Cakewalk® Pro Audio™ 8.01 for Windows 95/98/NT 4.0) README File
Copyright © 1991-1998 by Twelve Tone Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Cakewalk is a registered trademark, and Cakewalk Pro Audio is a trademark of Twelve Tone Systems, Inc. This file contains supplemental information on Cakewalk® Pro Audio™, Version 8.01. It was prepared on October 26, 1998.
Contents
User's Guide Corrections & Clarifications 1
Explanation of new Audio Options 1
Prepare Using N Millisecond Buffers 2
Audio Volume Envelopes 2
Audio Pan Envelopes 2
Snap Modes 3
Audio Data "Queue" Buffers 3
Video Issues 3
Chord Analyzer 5
Using the Yamaha DSP Factory at higher bit rates 5
Using SMPTE/MTC in Cakewalk Pro Audio 5
Console View Resources 7
Console View and Aux Sends 7
Enable Read and Write Caching 7
Session 8 StudioWare™ Panels 7
Dump Request Macros 8
Real-time Effects and Processor Speed 8
Full MMC Auto Punch 8
Managing Chord Libraries 9
Panic (Reset) Strength 9
Lyrics View and Special Keys 10
Sample StudioWare™ Panels 10
Bug fixes in Pro Audio 8.01 11Hardware Notes 14
Limitations of Early Sound Blaster Cards 14
AWE Wave Synth and Audio Output 14
MIDI Time Piece tips and tricks 15
Gravis UltraSound 16Instrument Definitions 16
Upgrading from an earlier version 16
Roland SR-JV80 series expansion boards 16Roland StudioWare™ Panels 18
Roland VS-880 panel 18
Roland SC-88 Pro panel 19
Roland JV-2080 panel 20QTools/AX Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 23
Acknowledgments 31
Instrument definitions 31
Dump Request Macros 32
User’s Guide Corrections & Clarifications
This section of the Readme.rtf file contains corrections and clarifications to the Pro Audio 8 User’s Guide.
Explanation of new Audio Options
Information on several new audio options in the ‘Cakewalk DirectShow Audio’ dialog (Tools-Audio Options) was accidentally left out of the User’s Guide and online Help. Below is an explanation of each new option.
[General tab]
Default File Bit Depth: Determines the number of bits per sample used for storing recorded (or imported) audio data to disk. The choices here are 16 or 24. Note that other values such as 18 or 20 aren't permitted, because they are technically not legal wave format values as defined by the Microsoft's multimedia specifications. Also, you don't need to have 24-bit capable audio hardware to use this setting, but be forewarned that 24-bit files require 50% more overhead for streaming.
Bits per Sample: Determines the number of bits per sample used for communicating with the audio hardware for playback or recording. Your audio hardware must be capable of supporting the setting you supply here. In most cases, even if your hardware is "advertised" as being 18 or 20 bit, you will want to set this value to 24 for optimum performance.
Dither: Controls whether a dither signal is added to the final (floating point) audio mix, before conversion to integers. Disabling this option may provide a slight increase in real-time effects performance.
[Advanced tab]
File I/O Buffers, I/O Buffer Size: These values determine the buffer characteristics for transfers to and from the disk. Changing them will not affect audio latency, but will affect the disk throughput for audio tracks. For best performance, you should make sure that the number of I/O Buffers is greater than or equal to the maximum number of audio tracks you expect to play at a given time. Also, on some disk controllers, you may get better performance by increasing the default I/O Buffer Size to 128k.
Playback Buffers, Wave Buffer Size: These values determine the buffer characteristics for transfers to and from the audio drivers. Lowering either of both of these values will improve audio latency, though making them too low will make your system more susceptible to stuttering or dropouts.
Record Buffers: This value determine the buffer characteristics for transfers from the audio drivers. If you are using multi-input hardware, and experience problems with recording/playback simply stopping, increase the number of Record Buffers.
Use unpacked 32 bit storage for >16 bit audio: Checking this option can improve performance on specific 24-bit audio hardware systems (for example, the Sonorus STUDI/O card). By choosing this option, you are instructing Pro Audio to skip its expensive 24-bit data packing operation, and allowing the audio hardware to do this work instead. Please contact your hardware manufacturer to determine if their drives support this "24-bit unpacked" data format.
Prepare Using N Millisecond Buffers
This option on the MIDI page of the Tools-Global Options property sheet lets you specify how far in advance Pro Audio 8 prepares MIDI data during playback. The default is 500 milliseconds.
