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mika · Posted - Fri Dec 28, 2001 3:44 pm

Hi

It seems that I am composer from stoneages, but I just heard that I can fix all
effects, audio files and midi playings in Cakewalk Pro 9 - can I use Cool Edit Pro for my benefit at all? I am taking about creating/composing/mixing music. Not copying or misusing other's compositions. How do you see that ? This is very good site - I got help in minutes.
glad New Year for them who ever will spend it !

mika · Posted - Fri Dec 28, 2001 3:45 pm

and should have added - what's the use of multisession in CEP ?

Graeme · Member Location: Spain

Essentially, CEP is an audio recorder/editor. You can render your midi files into audio and put them into CEP for mixing, editiing or simply further audio processing. However, you can do this in Cakewalk already, so whether or not there is any benefit for you personally, it's hard to say.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'multisession', perhaps you mean "multi-track", in which case all it means is that you have a 64 track audio recorder at your disposal.

Jim Smitherman · Posted - Sat Dec 29, 2001 2:29 am

One reason (the main one) I've never gotten CEP is that cakewalk does a lot of what I need, along with the midi that I need. However, the audio editing in cakewalk (ver 9 is not bad, and I understand Sonar is more impressive) still does not equal the ease of such editing you can do in cool2000, so I've also used cool2000 a lot. Various audio editors will appear on your cakewalk tools menu for immediate access. selecting an audio track, and choosing cool2000 in cakewalk, will open that track for editing, and any edits you make on it will be copied back into the cakewalk audio track.

Jim

post78 · Location: USA

I don't like Sonar. I think it's absolutely useless.

Jim Smitherman · Posted - Sat Dec 29, 2001 9:21 pm

What makes Sonar useless? Just curious. It's one of the few apps currently that supports 24 bit wdm under 2k and xp, for one thing. I understand from reviews that the interface is changed from that in cake 1-9 (I've use cakewalk since the first windows version, so that might be hard to get used to). But if it works and plays well with WDM under the NT kernel, how can it be absolutely useless?

Jim

Havoc · Posted - Sun Dec 30, 2001 1:14 pm

If sonar would be as easy to use as CEP and a bit more audio oriented, I would not wait for CEP 2. But I keep waiting...........

post78 · Location: USA

I suppose my statement was a little rash. The program makes no sense to me. Maybe if I understood it I wouldn't have such a problem with it. As for right now, I find it as ugly and sloppy as any other Cakewalk application.

Jim Smitherman · Posted - Sun Dec 30, 2001 8:12 pm

well, ok, to each his or her own, I suppose. Other than emotional effusion, though, I still don't understand what you object to in any given cakewalk application. I just don't understand the words 'ugly' and 'sloppy' in this context. My reason originally for choosing cake 1 for windows, in 1992, was that at the time it was the only midi sequencer that showed notation. I have ver 9 now, and it's only gotten better.

What sequencer would you prefer? The only other contender that I'm aware of (at the high end, anyway), is Cubase. Do you use it?

Another choice would be n-tracks. I have it, it does good things, and is affordable. No notation, though.

Jim

Graeme · Member Location: Spain

Jim Smitherman · Posted - Sun Dec 30, 2001 10:01 pm

ok, yeah, I've heard of Logic too. I don't recall reading any reviews of it, but then, I don't really keep up all that much anymore. N-tracks support for midi is relatively ok. . . at least, it does have support. I haven't used it that much for midi, to tell you the truth, especially since it lacks notation. Cakewalk is just second nature to me by now.

I've been playing around with my various woodwinds lately, and ntracks is the only app I have that supports WDM under 2k at 24 bits, so that's where I've been doing most of my straight audio.

Graeme · Member Location: Spain

Jim Smitherman · Posted - Sun Dec 30, 2001 11:02 pm

well, on one thing we can be sure we disagree. Notation is not a dying art. Wherever did you get that idea?

But, no, mika probably has no use for cepro, given cake 9. cool200, yeah, maybe so, as I've already noted. (no pun intended).

Graeme · Member Location: Spain

Jim Smitherman · Posted - Mon Dec 31, 2001 2:08 am

well, it's a tired argument. Some of the worst players I have ever heard could read. They couldn't improvise a tire change, though. That isn't a result of their being able to read, it was a result of their never learning to improvise. Those really good players who can't read . . would be so much better if they could, and then would expose themselves to music that would stretch their abilities.

there are always those greats who couldn't read (one doesn't pop to mind, though there are some), then there were the greats who could (Bill Evans, Charles Mingus . . on and on). I've worked in the music business for years too, but in the specificlly pop field, it's so easy to hear the progressions, that there is no real need to write any of it down. How many pop songs are there? Maybe three or four, altogether. Occasionally they'll change key in the B section. There's more to music than the pop field, though. Fortunately.

But trust me, there are many serious literate musicans out there. The pop music business is a billion(s) dollar a year industry. That doesn't mean it's necessarily important artistically.

Jim

Graeme · Member Location: Spain

Jim, I wouldn't totally disagree with any of your statements.

However, in (say) the forties and fifties, there were very few 'popular' musicians who couldn't read. Compare that with the situation today. Now consider just how much 'popular' music has increased and how much 'serious' music (jazz, classical or whatever) has declined and you can see what I mean when I say it is a dying art.

However, it will never die completely - thank goodness.

SteveG · Location: United Kingdom

Hang on chaps - aren't we in danger of getting just a little polarised here?

