Two really obvious (to me) feature requests

[jkoseattle]

I know I know, there are places to officially log feature requests, but never ever in my long life has a feature request I have ever suggested ever made it ever to any piece of software ever, so I'm basically just howling at the rain here. Apologies. You can skip.

#1 Here is my workflow: I export a song that is in progress to audio, then copy the resulting mp3 to a Google Drive folder so that I can listen on my phone as I go about my day, jotting down a few notes for the next time I'm at the DAW. Half the time I do this, I then go off and later discover that only one track got exported, because that track happened to be selected at export time. Grrrr.... And when exporting I can't choose "Project" instead of "Selection" in my export because I have all kinds of crap in my project far off to the right of the real song, so I need to make a selection from the true start to end.

It seems like it would be easy for Sonar to pop up a warning: "Your exported audio will not include all non-muted tracks. Are you sure you want to export?" Then there would be an option to cancel export, and another option "Include all non-muted tracks in exported audio."

#2 - It also seems obvious that when I have selected some notes in PRV and want to drag them around or edit them somehow as a group , that I shouldn't have to put my mouse riiiiiiiiight over ONE of the notes in the group to drag it. Once the selection is made, I should just be able to drag anywhere within the "box" of selected notes. Same with editing velocities or lengths. If I simply want to change the length of a passage of very short notes, I'm required to first zoom in so that I can get the cursor over the right edge of one of the notes. I should just be able to treat the selection as a single thing. I'm thinking something like the Transform Tool box with the buttons on the borders.

Thanks for indulging me.

[Amberwolf]

I most certainly would love #2.  

[David Baay]

6 hours ago, jkoseattle said:

It seems like it would be easy for Sonar to pop up a warning

CW developers have historically avoided the use of warning pop-ups to save you from yourself, and rightly so in my opinion.

My suggestions:

- Get in the habit of hitting Ctrl+Shift+A to deselect everything before bouncing/exporting an entire project.

- Use the Project Start and End markers to define the default range.

- Instead of going straight to export, bounce the Master bus to a 'Master Bounce' track that outputs directly to Main Outs in parallel with the Master bus. Group that track's mute button in opposition with the Master bus so you can A/B between the live and bounced mixes. When you're satisfied that they sound the same, export the Master Bounce track in the desired format.

[Xoo]

#2 is standard Windows behaviour (try moving a bunch of files in Explorer for instance) so is probably hard to change and also probably not something that *should* be changed as it's then non-standard behaviour.

[pwallie]

14 hours ago, jkoseattle said:

I know I know, there are places to officially log feature requests

feedback forum, a mod @Wookiee should move it there, you'll more likely get more useful feedback

[Wookiee]

57 minutes ago, pwallie said:

feedback forum, a mod @Wookiee should move it there, you'll more likely get more useful feedback

Even from my hospital bed I useful eh?

[pwallie]

1 minute ago, Wookiee said:

Even from my hospital bed I useful eh?

useful? hmm could be haha, best wishes for a speedy recovery mate

[Starship Krupa]

20 hours ago, David Baay said:

Get in the habit of hitting Ctrl+Shift+A to deselect everything before bouncing/exporting an entire project.

Many Cakewalk users have bound the "~" key to Deselect All. It's handy because it's one of the few unassigned keystrokes that doesn't require a modifier.

Figuring out why Cakewalk's DAW's have me wearing a shiny spot on my tilde key is on my to do list. There's something about the way it releases (or doesn't release) selected items that isn't such an issue in other DAW's I've used. Not that I think it would ever change, I just want to understand it.

20 hours ago, David Baay said:

Use the Project Start and End markers to define the default range

This is the very issue that led many of us to request this feature. I like to work with a measure or two at the start of my projects, and I also sometimes "park" things past the end of the song.

20 hours ago, David Baay said:

Instead of going straight to export, bounce the Master bus to a 'Master Bounce' track that outputs directly to Main Outs in parallel with the Master bus. Group that track's mute button in opposition with the Master bus so you can A/B between the live and bounced mixes. When you're satisfied that they sound the same, export the Master Bounce track in the desired format.

