and a clip, but for some reason having that other stub sitting there is a sign to Cakewalk telling it that I want it to split my new takes right at the edge of that clip.

I can't describe exactly what it does because the logic of it is impenetrable to me, all I know is that if I abort a take, I better get any stub clips the heck out of there before doing any more recording or Cakewalk will think that I want the new ones split into clips to match.

And heaven forbid one of the takes should continue past the loop point and then past the stub clip, it gets even weirder if I do that.

So: what I want Cakewalk to do is when I am tracking, and it's recording and making a new clip in a new take lane, I want it to ignore the fact that there is a clip in the lane next to it. I want it to forget about past mistakes and just move on. Even though Bob Ross tells us that everyone needs a friend, the leftover clip from my earlier botched take does not need a friend, it just needs to be deleted when I am done drumming or singing or whatever and sit down at the computer.

There are other situations where I've been recording audio and then stopped and the resulting clips seemed like they were arbitrarily split and flung across multiple take lanes. I'm sure this feature makes sense somehow, in some context, but I would rather just turn it off or configure things correctly if that's possible for now.

I've checked the documentation and can't quite figure it out. There is this one part that confuses me:

"If you have the Expand/collapse Take Lanes button on a track enabled, and you record one clip so that it overlaps another clip, the clips appear in different Take lanes when this option is enabled."

Does that mean that even if I already have Create New Lane On Overlap selected in Preferences, I also have to have the buttons pushed that show the Take Lanes on each channel I'm tracking or it won't work? And is doing that even the answer to my troubles?

[Noel Borthwick]

The fundamental purpose of the comping feature is to create a comp track from all the take lanes that has no overlaps. So leaving the prior take alone wouldn't be appropriate here since it would overlap with the new take.

[marcL]

Yes, the purpose is comping, but this does not mean that when I loop record a part 5 times, that all the clips should be split at the stop position. This doesn't make sense from the user's perspective and I never managed to stop precisely at the end of the loop! When you do comping then you want to choose either one whole clip of these 5 takes or you split them musically by your taste and combine them together. I think you almost never want to combine 2 different takes by the arbitrary stopping split point! This is nonsense (sorry for the hard word)!

[marcL]

By the way the only workaround that I have for this "mis-design" is that I make the looping area a bit longer (either at the end or beginning), so that I have a chance to stop within a not relevant point. And then I have to cut that unnecessary part  in all the takes after the recording and delete it (by hand). This could be avoided by a better design.

[Starship Krupa]

So is there no way to record in the way I describe?

I want to be in Loop mode, but be able to abort a take due to trainwreckage, restart my tracking, but not have my subsequent takes chopped up into clips that match up with the aborted takes.

If not, my choices are to either abort and then delete the resulting clips, or wait out the loop, maybe practice while the song's playing, and let the song start over?

It seems that there are others who are having workflow issues with Loop mode recording in Comping mode. I guess I do that, too, sometimes I want to stop the transport to take a break, have a drink of water when singing or something and wind up with a clip that doesn't fill up the entire loop and then subsequent takes get the choppy treatment.

I thought there must be a way to turn it off or configure it so that this didn't happen, but that's a feature request waiting to happen.

[David Baay]

Two options:

1. The comp splits can be easily "healed" in all clips after the fact by swiping across any take lane with the Comp tool, starting outside the clip.

2. Record in Sound on Sound mode with Auto Punch and Mute Previous Takes enabled.

 

[Larry Jones]

I don't record the way you do so I haven't come across this behavior, but -- since you are say you are hitting "W" and "R" -- I take it you are not trying to loop record hands-free. In that case, a workaround would be to hit "Ctrl+Z," then "W" then "R." Not perfect, but if  you've got a flub stub  and you know you don't want to use it, this will get it out of your life, leaving however many complete takes you choose to keep.

[Starship Krupa]

Excellent. Thanks, lads. I shall give David's recipe a try and see if it works for me, and Larry's surely will if it doesn't.

What I do is record hands-free until I mess up badly enough to abort the take, then I hit "W" and then "R" again. The rest of the time, I just let it roll.

[chris.r]

There used to be a key combo in previous Sonar versions just for deleting the last take without even stopping the whole loop-recording process, not shure if it was Ctrl+Spacebar maybe? Does it still apply in CakeLab (and the most recent Sonar version)?