If playback stops prematurely, you may try larger values (although you should also check the buffer options in Tools-Audio Options-Advanced).
If you are using MIDI effects, you may want to try smaller values -- for example, 100 milliseconds. Doing so means that, if you change a property for a MIDI effect, there will be less delay before you hear the new value take effect.
Audio Volume Envelopes
In version 8, Pro Audio would automatically generate volume envelopes for audio events if their velocity did not map to 0dB. The be fully backwards compatible with earlier versions of Pro Audio, version 8.01 will no longer automatically generate volume envelopes. If you wish to use volume envelopes, you must manually create them in version 8.01. Audio event velocities and volume envelopes are two separate gain stages in pro Audio 8.01. This allows you to also use existing editing commands, such as Edit-Scale Velocities and Edit-Interpolate, to change the velocity of audio events.
Audio Pan Envelopes
In the Audio view, pan envelopes are represented as left on top, and right on the bottom by default. This is consistent with stereo audio tracks, where the left track is on top, and the right track is on the bottom. This is also consistent with most horizontal audio meters. However, some people may prefer to have left values displayed on the bottom, and right on top. This will be more consistent with controller 10 (pan) values in the Piano Roll view, where small values (0-63; left) are on the bottom, and large values (65-127; right) are on top. You can flip the pan envelopes so left is on the bottom, and right is on top. To do so, add the following line to the [Audio View] section in CAKEWALK.INI:
[Audio View]
PanEnvelopeRightOnTop=1
The default value is 0 (zero), which means that pan envelopes will operate with left on top.
Snap Modes
In the User’s Guide, the two different Snap modes are referred to as ‘Snap To’ and Move By’. The two modes are now simply called ‘Move To’ and "Move By’.
Audio Data "Queue" Buffers
Some DirectXplug-ins maintain a "queue" of audio data buffers while they are processing, and do not produce any audio output buffers until several input buffers have been received. For Pro Audio to handle this situation properly, we need to create extra buffers to make up for the ones being queued by the plug-in. This TTSAUDDX.INI variable controls how many extra buffers we create:
[Wave]
ExtraStreamBufs=<n, default=4>
Video Issues
Keyboard Support to Advance by a Frame or a Frame Increment:
If the Video view is the active window, you can now use keyboard shortcuts to advance by a frame or a frame increment. The +/-, and left/right arrow keys move forward/backwards by a single frame. If the control key is pressed, then the frame increment value is used (default = 5 frames) Alternatively you can use the [ and ] keys to seek by the frame increment.
You can change the frame increment that is used when pressing the control or [ and ] keys. To do so, add the following line to the [Video View] section in CAKEWALK.INI:
[Video View]
FrameSkipDelta=5
The default value is 5, which means that Pro Audio will advance by 5 frame increment while seeking using the [ ] or Control key combinations.
On seeking by frames in the video view, the now time is changed to the nearest tick value corresponding to the frame displayed.
Optimizing Editing With Video:
If you intend on doing a lot of seeking around or looping and editing with a video file loaded, make sure that your video file has sufficient keyframes. Since each frame has to be computed from the last keyframe encountered, if you have very few keyframes in the video, performance may be slow. To change the number of keyframes, you may recompress the file using Tools-Export Video to AVI and specify more frequent keyframes. Choose a suitable video compressor such as "Indeo Video 5.04" and change the KeyFrame Rate parameter to a number between 1-5. A value of 1 makes every frame a keyframe, and higher numbers insert a keyframe after that many frames.
Another optimization tip is to put video on a separate drive from your audio. You can change the path from Tools-Global Options-Folders.
Changing the video properties such as Trim and Start time, imposes some degree of overhead. You can apply any changes made here by using Tools-Export Video to AVI.
MPEG and QuickTime video files
Please note that the Start Time, Trim-in time, and Trim-out time can only be set for AVI video files. If you need to adjust these settings for an MPEG or QuickTime files, use the Tools-Export Video to AVI command to save the video file as an AVI file. You can then insert the new AVI file, and adjust the Start Time, Trim-in time, and Trim-out time from the Video Properties dialog.
Exporting video to AVI
Compression issues
Note that not all compression codecs listed may necessarily be compatible while re-compressing video through "Export to AVI". If an incompatible codec is selected an error message may be displayed during the export.
Video Compression
Note that if "No compression" is selected, the video retains its original compression.
The following video compression codecs have been found to be compatible. Different codecs provide varying degrees of compression performance.
