Proboscis wrote: ↑05 Feb 2020
Well, my serious Bro-Love for Cakewalk may have reached the end of the Honeymoon period after a few short days.
I decided to give it a run on a new music project, to see what I might achieve with the limited instruments onboard, plus a handful of VSTs I own. Not content with losing my other love, the OctoRex, I thought I would pipe the drums in via ReWire. Cakewalk make it dead simple to do this, I didn't need to RTFM it was that straightforward.
So here I am, controller & guitar to hand, and laid down a nice little phrase with a vintage Rhodes. Added some bass, and a touch of guitar. How about some effects ? Sticking to the included suite, I threw on a digital delay unit and an amp head/cab combo. Sounds good. A little disorienting to navigate and move notes around, since the shortcut keys aren't intuitive to me. I then decided to see what would happen when I dragged an audio clip onto a MIDI lane. Processing, processing, processing.... all good
But then. the screen goes gray. I get the ' Cakewalk is not responding ' message. Bummer, I've crashed the DAW.
No problem, I think, I'll just start a new session. But, I hadn't yet set up the auto save, I knew that the moment it froze. No problem, I can play it again. However, when Cakewalk crashed, it hung my whole computer ! No access to the sound card settings. I cannot relaunch Cakewalk. Everything's dead, I can't even restart my computer, so I do a hard reset.
Finally I'm back in business. Record my phrases, add some effects, this time stacking a few into a single channel. Hello error message, nice to see you again. Cakewalk's crashed a second time. Once again, whole computer is kaput.
Then I got all nostalgic about the time when I first started exploring digital recording many years ago. A trial version of Cubase, a cracked version of Fruity Loops (it wasn't 'FL Studio' back then) and was reminded of that awkward time. A time when those too furnished me with that sweet little
evil error message. It was an old computer, that by today would have been re-absorbed by the earth from which it came, and I almost gave up. But something, or perhaps someone, suggested Reason 4.
And behold, beautiful, uninterrupted music-making. I forfeited my ability to record guitar, but it didn't matter to me. I was making music on the computer ! And this vast array of rack devices was something I could relate to, at least a little. Audio comes out of there, and goes into here. So began my love affair with Reason.
Since Reason 4, I've worked on over 500 projects, and in that time I only recall a handful of crashes. One handful, really. And in two of those cases the file corrupted, and the songs were irretrievable. Not bad odds. I've had a dozen fatal exceptions with the A-List drums , which I put down to using them in a way they were not intended, but they never crashed the DAW. A quick save/close/relaunch and I was back in business. And a couple of errors with a free pitch shifting VST that was fixed soon enough (by uninstalling said VST and never using it again), and that's it. That's the grand total of problems I've had in over 10 years with Reason.
But here we are, into the second decade of my familiar and comfortable DAW relationship, and I'm looking to move on from my one true love. And it's here, my friends, where I am reminded of the futility in cheating on my lover with a fresh new young model. The passion has been growing, but there's some inconsolable issues. This new fling, she just can't operate with me, in a stable, trusting manner. The invigorating tryst on our first few dates was exciting, but alas, it's time for me to go, my lovely Cakewalk. Time for me to return into the open arms of the old draft horse that's gotten me through many an otherwise lonely night. She doesn't care how much I drink, or sit around in my underwear, unwashed and unshaven for entire weekend, together, alone, while I lovingly manipulate her buttons, arrange her rack, nor does she complain about how many items I try and shove into her to make the magic happen, just the way I like it.
So I ask of you, dear old Reason, will you please forgive me for leaving the nest for my brief fling ? I need a stable relationship, and just as I discovered when I was playing the field before we met, others cannot be relied upon. I am yours, dear Reason, and never shall I stray again.
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TL;DR: Cakewalk doesn't play nicely with my mid-spec'd computer. It's also randomly over-riding the sample rate. Maybe by the time R12 is released, I'll have upgraded. Until then, I'm not interested in troubleshooting when I have a stable, reliable DAW to use. Although I am going to compile a comparison list of what's missing, and might send it to the RS CEO.