Yeah, pop music is generally pretty simple, but not all of it. I recall a few songs like 'Dizzy' that did pretty well. That goes through a few key changes... and I could bore you with some more, but I won't.

But in quite simple songs, things like brass and string arrangements are usually scored - they have to be.

And I wasn't particularly aware that 'serious' music had declined - has it really?

As far as I can tell, there will always be a demand for musos who can play other peoples' arrangements. The dots may be a pretty bad way of expressing the composer's intentions in terms of nuance, but because of the universality of them, and the plain fact that nobody's come up with anything better, they are going to stay whether we like it or not.

But nobody's forcing anybody to use them... :)

I hope that you have a prosperous new year, BTW.

Steve

Jim Smitherman · Posted - Tue Jan 01, 2002 9:08 am

yeah, I don't mean to polarize the issue, but somehow, this issue seems to get polarized all too easily, with little effort.

I also don't mean to demean 'pop' music. I like a lot of it. I've made my living using it as fodder for the improvisitorial mill. Graeme, your points about the pop music of the 40's and (lesser extent) 50's is well taken. But, again, look at the whole century. The great american songbook is just that . . . great. In the hands of a really fine player, any of these standards can be turned into something golden. (Keith Jarretts long running series of standards recordings comes to mind . . . an unbelievable Autumn Leaves, incredible Stella by Starlight, it goes on)

But, Autumn Leaves was before MY time, as is most of the stuff I play at gigs (smoke gets in your eyes, stardust, all is fodder for jazz improv) . . . . so, what does that say about 'times' . . . I think it's so easy for a given generation (including my own) to get locked into the ten or so year period when it was say, 13-23, and think that was the only ten (or so) years of music worth listening to . . . (I alienate all, now, huh?). I think there is truth to this observation, though, because I dealt with it in myself, at the age of 19 when I came to grips with the fact that there was more to piano playing than fast blues licks, and decided to go back into serious study of theory and piano, mainly to improve my jazz playing . . . ultimately, it drew me into a study of the last 2000 years, and it did this rather quickly, when I really started listening . . . (The Rite of Spring is an ear opener for a 19 year old rocker, it was for me) . . .

Literacy in music is just that. Knowing the alphabet, and knowing grammar in language does not necessarily mean that one is, or can be, a great writer, but there aren't any great writers who don't know the alphabet and understand, at least intuitively, grammar. It's the same in music.

The deficiencies of notation pale in comparison to the deficienies of illiteracy.

but, no, Steve, one of my points is that serious music hasn't declined. It just doens't get all the press that high profile 'music' gets . . . . since, so much of that is more a cult of personality than it has anything to do with music per se. My main point, is that there is good stuff happening now, and that that has ALWAYS been the case, but we so easily forget that, and get wrapped up in only what's happening 'now' . . . forgetting how much the 'now' depends on the past, and thus, missing the richness.

Listen to Machaut, incredibly 'modern' sounding music, written in the 14th century. Listen to Sumer is Icumen In, one of the greatest hits of the last millineum, 12th century. I had my sightsinging class at LSU learn to solfege that one. . . . . . very cool (we also solfeged 'birdland") . . .

Learning to read music opens up the world of music the same way learning to read words opens up the world of thoughts of the great writers. Having the ability to read doesn't per se make you a better musician, but putting that ability to use, and reading, DOES.

and, yeah, you will work a LOT more.

rant ends . .

Jim

SteveG · Location: United Kingdom

SteveG · Location: United Kingdom

I suppose that my response to the original question is this:

If you are going to do MIDI tracks, then Cakewalk, or any of the other proprietry software that floats your particular boat is fine - CE isn't intended for this purpose anyway. But if you have MIDI tracks sequenced up, and you want to add acoustic instruments, then using CE is definitely a good, intuitive way to go about doing it, with the huge advantage that it will ultimately mix down however many tracks you throw at it, even if this does take a little while with some files. And it will do this sucessfully even on a moderately specced machine, because it doesn't have to do it in real time. Okay, so you have to adopt a slightly different method of mixing stuff, but this really isn't a problem.

So yes, if you want to spend a fortune on a machine with umpteen different windows all trying to muck around with your plugins, and a mixer that you don't touch half of the time, that's not particularly intuitive, BUT will cope with all of the Audio and MIDI at once, then yes, spend money on Cakewalk, Cubase, Logic, etc. But I bet you end up chasing your tail half of the time! I've tried editing audio on a few of these apps, (the ones that actually will) and I'd rather use CEP anyday, and that's not just because I'm more familiar with it, but because it behaves like an audio editor should behave, as far as I'm concerned.

So really it's a point of view thing, I suppose. Cakewalk is some music software that just happens to record multitrack audio. CEP is an audio editor that just happens to record multitrack audio, and has some rather more useful tools for manipulating sound. You decide!

Steve

Jim Smitherman · Posted - Tue Jan 01, 2002 12:25 pm

yeah, what you said! That's basically the way I see it as well. I think cakewalk themselves understand that, that's why cooledit, or any other audio editor, will appear on a cakewalk tools menu!

One of the deciding factors now in choosing a sequencer, though, is the plugin format support. will I use vst or dxi?

Incidentally, speaking of plugins, I see the new cakewalks, sonar, and home studio, have a softsynth plugin that gives soundfont support no matter the hardware . . . .

Jim