External Audio Editor

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

22 hours ago, scook said:

Quite a while ago (pre X Series) there was a discovery process as part of the installer which added certain editors to the Tools section of the the Utilities menu.

The hooks were retained in the program so the registry entries still work.

I wrote the Tools Editor to simplify the process and remove the need to directly edit the registry.

 

I used 8.5 until CBB came out so I wasn't imagining it then. It used to give me the option of Wavelab that I also had installed.

I think I tried it once and never used it again so no loss

[dePUNDIT]

@Scook I downloaded your tool but it doesn't display the entire page on my screen. The lower parts are cut off and I can't scroll. How do I fix this issue? 

[scook]

Select a smaller font size using the File menu

[Trensharo]

You can add an Audio Editor using the Registry.  Cakewalk doesn't automatically detect newer versions of Audio Editors like Sound Forge Pro, WaveLab Pro, etc.  You have to do it manually, but it takes literally 2 minutes.

[Psychotronic]

Can't for the life of me figure out how to get the tool to add Sound Forge, though...

[scook]

The readme included with the Tools Editor has an image of a SoundForge setup

 

[Timo Finkbeiner]

This is also a point which has to be developed in future updates. It is not up to date when you have to do a registry hack just to add an external audio editor. This has to be standard and should be done inside the options-menu inside the program.

[Maestro]

On 6/27/2019 at 3:06 PM, scook said:

It is possible today. I wrote a utility called Tools Editor to make it easier to add any program including audio editors (and almost anything else including pdf and html documents) to the tools section of the CbB utility menu. It is available on my google page. Help is built into the program and there is a readme pdf with illustrations including the setup for adding a version of SoundForge.

Once added to the tools menu, to edit a clip, select a clip and launch the audio editor from the menu.

Not sure if Audacity will work as an audio editor though. For a program to work, it must be able to take a wav file as a command line argument. That is how CbB (and many other DAWs) send files to external editors. There are quite a few free and paid editors that do take wav files on their command line.

1. The handoff is for the entire file.  If you only use 5 seconds out of a 50 second audio file, Cakewalk will hand over the entire file to i.e. Sound Forge or RX when you use the Tools menu.  I ran into this issue when I wanted to remove an artifact while editing a Podcast for someone in Cakewalk.  I had to switch to Samplitude and do the work there, because Cakewalk was handing over the entire 1 hour Audio File to iZotope RX.  It was incredibly impractical. 

2. They need to build the configuration for External Editors into the UI.

3. Using Audacity as an Audio Editor from Cakewalk is like using Cakewalk as an  Audio Editor from Samplitude.    It's designed to be used primarily as a non-destructive multi-track recording/editing solution, like Adobe Audition's Multi-Track workspace.  It's a DAW, not an Audio Editor (or Destructive Wave Editor, to be more precise).  If Cakewalk didn't support Virtual Instruments (like Audition), it would be directly comparable to Audacity.  The issue with this is that  when you go to save the file, Audacity defaults to wanting to save a project/session file, so it becomes a bit fugly to use because of all of the extra clicks and directory browsing to get it to overwrite the correct file before going back to Cakewalk.  With Destructive Audio Editors, you press <Ctrl-S> + <Alt-F4> and off you go.  The workflow is considerably smoother, and there is less button mashing/mouse clicking involved.

[scook]

1 hour ago, Maestro said:

The handoff is for the entire file  clip

It operates at the clip level. There is nothing to prevent splitting smaller clips out if a larger one and passing that between programs.

[Maestro]

47 minutes ago, scook said:

It operates at the clip level. There is nothing to prevent splitting smaller clips out if a larger one and passing that between programs.

That is not what I experienced.  Entire clip was sent to the RX Audio Editor.  In that case, a 1 hour podcast recording, instead of just the 2 second clip that I had split out of it (splitting around the area that I needed to work on).

[Josh Wolfer]

13 hours ago, Maestro said:

That is not what I experienced.  Entire clip was sent to the RX Audio Editor.  In that case, a 1 hour podcast recording, instead of just the 2 second clip that I had split out of it (splitting around the area that I needed to work on).

This is correct. If you want to only send a small portion, you need to bounce that clip first. 

Here's the rub, if you have to denoise the clip, it's a lot easier to denoise the entire hour long podcast first and then snip and bounce if you want to make additional adjustments. That way it doesn't send the hour clip to RX. I do this non-stop with mixing DX. 

[Klaus]

Instead of Bounce to Clip, "Apply Trimming" is faster, esp. with a keyboard shortcut.
 

[Josh Wolfer]

21 hours ago, Klaus said:

Instead of Bounce to Clip, "Apply Trimming" is faster, esp. with a keyboard shortcut.
 

OMG. And it doesn't render the X-fade. You're my hero. I've been using Sonar for 20 years and never once new about that. Cheers!

[Maestro]

On 9/24/2020 at 6:10 PM, Josh Wolfer said:

This is correct. If you want to only send a small portion, you need to bounce that clip first. 

Here's the rub, if you have to denoise the clip, it's a lot easier to denoise the entire hour long podcast first and then snip and bounce if you want to make additional adjustments. That way it doesn't send the hour clip to RX. I do this non-stop with mixing DX. 

 

 

I didn't need to denoise a clip.  I need to use the Spectral Editor to remove a noise from the people upstairs doing work while we were recording ?

If I needed a DeNoise, I'd have just used the RX  De-Noise Plugin, instead...

In other DAWs, the DAW just knows how to send only that clip to the Audio Editor.  It does a "bounce in place" automatically and then replaces that clip with the edited clip when you're done.

Edited September 26, 2020 by Maestro