Thoughts about Cakewalk compared to other DAW?

[Craig Anderton]

13 hours ago, Ælleden said:

9/ Yeah my first impression about the community wasn't fantastic I must say, maybe I deserved it is what some believe, maybe I did is what I believe aswell. In the end I came back after a very nice message from one of you so I guess all good then.

FWIW I think the biggest problem was "guilt by association." Yours looked similar to the (many) posts in the past where someone would come into the forum, complain vociferously about how Cakewalk was total crap, get their questions answered politely, and then would never come back or respond. The main difference, which should have been a clue, was you didn't say you were now going to try Reaper    After enough of these, I think the community lost its patience with posts that fit that profile.

In general the community here is  helpful and patient, to a much greater extent than most forums. I hope you didn't think my comment was a dig, it was more of a general comment due to a thread in my own forum about what can be done about the complexity of today's music software, which seemed relevant to this thread.

Finally,  Markleford is right - if you can produce a recipe that documents a reproducible bug, Noel & Company are very good about doing a fix. Over the past 20 years or so of using Sonar/Cakewalk, every time I was able to submit a reproducible bug, it was fixed (and often sooner rather than later).

[Ælleden]

Mark you're right it's actually CTRL+Numpad8 not shift my bad.
I don't know why but it's not crashing anymore lol, I literally had this issue almost everytime I used the command on all my projects and now it's working, I'll come back next time it crashes due to that and will try to be precise what i had in my scene

Edited February 24, 2022 by Ælleden

[scook]

 

[Starship Krupa]

On 2/12/2022 at 5:50 PM, Ælleden said:

Cakewalk splitting your work into pieces that you have to merge back together but it doesn't work 2 times out of 3.

This issue has bedeviled me since I first started using Cakewalk. 

When recording in comp mode/loop mode, Cakewalk makes assumptions about where you want to split your clips and then does it for you.

Unfortunately, at least in my case, its assumptions are never correct.

For audio, just swiping across the clips in the lane with the Smart/Comp tool will fix things, but with MIDI, it's more difficult, as you found out. You have to select everything and then bounce to clips, and that doesn't always go to plan.

I recently made a feature request to have the option to turn off automatic clip splitting. If you agree, please reply to the thread:

 

[NokNod]

forgive me for being an old head but, what does mega tilted mean ?   ?

[Markleford]

7 hours ago, Guerilla Genus said:

what does mega tilted mean ?

I know "tilted" or "on tilt" from the poker world, where you're playing with a hot head after a bad beat or frustrating loss and really need to slow it down and think things through. I imagine the term has made its way to other gaming and even beyond.

[Ælleden]

Ok so it crashed again using the command CTRL + padnum 2 to move everything down by an octave. It honestly didn't happen since last time I complained on here, so i used this command a lot in mean time and that was pretty stable until today.
Here is a screenshot, I'm not sure I can debug much more than that:

I recently restarted my song over but using some of the old instruments I designed. After making a grovy counter rythm with my chords, I was about to duplicate that on my bass line and when I wanted to go down an octave to match what I had on my previous song version (which you see on the right) it crashed.

Using Xfer Serum.

[Will.]

In case anyone is wondering.

It reads: 

"a problem caused the program to stop working properly. Windows will close this program and let you know if a solution is available."

[Ælleden]

Yep sorry forgot to translate.

[Ælleden]

This keeps happening over and over, just using numpad 2 for one single note makes it crash sometimes, not even needed the full CTRL + Numpad key to make it crash.
It's not reproducible 100% of the time but is once in a while.
It's quite annoying I just lost 30mins of work again...

Edited April 13, 2022 by Ælleden

[Heinz Hupfer]

HI:)

I do use NUMPAD2,8,4,6 (with Ctrl) very often on Editing Midi, I can't remember it crashed on that.

I know it doesn't help, but maybe it has to do with some other things, perhaps used these keys as shortcuts in other software in the background or in Windows itsself? 

 

Bassman.

