I cannot get the great sound in Cakewalk out to exported files

[kfcherring]

Help!....    

I am a musician in a band and I am the audio engineer.  We record on my mixing device, I then 'record' all the separate tracks into Cakewalk and apply various effects etc.  I have watched many Youtube videos from Mike at Creative sauce and get some awesome results.  The song sounds amazing in Cakewalk.  When done, I then export to Wave, Flac or MP3 and there is sound loss.  Ugh!! I cannot get the sound I hear in Cakewalk out to recordings, that I share with my band mates.  Why can I not export out the same audio quality?

Does anyone else have this issue?

I have had multiple discussions even sending my Project and exports into your amazing support (shout out to Lois… super customer support) but we have not been able to solve this issue…….

[msmcleod]

When you say sound loss, what do you mean?

A loss of volume can be due to you routing directly to the hardware outputs (rather than via a Master Bus), and/or the hardware output volume not being at unity gain.

If you're outputting directly to the hardware, add a bus and call it Master, then route the tracks that went to the hardware output to that instead.

In either case, ensure your hardware output is set to unity gain, e.g:




You can change the level of the master fader, but don't change the hardware fader levels (the ones with the red fader knobs).

The other reason for a difference in sound is that you're using your onboard audio device that has some sound enhancement processing on it.   In other words, what is coming out of Cakewalk/Sonar is being further EQ'd / processed by Windows before it reaches your ears.

Cakewalk/Sonar has no knowledge or access to this extra processing.

If this is the issue, the only thing you can do here is disable all extra Windows sound processing, and re-tweak your mix accordingly.   As this was done on the final stereo output, you may get away with simply adding an EQ to your master bus and tweaking that to match what Windows was doing.