oops - left out a minor gotcha... in order to make keyswitched instruments a bit easier to use, I end up using two MIDI tracks per... one for the notes, one for the keyswitches. I've toyed with a single keyswitch track for multiple MIDI tracks, but there's just too much over-lap, and I am too lazy to re-assign them<G>.

I'm going to see if I can easily export the track list from my most recent attempt at a master template, if I can I'll post it.

So using 1  instrument, and that instrument has like 6 articulations
you will be using 6 midi tracks for that single instrument instrument !

What is the benefit of that , compared to use a note and do it by ( key switching )

Maybe this:

I guess it must be, when you will use 3 of the articulations in the same time
that is why you need to use  separate tracks, cause you can not use 3 articulations
in the same midi track at once with key switching.. right ?

If that is right, then i understand , the complexity creating full a orchestra


What about the outputs if the midi tracks, it goes up to 16 tracks
how do you exceed the 16 tracks output?

I've seen 400-track projects for video game soundtracks, so yeh, track counts can get up there.
 
800 boggles my mind, though. That would be 10 tracks for each player in an 80-piece orchestra! Granted, they represent different articulations, but most instruments can't even perform 10 separate articulations. How many tracks does a triangle require?
 
Could this memory consumption issue be somehow related to Kiosk Project's thread about excessively long MIDI files? In that case, something in the file was making it appear to be a much longer sequence than it really was.

So it is like this, if i gonna use 32 midi tracks
i need 2 instruments capable of 16 inputs each

So midi track 1-16 / midi out: TTS, channel 1-16
midi track 17-32 / midi out : Kontakt 5, channel 1-16

that gives 32 midi out total ?

Good that we can use midi and audio track folders then and put ea instrument in that to keep track.

working backwards...
 
Bit - I thought there might be junk in the project that started this little adventure, but the files I posted had no data in them. They were not long because in fact they had no length.
 
As far as 10 tracks per player... that's conservative<G>. I have multiple libraries that cover the same instruments, and ideally I'd love to have them all at my disposal all the time so I can decide if this library or that library fits the piece better. And while I don't need 10 string libraries, I'd very much like to add at least two more (more than two really, since Spitfire sorta divided their strings up.)

Even now I have KHS Concert Strings 2, KHS Spotlight Strings, Project Sam Orchestral Essentials, and Presonus Orchestral Instruments all covering strings, plus some oddball string effects libraries. It adds up fast! There is no question that both individual track per articulation and key-switched articulations both have issues (and by issues I mean problems), but dang, having had the opportunity to work with a large-ish template it is absolutely the way to go. I was able to play the same part into Addagiato, Mural, LASS (OK, yes, this guy has more libraries than I would think I need, but...), and anyway it was dead simple to audition the differences. Yes, I would like to be able to work that way, with maybe a few less choices<G>!
 
Soundblend - Key-switching can conserve the number of tracks required, but it causes more problems than it solves. The biggest issue is that key-switches are not chase-able. So you have to rewind to get the articulations that you want. I have a kludge where I convert key switches to CCs and use CCs to select articulations, but it is a LOT of work to set up for each instrument, and I haven't decided if it is really going to work for me yet.

There is always the load the instruments as you need them approach. It does address some problems, like memory, CPU, track count, etc, but it adds so much tome to the process, and I am kinda tired of working that way!

The good news is that I seem to be the only person creating gargantuan MIDI files, so there may be hope yet until I can afford a fire breathing DAW and half a dozen slaves, and all the libraries to fill them<G>!

I suppose that I have been know to use multiple articulations as an effect, but it is not something you would normally use if you are trying for a realistic mock-up.

Soundblend
What about the outputs if the midi tracks, it goes up to 16 tracks how do you exceed the 16 tracks output?

Each instance of Kontakt, for example, uses 16 MIDI channels. So five instances of Kontakt will eat up 80 MIDI channels and 80 Audio channels... which seems to be about my maximum size project at the moment.

So you guys have been a big help, and I did some digging last night!
 
The first thing I discovered is that the only part of my copy cakewalk.ini that is populated is the dump requests. That seems odd. Odder still, the timestamp in the file is March, 2002. Have I got an ini file problem, a corrupted copy perhaps?
 
And if so, other than completely removing and reinstalling is there a way to get a current copy of the file?
 
And if a complete re-install is required are there any gotchas I need to be aware of?
 
And should I suspect the validity of aud.ini too?
 
I did do a re-personalize, or whatever they call it - no change, which makes sense because I found the master copy, and it too is dated 2002 and empty except for dump requests.
 
So I re-ran the latest (X3e) patcher... still no joy.
 
If it matters I am running the x64 version, and I did have X2 installed prior to upgrading to X3. None of the earlier versions ever made it onto this OS build.
 
Thanks a million... I really need to solve this problem so I can get back to work.

The lightest approach is renaming the ini files. They are automatically rebuilt when SONAR starts up.
 
There are two levels of re-personalizing SONAR:
1) Holding the SHIFT key while starting SONAR will cause any missing files in the user directory to be replaced.
2) Holding the CTRL and SHIFT key will overwrite the files in the user directory. I described it in #16 above http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3039156

I had not tried renaming them - that's next I guess. I did try both SHIFT and CTL-SHIFT, and the results were the same for both. That's why I have a wee suspicion that the master copy might be the one that got clobbered.
 
Thanks though for the tips earlier in the thread, that's what motivated me to try!

the master copy is stored in "C:\ProgramData\Cakewalk\SONAR X3 Producer"
ProgramData is a hidden directory.