conversion of cbb takes

[mweiss001]

First of all, I love reacwp. Many thanks to all your hard work.
I am recently switching to reaper from cakewalk.
I have hundreds of projects I am converting out of fear that one day I will no longer be able to do so.
I have been with cakewalk since pro audio 8, so I have projects from 1998 to 2024.
The only thing I am struggling with is take lanes. A rather newish feature of cbb I believe.

For example I have a track in cakewalk with multiple takes, then sliced up and the best takes selected to make a comp.

When I convert that to reaper with reacwp_0_0r3b69 I get one track with all the items overlapping.

I can choose "Options -> Offset Overlapping Media Items Vertically" to see them all.

The pieces that were selected in cakewalk are not muted and it plays back perfectly.

However the pieces are all jumbled and I have not been able to figure out any easy way to sort them out.

I can do it manually but it takes a lot of time. If I was more familiar with scripting in reaper, there is probably a way to automate it.

I am just wondering if I am missing something, is there an easy way to do this that I am overlooking?

I have tried all different implode actions.

What I do manually is:

create a new fixed lane called take 4
drag all items with the name take 4 to that fixed lane, preserving the start times
do the same for all other takes.

Any help, or just pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

I have some screen shots that show what I am talking about and I will try to attach them.

[azslow3]

The reason for current implementation of take lanes conversion is the fact ReaCWP was developed at REAPER 6 time. So there was no "Fixed item lanes" in REAPER and all available options was far from perfect, I have just chosen the one which was working sufficiently close (so producing the same sound) to lanes in Cakewalk (see ReaCWP documentation).

REAPER 7 has introduced lanes which are closer to Cakewalk lanes (as you have figured out). But till your post, there was no requests to update.

It will take some time, I am not able to do this "tomorrow". But I put it into TODO list. I will PM you when that is done.

PS. REAPER lanes behave more like Studio One lanes, so not exactly Cakewalk way. I have the implementation in converter to Studio One, so "brainstorming" phase is already over, I just have to code that for REAPER format

[mweiss001]

That is great news. Thank you so much for putting it on your TODO list.
I really appreciate all the time and effort you put into reacwp, it is so helpful.

[azslow3]

I have uploaded new build, r4b70 (the same link as in PM, otherwise easy to find in Downloads), with new fixes and improvements in lanes conversion. Please check.

In this version the only thing which is not preserved is lanes order (so if you have created them not sequentially or moved). But everything else should match, so original lane names (also automatic) and solo/mutes.

Incorrect muting of soloed lane (when it was originally muted) and bad placement of frozen material are fixed. Also removed lanes should not appear as empty lanes.

There is still not "comping" lane. But that can be done by script after conversion. I can't detect if lanes was used for comping or just as lanes, and so I think converting by default as comping is not a good idea. Also I don't have more information during conversion, so no benefits to do this there.

[mweiss001]

I have tested this briefly and so far it works for me perfectly.

Later when I have more time I will test it more thoroughly.

Thanks again for all your hard work and effort making this amazing tool to convert from cakewalk to reaper.

[azslow3]

Thanks for testing.

[mweiss001]

I have tested more. Like around 5-10 projects.
When it works, it works perfectly.
But a few times, it crashes hard. Reaper instantly exits.
I am trying to narrow down when it happens.
So far, it seems to happen on large projects.
My process is:
Open the cwb files with cbb and save.
Then open the cwp file in reaper.
The ones that crashed were 1G, 2G and 4G cwb files.
I reverted back to 3b69 to test and they all opened without crashing.
I wish I could give you more information about the crashes.
Are there logs somewhere?
Is there a way to turn on some kind of debugging to get more info?
Is there anything I can do to help troubleshoot this?
I could send you the cwb files I am trying to extract, but they are quite large...

[mweiss001]

I just read your post about alpha testers.

I uploaded a project that crashes to my google drive. I don't care that it is public.
I post my finished work to YouTube for free anyway.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1H9C1LEzmX4O2WBX6VExDJnn9vgdGcZH4?usp=sharing

Hope this helps.

[azslow3]

Thanks. That is in new code for lanes. I will find what it is (lane number "-1" ).
You can remove the project, I have downloaded it.

[mweiss001]

I have gone through about 350 of my 400 projects I am converting from cbb to reaper.
Your reacwp tool has made the process so much easier.
I am very thankful for all your work creating this amazing tool.

The last 50 or so I am stuck on are large complex projects that would take a huge amount of time to do manually, and they won't open with 4b70.

I think I have narrowed down the time range of projects that won't open to 2019 and newer.

Is there anything I could do to help? Would you like me to upload more examples?

[azslow3]

Sorry that I have not uploaded a fix yet. I have understood from where it comes technically, but I wanted to check in Cakewalk what can trigger that (may be it has special meaning...).

Unfortunately I was forces to work from morning till late evening this week, and I have to continue this weekend. One man has decided that my "old" system is "not safe", just because it is old. That could be just lol, but he has power (and he has used that power...) to block servers with that system. Several colleagues can't do what they have planed to do, other couldn't work at all several days. I have to completely "renovate" the thing to "unblock" it, as soon as possible.  So I have no time for anything else.

At the beginning of next week I hope I can relax a bit, I will make and upload fix then.

[mweiss001]

I appreciate any time or effort that you do spend on it.

I understand work, I have a full time job and other obligations as well.

I am curious about what tools and programming languages you used to create reacwp.
I have somewhat of a programming background myself.

I created this:  http://purplemartians.org

So I am curious about the programming languages you used, and programs in the toolchain.

[azslow3]

Interesting. I will try to play once I have time

I write in C, when possible. May be not as elegant as C++ can be, but the code can be compiled in 10,20,30,etc. years without problem...

I cross-compile everything under linux. With C++ that will not work (REAPER under Windows use MS style ABI, it ranges from too hard up to impossible to convince GCC C++ produce compatible code).

And I like when compilation takes just few seconds.

With GUI I have not settled yet... so GUIs are just different (Win32 and ranging from X to GTK+ on Linux). It will be nice to have C based WDL one day, but I had no time to finish such project (I want it xcb based, may be also Wayland,  but not GDK as original WDL).

[mweiss001]

C is my favorite as well. I learned C while writing my game over 25 years ago.
Years later I converted it to C++, but do not make much use of any advanced C++ techniques.

C is so simple and elegant, I like compare it to chess.
Chess has a very simple set of rules about how each piece can move. Those rules can be learned very quickly.
However the strategies of playing the game can take a lifetime to master.

C is similar in that the core functionality of the language is very simple.
How you use those very simple building blocks to create more complex things is an art that can take a lifetime to master.

Purple Martians is cross platform. The exact same source code produces the linux and windows versions.
Even the networked multiplayer works perfectly across windows and linux.

I am a huge fan of gcc and all things open source.
I have successfully been able to avoid MSVC entirely up to this point in my life, and would not go there even with a gun to my head.
Life is just too short.

From what I have been able to find out, I think MSVC is required to make reaper plugins like reacwp. Is this correct?

[azslow3]

REAPER load plug-ins as C++ objects, and so ABI follows the rules of computer used to compile REAPER on particular platform. For Windows that is MSVC. With C it is possible build any structures, including C++ objects. GCC supports all possible function calling conventions. But convincing GCC C++ object to be MSVC C++ object is practically impossible.