Indeo Video 5.04
Intel I.263
Cinepak Codec by Radius
Microsoft Video 1
Microsoft RLE
Video compression cannot be used if the Start Time, Trim-in Time, or Trim-out Time settings have been changed in the Video Properties dialog. If any of these settings have been changed and you need to use video compression, you can 1) export the video file to a new AVI file, 2) then insert the new AVI file, and finally 3) export the video to a new AVI file.
Audio compression
The following audio compression codecs have been found to be compatible. You may see different codecs installed on your system.
CCITT - A Law
CCITT - U Law
DSP Group TrueSpeech
PCM (this is the standard uncompressed format for wav files)
GSM 6.10
IMA ADPCM
Problems Importing QuickTime video files
If your system has a basic Windows installation with DirectShow installed, you may not be able to insert QuickTime video files. You may need to install the latest video Codecs from Microsoft’s web site in order to import different video formats.
The problem can be solved going to Microsoft’s web site (http://www.microsoft.com) and downloading and installing the latest version of Media Player (version 5.01.52.0701 is the latest as of 9/11/98
Chord Analyzer
When using the Chord Analyzer MIDI effect, during playback it will display the names of chords it sees based on Note events in the track.
However, you will see it display the chord names for notes that are slightly in the future -- before you actually hear them. The reason is that MIDI effects work slightly ahead of time, to ensure that playback is solid. This is partly based on the amount of time you have specified in Tools-Global Options-MIDI-Prepare Using N Millisecond Buffers. In other words, if you decrease this value, Chord Analyzer will be "less psychic". However if you decrease it too much, playback may stop unexpectedly.
When the Chord Analyzer is processing your live MIDI playback (because the current track has the Chord Analyzer attached to it) then you will not see this behavior. In that case, obviously it cannot analyze what you play until you actually play it. In addition, this behavior is not present when auditioning the Chord Analyzer as an offline command.
Using the Yamaha DSP Factory at higher bit rates
In order to use the Yamaha DSP Factory's higher bit rate support (i.e. 24-bit audio) you will need to make sure that the "Use unpacked 32-bit storage for >16-bit audio" option, found under Tools-Audio Options-Advanced tab, is selected. This will allow Cakewalk to open the DSP Factory's wave drivers in the correct manner for > 16-bit support.
Using SMPTE/MTC in Cakewalk Pro Audio
On page 15-9 of the Pro Audio User’s Guide, the following statement is found:
"Pro Audio supports five timecode frame rates, which are normally used for the following applications:"
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24 frames per second Film
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25 frames per second European video
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29.97 frames per second (drop) NTSC color video
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30 frames per second (non-drop) NTSC black & white video and most music-only applications
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30 frames per second (drop) Rare uses
The timecode choices found under the SMPTE/MTC section of Tools-Project Settings-Clock are the following:
24 frame
25 frame
30 drop-frame
30 non drop-frame
The following table should clear up any confusion regarding which Pro Audio setting to use with each possible type of external timecode.
External timecode type Possible Applications Recommended Pro Audio Setting Notes
24 fps Theatrical film worldwide, most other film 24 Frame Any film in North America or Japan will use this setting.
25 fps (also called EBU timecode) PAL/SECAM video, video and some film in countries that use 50 Hz wall electricity 25 Frame This is the setting to use when synchronizing to any European video format.
29.97 fps non drop-frame NTSC non-broadcast and short length video in North America and Japan, some music projects 30 Frame Non-drop This setting will allow Pro Audio to synchronize perfectly to the external timecode, but the sequencer position displayed in the Now time and Big Time displays will gradually drift and become incorrect over long periods of time. The audio and MIDI synchronization to the external device will not be affected by this discrepancy.
29.97 drop-frame NTSC broadcast and long format video in North America and Japan 30 Drop-frame This setting will allow Pro Audio to synchronize perfectly to the external timecode, but the sequencer position displayed in the Now time and Big Time displays will gradually drift and become incorrect over long periods of time. The audio and MIDI synchronization to the external device will not be affected by this discrepancy.
30 fps non drop-frame Most music projects, some Film in North America 30 Frame Non-Drop This is the best choice for any music project and should be used unless the situation dictates otherwise.
30 fps drop-frame Not a Standard type of timecode, used rarely for speed correction and transfer problems in tape based systems 30 Drop-Frame
Fps = frames per second
NTSC = National Television Standards Committee (USA)
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