Cakewalk Midi Editor

[Veronica Hernandez]

Ive used Cakewalk for 20 years (with huge breaks of time in there!) I've used it mainly for audio recording and editing, including integrating it with BAND IN A BOX which I use to easily make audio tracks for my songs (I'm a singer/songwriter/guitar player mainly) This has worked out great and I understand the program fairly well. However I have never really done anything with MIDI. I've been a bit spoiled by Band In A Box (and occasionally recording actual musicians) generating really good audio tracks for me that I haven't sat down and really learned to make tracks from midi.

But the idea of taking a song I've written and going from chords/melody to a complete track seems a bit overwhelming and I'm not sure how to start to approach that. I'm used to simply typing in chords and having band in a box doing the heavy lifting, but then you have to take what it gives yo./

Programs and midi file in no way have to Cakewalk specific. The only requirement is the synths should be of the vsti standard, and Cakewalk will digest any .MID midi file you can throw at it. The midi track output should point to the aforementioned vsti synth. You can edit the midi with a mouse, record midi with a hardware midi controller keyboard and or midi drums.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I understand MIDI and cakewalk well enough I'm just struggling on how to get going when starting a song from scratch, IE how to make a guitar part to chords I already have etc.

A few decades ago, I used some Roland "Intelligent Arrangers," with a midi track consisting of chords going to the Roland's chord recognition midi channel. The boxes would then "orchestrate" the chords based on various arrangement algorithms (aka "Styles"). It had some options (choice of a basic or an advanced arrangement, fills, etc.). Not sure if that's the kind of thing you have in mind, but if it is, maybe someone knows if there are plug-ins which do something like that. Just a thought.

It sounds as if you are really having a problem composing, harmonizing or orchestrating rather than a MIDI problem. MIDI is just another way to record or notate music and if you already know how to edit MIDI, then you have everything you need to create a symphony from scratch if that is your goal. If you know the notes you want a MIDI controlled sound source to play, the simplest method for getting there is to use some kind of MIDI controller. If you lack the instrumental chops to play a controller in real time, then step record, enter notes in a piano roll editor, play on your instrument of choice or try to use pitch to MIDI conversion algorithms etc. You can even enter notes in an event list editor if you can convert the notes in your mind to note numbers, velocity values and duration. If you do not know the notes you want to play, then MIDI is not an answer to anything. Band in a Box and other algorithmic composition/harmonization tools may use MIDI inputs and outputs but they are not MIDI--they are computer assisted composition tools. I am not saying you should not use them, but by their nature they are designed to give you a solution to a problem or at best a choice of solutions that may or may not be what you want.

Its pretty hard to find music editoring software for windows 98SE thies days. I searched for FL Studio 7 (i think it still has win98 support) but found nothing.

Is there any source or place where i can find old FL Software? I have a FL Studio 20 license. Im not asking for pirat software. Or any usefull alternative?

I like to record/edit with midi devices.

regards

Chris

Cakewalk's a good MIDI editor, with more wav-style DAW stuff included as you get newer. I'm fairly certain there were many full-featured 'lite' versions of Cakewalk for Win98, they'd be given away with midi keyboards, sound cards, coverdisks etc, maybe look up 'Cakewalk Express'. (Modern Cakewalk for Win XP onwards is called things like SONAR and Plasma etc.)

So Sonar 2 has still Win9x support, but looks like same hard to get as FL Studio 7.

At the moment i only found Cubasis 1.0 with dongle what is really old, not really nice to use.. win3.11 first release

I use CakeWalk Pro Audio 5 on my Win9x setups, including a 486 I have (which it works for digital audio and MiDi). It works great. On the desktop with the AWE64, it sounds incredible on the MIDI side. Sometimes I use it to compose stuff for BandLab.

Editing relies on utilizing multiple tools which are presented in layers, there is an edit tool with multiple sub tools, there is a draw tool with multiple sub tools, there is an array stool with multiple sub tools, there is a select tool, there is a move tool and there is a smart tool.

