Help - Advice for Music Teacher considering Cakewalk

[Nigel Cassidy]

Anyone using bandlab for education AND Cakewalk in a school?

I am currently on aged version of Cubase and thinking of changing.

I would use bandlab for education with junior students on PCs and iPads

I would use Cakewalk on PCs for Senior students.

My questions are:

1. Can you open bandlab edu files in Cakewalk and go between the two? So could students make ideas in bandlab and shift them to cakewalk?

2. Does Cakewalk work well on machines on a school network?

3. Does Cakewalk work ok on fairly old machines (with m-audio mtrack)

 

 

 

 

[Starship Krupa]

1. The developers at BandLab continue to take steps to integrate Cakewalk and the other BandLab DAW's. It is possible to start projects in one and transfer them to the other and back and forth, but so far only as audio stems. Plug-ins and automation do not transfer.

2. Not sure what you mean by this. Keep project files on a network folder and launch them in Cakewalk? Cakewalk needs to stream audio files directly from the drive, so network latency would preclude this, if that is what you mean. If you mean keeping a single installation on a network server, I believe that Cakewalk must validate to each local system via BandLab Assistant, and again, loading plug-ins and loops and so forth might be slow over a school network.

3. If you post the specification range of your "fairly old machines," we can answer this question. RAM, processor, processor speed, hard disk type and RPM are most critical.

A feature that makes Cakewalk especially suited to the educational environment is Lenses. They allow you to select what elements are visible/available to the user. They can be used to hide more advanced features that would be confusing or superfluous to your coursework. So for instance, if you don't want to see the Inspector, you can hide that, or the Matrix, or many other features that might be distracting.

They can be hard to get your head around at first, but quite powerful once you grasp the concept.

[Kev]

On 10/25/2019 at 10:27 PM, Nigel Cassidy said:

...Does Cakewalk work ok on fairly old machines...

I've tested it on a PC that dates from 2010 (i7-950; 6GB RAM; WIndows 7) and it seemed to work ok.

[abacab]

On 10/25/2019 at 7:27 AM, Nigel Cassidy said:

2. Does Cakewalk work well on machines on a school network?

3. Does Cakewalk work ok on fairly old machines (with m-audio mtrack)

2. As far as I know the Cakewalk application is not designed to be networked. Each copy is standalone. Also I wouldn't link any of the content paths defined in the DAW anywhere except to a locally attached drive. But you could share project files with others (not in real-time) over the local network, same as you could with the internet. But that  might be slow, and dependent on the computer and network architecture, and is not really a DAW dependency.

3. Not sure exactly what you mean by "fairly old".

I have Cakewalk running on a 3rd gen  Intel Core i3 dating from 2012. It runs at 3.4 GHz with 2 physical cores. Cakewalk runs well as long as I keep the CPU load below 50%, by minimizing real-time processing by either limiting virtual instruments running in real-time, and/or minimizing the number of tracks.

Audio tracks are usually very light on the CPU, and I have not hit a limit with them.

You can freeze individual  instrument tracks with CPU heavy virtual instruments, which effectively bounces the selected track down to audio. You can unfreeze with one click if you need to make changes, then freeze again.

I would say that the faster your CPU and your drives are, the better. Recommend at least 8GB memory. I have tried it on a computer with 4GB, and that gets tight really fast if you load up a few sample based instruments.

Bottom line, it's free to try, so why not test it out?!!!