chris.r

Brian Walton
Never used CAL it any other scripting as it relates to creating music.

Very few musicians care about such things let alone how to use the tool.

That's entirely not true.
 
I have no idea about programming languages yet CAL scripts saved me loads of hours of MIDI editing so many times.
 
And I hope for more.

+1 to this.
 
Much as I'd like there to be improvements on CAL and/or a replacement, I doubt it will happen. I think scook summed it up pretty much.
 
In the meantime, CAL does most of what I need for bulk editing in MIDI, especially as this tends to be needed less and less nowadays.
 
At one point (around Sonar 3 or 5), I had a CAL script which would go through all my hardware MIDI tracks, and solo and bounce each one down to audio, including cleaning up & splitting up my MIDI drums into bass drum, snare, hats, toms & overheads - all automatically, while I'd take an hour or so for lunch.
 
As newer versions of Sonar appeared, certain functions started to break, and I had to run parts of it manually. Now I'm pretty much 100% VSTi for synths, so it's no longer an issue.
 
CAL was great back in the Pro Audio days when 90% of what you did was MIDI, but I get the feeling (certainly from this forum) that this is less and less the case. Audio is by far what most users are dealing with.
 
Alexey's AzLUA is probably the best alternative to CAL, and it's pretty easy to work around its limitations by duplicating your clips into a temporary track while you do all the processing.
 

+1 to CAL.
It may be considered somewhat limited and primitive, but that doesn't mean it's not also extremely powerful.
 
I use CAL quite a bit, has saved me tons of time, and actually makes it possible to FIX things that otherwise would be pretty much impossible.
 
As far as I'm concerned, CAL is a little piece of magic :-)
 

With this solution discovered by Scook, I think that now it's possible to use 3rd language scripts like AZ Lua or another MFX like Frank's MIDI Plugins, since the only restriction on the use of these MFXs was that they only worked for the entire track.
Now with this solution, one can easily apply an MFX for clips or even just a few selected notes. 

It's a very interesting question and I definitely understand how meaningful it is as a workflow tool and helpful to many members of the community.
 
Unfortunately I hope you guys don't mind me sharing candidly this is not something that we have planned or intended to put time into - scook's post is spot on - it's not write once and done and does create some complexity and introduces dependencies which creates some challenges on the go-forward. I know this may be disappointing to some power users, but rather than going back and forth whether people care about it (I guess if the question is asked, then they absolutely do!) I thought it would be helpful to clear up 

That being said, never say never - if we do find some creative ways to pragmatically implement better scripting language support it would of course be something we would consider.
 

Something that would help a lot for little effort:
 
Document the API!
 
Publish a list of those things CAL has access to.
 

jpetersen
Something that would help a lot for little effort:
 
Document the API!
 
Publish a list of those things CAL has access to.

I've been using CAL Cakewalk/Sonar since Pro Audio 7, and the documentation has always been a bit sparse.
 
If I remember rightly, the docs were slightly better in the Pro Audio days, but it's been reduced since it was officially deprecated. I guess they don't want to draw too much attention to it, especially as functions can cease to work with changes in the software.
 
But keeping docs up to date, is exactly the sort of thing scook and Meng were talking about. This, and making sure that every time you add functionality to Sonar, that CAL or any other API (a) supports the new functionality, and (b) continues to work with backwards compatibility.
 
The best and most comprehensive documentation I've come across is here:
 
http://members.ziggo.nl/t.valkenburgh/Cakewalk%20Application%20Language%20Programming%20Guide.pdf
 
Beyond using CAL, there is some support for accessing commands via the Control Surface SDK.
 
The list of commands is here:
 
https://github.com/Cakewalk/Cakewalk-Control-Surface-SDK/blob/master/Framework2/CommandIDs.h
 
The biggest downside of the Control Surface SDK however, is that there's no way of passing parameters to any of the commands.
 

When I first started with Cakewalk( the company, not the software ;) ) I thought it was great that they had a scripting language for users...and then found absolutely no use for it ;) I play guitar, record audio, I play my keyboards I record audio, I play a VSTi, I record Midi.... the most I need to do is edit flubbed notes in PRV. So why am I suffering from .cal neglect? I'm gonna have to go with Brian on this one...unless someone can think of a use for musician's like myself :)
 
Bill

when I started making music on my Amiga in the late 80ies there was a software called "Face The Music" by "Maxon Computer". They invented a so called "Sound Effect Language". The aim of this nice script-based language was to modify the sounds in realtime.
=> What about a script language with the possibility to manipulate automation parameters in realtime?
At the moment you have to "paint" or click these automations with your mouse.
It'd be nice to "program" them using a script language with loops, variables, mathematical functions, timers etc.
(just dreaming like a programmer...)

michheld
 
It'd be nice to "program" them using a script language with loops, variables, mathematical functions, timers etc.
(just dreaming like a programmer...)

As you can see in the Meng's answer, this dream will not come true, at least with Bandlab's products...