One of the things that I enjoy about it is that you can record directly to the take lanes in case you have a take that you need to do overdubs on. This allows you to minimize the number of take lanes, so that you do not have a screen full of takes that you need to scroll up and down to utilize.

The waveform is not updated in real time, so it can be difficult to know exactly what you were going to get before hand. This is important because the algorithm does not always put the transient marker exactly where it needs to be. In some other products there is no need to move around the markers, since you can see exactly what is happening in real time. When you can see what is happening in real time you can just move the marker to exactly where things need to go and get on with your life.

It is also possible to output the triggers to midi so that you can utilize an external software instrument to produce the drum sounds. I find that this workflow is somewhat cumbersome though. Other products simply let you click a button to export a midi track, but drum replacer directly outputs the midi to a synth that is currently in the project. If you want to capture the midi then you need to set up a MIDI loopback and record it.

The idea is to analyze two pieces of audio and then shift one of them so that it aligns with the source. This is done with an engine similar to audiosnap, so audio is affected only between parts where it needs to be.

One of the more disappointing things is that there is no navigation system that allows you to quickly find or jump to a specific track, or a type of track. Other products have things like search boxes and/or tree views that make it easy to navigate a large project in the mix console.I worked on a 45 track project in Cakewalk and even that was relatively difficult to move around and without any easy way of finding tracks.

Creating sends is something that most DAWs are not very good at. The act of creating a send is usually ambiguous since there are multiple ways that you may want this to happen and various goals that you may have when creating a send.

It is a bit disappointing that you cannot change the size of the faders, so you end up bound to the relatively small faders you are offered. A neat feature is that you can easily access Pro Channel straight from the mix strip by clicking the pro channel button.

I am not a fan of using menus to remove sends or effects. It is not difficult to add a modifier that allows you to click in effect or a send and remove it. Two clicks and visual recognition of a menu is a poor workflow.

It appears that before BandLab purchased Cakewalk, Sonar had many more ProChannel modules. I would love to see these added, but I suspect that they will be separated out as purchasable assets to help monetize Cakewalk.

Look at the top of the ProChannel title for the EQ. See those double arrows pointing to the right? That brings up a pretty full EQ window with spectrum analyzer, piano frequency graph and an input meter.

It adds a 3dB boost around 12khz with a 2dB dip at around 4.6khz. There was some slight distortion differences in the measurement, but not enough that I could rule it out as an error of measurement. Phase response is as expected for that filter.

Notably, this is NOT SHOWN in the response graph, which I think is a deceptive design. Presenting a graphic that aims to give you an idea of what the processor is doing, then not showing you what the processor is doing is not very friendly.

Turning on type II makes this even worse. It gives you a saturation sound that is devoid of any high-end sparkle but has the grit and the low-end that just causes a mix to end up sounding muddy and overly dense.

They all sound fantastic and I have been a fan of putting them on nearly every single channel. I particularly like the S-type, which sounds similar to an SSL 4K console. Regardless if the emulation is good I find that it is a cool sound.

It lets you assign multiple knobs from various plugins to a single control. These controls can be scaled (and inverted). These controls can be automated, allowing you to control multiple plugin parameters (scaled/inverted!) with a single automation line.

The editing is tool-based, but the tools are far away in the main control bar and utilize the F-keys by default to switch to various tools. You can use Middle Mouse Click to access a toolbar, but I found this to not be reliable as the tool bar would come up and disappear almost instantly sometimes.

Since a track will normally house a specific instrument, I think it is a reasonable assumption to make that that instrument will always warrant the same type of editor. Having the editor preference set as per clip makes for more clicking and increases the chance of ending up with a clip that is not set up how you want.

This is still a decent attempt and I would think that most people would appreciate how simple it is to place notes and adjust the velocity. Sometimes having a more functional step sequencer takes away from the essence of the concept: a simple way to enter musical information.

Cakewalk can upsample the signal pathway for all processes to twice the sample rate. This is sufficient to reduce a significant amount of aliasing and decrease the inharmonic content that may be present from non-linear processes.

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