The Cakewalk Blog

Last week Brandon Ryan and I hosted our second CakeTV Live webinar on music production with SONAR X1. Broadcast live over the internet from Burbank, CA, this latest installment of CakeTV Live was every bit a success as the first CakeTV Live webinar. With a steady 240+ viewers this time from all over the world, we had a steady stream of great questions coming in throughout the demo.

Of course, we understand that many of you couldn’t make it to the live broadcast, so we’ve uploaded the video to YouTube for your viewing pleasure. This hefty video weighs in at one hour and forty minutes and is loaded with music production workflow techniques straight from Brandon Ryan’s bag of tricks.

 CakeTV Live: SONAR Music Production ‘Aike’

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In case you missed part one of this two-part series, Cakewalk’s Seth Perlstein shared his favorite SONAR X1 music production tips, tricks, and techniques like using the Mod Matrix in FX Chains 2.0, Groove Matching with AudioSnap, creating variations with the Loop Construction View, and much, much more.

Plus, he gave a sneak peak of the X1d patch, which is now free for all SONAR X1 users.

Watch entire video of the first SONAR X1 webcast. (more…)

Going Online

It has long been held that connecting your DAW to a network, or worse, to the internet is something you should never, ever do. But is it really all that dangerous to your security or detrimental to performance? What kinds of precautions should be taken? Let’s find out.

First of all, why would anyone want to connect their DAW to the internet?

The Advantages:

1) Maintain system updates with less hassle

2) Maintain driver updates with less hassle

3) Perform software authorization with less hassle

4) Transfer samples, mixes, projects, etc via FTP and file sharing sites for collaboration or delivery

5) Search the internet for music theory questions like how to play a diminished chord or engineering questions like how to use a multiband compressor

In other words, it’s much easier to keep your system updated , authorize software and to search and share when your your DAW has internet access. The need to download everything on another machine and then manully transfer it to your DAW goes away.

But if it’s so convenient, why do people so often recommend against it? These are the most common reasons I hear:

The Concerns:

1) You might get a virus

2) You have to run software that will bog down your system

3) Your system might become unstable

4) You might get hacked

5) Wireless drivers can have a negative effect on DPC Latency negatively (see Computers In The Studio – Part 1)

The good news is that with the proper precautions you can connect a DAW to the internet with a relatively high degree of safety while maintaining performance and reliability.

Now you’re probably wondering what these “proper precautions” are. Let’s go through them one by one.

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Musician or IT professional?

It seems today’s musicians must be part artist and part IT professional. It’s a difficult dance that requires knowledge, time, and patience in order to achieve a level of success. The intention of this series of blog posts is to help with the IT part or the equation. My goal is to help with questions related to system optimization, maintenance, organization, networking, and other IT-related concerns important to musicians in the 21st century.

In this first post I’d like to talk about basic practices for achieving a smooth running PC-based DAW. I’ll also offer my thoughts and suggestions on OS “tweaking” or “tuning”. In subsequent posts we’ll get deeper into specific areas and talk about other aspects like organization and networking. Most of these tips will assume you’re running a PC with Windows 7 installed. (more…)