 

[msmcleod]

4 hours ago, Ælleden said:

This keeps happening over and over, just using numpad 2 for one single note makes it crash sometimes, not even needed the full CTRL + Numpad key to make it crash.
It's not reproducible 100% of the time but is once in a while.
It's quite annoying I just lost 30mins of work again...

Ælleden - please send us a crash dump.  This should help us to determine the cause of the issue.

Also, if you have a project that can reproduce the issue please PM me a copy.

[GreenLight]

On 4/13/2022 at 8:45 AM, Heinz Hupfer said:

HI:)

I do use NUMPAD2,8,4,6 (with Ctrl) very often on Editing Midi, I can't remember it crashed on that.

I know it doesn't help, but maybe it has to do with some other things, perhaps used these keys as shortcuts in other software in the background or in Windows itsself? 

 

Bassman.

 

By default, is CTRL+NUMPAD 8/2 mapped to transpose an octave up/down in Cakewalk?!

I have been using CAL scripts for that... are you guys saying I could do this without them? ?

[Heinz Hupfer]

HI:)

 

@GreenLight

I had CALs too for this, but you can use NUMPAD2+8 with Ctrl without CALs:)

 

Bassman.

 

[GreenLight]

On 4/18/2022 at 10:11 AM, Heinz Hupfer said:

HI:)

 

@GreenLight

I had CALs too for this, but you can use NUMPAD2+8 with Ctrl without CALs:)

Bassman.

@Heinz Hupfer Nice! I think I got my CALs from you!

In the keyboard preferences, what are the new bindable actions called, what should I look for?

[Heinz Hupfer]

Hi?

@GreenLight

They are bound to Ctrl+Numpad 2 and 8, you just  have to unbind your CALs.

Greetz?

Bassman 

 

[Panu Pentikäinen]

On 4/13/2022 at 7:03 AM, Ælleden said:

It's quite annoying I just lost 30mins of work again...

Use more aggressive auto-save.
I have set it to save project every 5 minutes or 30 changes. If Cakewalk crashes, my average loss is 2.5 minutes or less.

[GreenLight]

3 hours ago, Heinz Hupfer said:

Hi?

@GreenLight

They are bound to Ctrl+Numpad 2 and 8, you just  have to unbind your CALs.

Greetz?

Bassman 

 

Whaaaa... it works! Cool, thanks. ? No need for the CALs anymore. When was this introduced?

Also, wouldn't it be nice if these new built-in octave transpose actions were displayed in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog? As it is now, it just says "[Unassigned]" on CTRL+NUM 2/8, so people have no idea it's actually used for something.

[Junk Heap]

A portion of ppl bash Cakewalk, but it's one of the three first DAWs on the market.  Some may say 'so?', and that's fair, because all DAWs have similarities, but Cakewalk declined in support many years ago after Roland tossed it, then Gibson grabbed it and ran it into the ground; its support declined (possibly less $$ going into its upkeep).  The latest Indo-Asian company that's behind Bandlab has been bringing Cakewalk out of the ashes, and I was surprised to see that after plenty of software updates to the software they stopped updating Cakewalk by Bandlab... that's because they are working on a revamped version of Cakewalk Sonar( https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk?lang=en ) .

I am a bit cynical of all of this because I've watched the software decline support/online-presence-wise.  I moved to Cubase, but may come back if they do well for the DAW in the long-run.  I hate being with a company that has little dedication to such an old but excellent piece of software - OVER THE LONG-TERM.  So far the ppl behind Cakewalk look to be bringing it back into competition against the other big players, but we'll see.  If they do a solid job I'll switch from Cubase as I find I've used Cakewalk for so long that music creation has become tedious in Cubase i.e. having to learn the in's and out's of new software.  No small feat when talking about a DAW.  Don't let anyone tell you it's easy.

[Joya Ali]

I get your frustration! Cakewalk has great features for a free DAW, but it's known for being buggy and sometimes unintuitive. Other DAWs like FL Studio, Ableton, or Logic Pro are more stable and user-friendly but often come at a cost. If you're serious about music production, it might be worth investing in one of those. Don't give up—every DAW has a learning curve!