I'm having a hard time parsing this. When you say "bounce the Master bus to a Master Bounce track," how do you bounce a bus to a track?

Since I want to use a bus fader to control my monitor volume without having it affect exporting, I route my Master bus to a dedicated Export bus that has no effects and has its fader always set to zero. I hide it, because it's never going to be touched.

Then I route my Export bus to a Volume bus that lets me easily adjust my monitor volume without it affecting anything else. I also keep Mastering the Mix LEVELS or MeldaProduction MLoudnessAnalyzer on the volume bus pre fader.

Then at export time, I just export from my Export bus and that's it.

My reason for doing all this is that when I first started using Cakewalk, I ran into trouble with exporting because I didn't understand that "entire mix" came off of the hardware outs. I thought it came from the Master bus. I was adjusting volume with the hardware outs and my exports were coming out at low levels.

My interface also has a dedicated output for headphones, so I was getting the output from that as well. It was all a big mess, so I stopped using "Entire Mix" and figured out the above routing. There may be a simpler way to accomplish it, but I know that if I take my export from my Export bus, I will be getting what I'm hearing without it being affected by something downstream.

[msmcleod]

For #1 you can use "Project" if you define a project end marker.

[David Baay]

10 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

When you say "bounce the Master bus to a Master Bounce track," how do you bounce a bus to a track?

- Tracks > Bounce to Tracks

- In the Bounce dialog, choose Buses as Source Category

- Ctrl+Shift+Click any bus to de-select all buses, and then re-check only the Master, and OK to execute the bounce.

Unless you happen to have an empty track focused, Bounce to Tracks will create a new track that you can rename and redirect to Main Outs. I usually have a Master Bounce track pre-existing in my templates. and just focus it before I execute Bounce to Track so it automatically becomes the target.

Regarding busing and volume management, My templates also has 'Pre-Master' bus that's used only for summing the mix with no plugins on it, and outputs to the Master.  Master holds mastering effects and outputs to a '> Main Outs' bus that goes to the hardware outs, and can be used to manage monitoring levels. It's also actually where Master Bounce and Metronome output to rather than direct to hardware outs. Since I only ever bounce/export the Master bus, the end result is not affected by anything I do on the > Main Outs bus. In reality I generally use hardware to manage my monitoring volume and there's nothing on the > Main Outs bus except possibly metering plugins. 

Edited December 21 by David Baay

[Will.]

It is always good practice to double check your work before you do an export - doesnt matter which song you use. 

[Sock Monkey]

I think a lot of people never totally learn about the new export dialogue settings and features.

I'm a person who might export 60 songs in a week. I often revisit my collection of backing tracks and need to update them. This involves opening and exporting a lot of projects. And they are not always the same. They might have been last opened with a different audio interface and so on.

Three Sonar features  make this go smoothly.  I never have bonked exports unless I go too fast and miss a move. 

 Custom Workspace = This means every project opens and looks exactly the same overall. 

Sonars new Start and end markers. This is a huge time saver. No more blank space at start or chopped off ends. Perfect every time. 

 The new Export dialogue. I just re installed Sonar after a clean install so I had lost my custom presets. It took 10 second to set up the one I use the most. 

I choose the default "Entire Project" I had to change from 44.1 to 48 and turn off dither. That was it. I then saved this overtop of the factory preset. Done. 

I think a lot of people are also unaware of the extra view to the right of the "sources" box. This as you can see shows me I have not muted or selected just one track etc. 

Where it is a good Idea to use Select all or better yet select none, I have not had to do this for years now. I just check this list and if I spot something I simply un check it here and make sure the Hardware box is checked. 

I have never had to fuss with convoluted routings or bouncing this and that. Literally 100's of exports just last year and possibly only 1 in 50 is playing one track because I simply didn't look at that sources list close enough. 

 

Edited Tuesday at 06:36 PM by Sock Monkey