Getting Superior Drummer 3 to work in Cakewalk

[Tony M]

Hi all. I'm having trouble getting my Roland v-drums to trigger Superior Drummer 3 in Cakewalk. Please bear with me as I have little experience with DAWs, VSTs and recording in general.
When I play in stand-alone SD3, everything works great. My Roland TD-11 is connected via USB to my PC, and I hear what I play through PC headphones. No latency, no issues. In the Audio settings I use ASIO as the audio device.
But when I add an SD3 VST track in Cakewalk, my v-drums don't trigger anything. I was expecting the plug-in to work exactly the same as the standalone program.
I thought that maybe my TD-11 needs to be connected to the PC via midi cable? Or are there audio settings somewhere that I need to change?

Secondly, the one thing I miss is the ability to turn on the TD-11 and play along to music from my phone on the fly, like from Youtube or whatever.
Is there a way to play along to music with Superior Drummer using Cakewalk? The only way I found is to add audio files in SD3 and play along, but I find this quite limiting.
Someone suggested I might be able to do this with a mixer, but I'm not sure exactly what the setup would be like.

Thanks for any help!

[Teegarden]

Hi I don't use an external controller, but SD3 works just fine in CbB. ASIO is good. 
It must have to do with your input & output settings (look at "Preferences" as well as midi input and output on the SD3 midi tracks in your project) and selection of the right hardware in Preferences-> midi devices -> Inputs.

There are several topics that explain how to get this up and running. Here is one that probably will answer your questions:

How do I use an external synthesizer as a MIDI controller?

Some extra info: CbB manual External Devices

 

You also might want to have a look at how to use the Enhanced ‘Instrument Track Per Audio Output’ feature.

Not quite sure what your problem is with playing along on the fly but if you've got the above working, you should be able to play on your hardware and have the sounds come out of CbB while listening to on your phone.

 

Hope this helps.

Please let know if you need more information.

 

Edited May 28, 2021 by Teegarden