 To celebrate the fact that Cakewalk has some fantastic new export features, I'm going to show you today how to export like a pro. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. If you want other people to hear your music, then you're going to have to learn how to export from Cakewalk by Bandab and understand all of the settings so that you can do it properly. Not only that, but they've added some new features as well recently which make it really really powerful. We're going to be running through all of that starting right now. So here we are in Cakewalk and there's a couple of different ways you can get to the new export features. First of all at the top right here you can click on this export arrow and then go down to advanced and then that will open up the new dialog box. I'll close that because the other way that you can get there is to go up to file on the left hand side, go down to export and then click on audio. It brings up exactly the same dialog box. The first thing I want to draw your attention to here with this box is there's different sections to this and they each have their title in blue here. Now next to those titles we see these arrows which means we can expand or collapse that section. So I'll click on the ones that I want to collapse here and I'm going to focus first of all on the first one at the top here which is the file name and location. By default you can see this tag in here with some curly brackets around it. The tag here is project name. With that there we can automatically generate a file name based upon our project name. So my project name at the moment or the file name for my project is some love song. So it's automatically generated a file name based upon that and it's added the extension here the format if you like which is going to be a wave file. We'll be changing that later but it's on wave at the moment. Now there's a number of different tags that you can add in here to automatically generate your file name. I could go in here and start with curly bracket and type in the word if I can type tempo okay surrounded by curly brackets and you can see it's automatically generated a file name here with the tempo added on there. Now you're going to think Mike that's an awful lot of typing and how am I going to remember all of the potential tags. Well you don't have to because you can just click on this tag option over here and you can automatically add in some tags. So I'll get rid of that tempo one there just by highlighting it and hitting backspace or delete on my keyboard there. So I'll go and open that tag option there and I can add in a few different things here as you can see some of the more interesting ones for me maybe something like the date so we could add that in there in different formats okay so that adds the date onto the file name that's fine I'll get rid of that let's try another one we've got some interesting ones here like the artist name I'll pop that one in there okay we could add some separators in so I'll add a dash there and I'll add in the copyright here okay cool you may be wondering how I've got this information in there things like the owl and the artist the copyright I don't want to go into that right now but I'll put a little bit at the end of this video to let you know how in Katewalk you can add those kind of attributes to your projects so it's a really quick and easy way to build up some specific file names okay so the other thing that you'll want apart from the file name is the folder where it's going to be saved now by default it saves to this position you can see it's got this little sort of tag or keyword in their project folders so by default it's going to save the files within a folder called audio export within your project folder I almost didn't get that out so you can change that of course to anything you like you could change it just by clicking on this box here and change it to another location it's important because it means that all of the exports and I use the word plural exports because we can set up several exports with this dialogue box will all go to that folder location okay so that is how we set up the file name and location now let's take a look at the format now under the format section the first thing we see is the file type and there's many to choose from here but I'm going to focus on the main two those being wave and mp3 let's start off with mp3 the main thing that you need to understand with mp3 is that the quality is reduced because it's compressed file format so it's less quality than a wave file but the file size is smaller so it's most useful when you need a small file size so for example maybe you need to send a mix to someone quickly via email and the wave file is going to be too big to attach to the email then you may want to use an mp3 now it may be that you just want to add this to your player which is likely to be your phone these days your mp3 player and that's you're concerned about space on that device you want to keep things small so you may put that on there and the player may best understand mp3 and you may not care too much about getting the highest quality at that point but do remember that there is a reduction in quality so for that reason there are times when you don't want to be using mp3 first of all when you're exporting ready for mastering you definitely don't want to use mp3 now I definitely advocate the process of exporting from katewalk and then importing that stereo track for mastering don't try and do your mastering on your main project well you can if you like but I don't like doing that it gets clumsy when you do that you're using up a lot of resources so it's a good time to export to a stereo wave file and then import ready for mastering the other time and this may be after mastering is when you are exporting ready for distribution that may be for something like soundcloud or it may be to upload to something like distro key which is what I use to distribute my songs to places like Spotify and iTunes remember those services are going to change the format ready for streaming so there will be a degradation in quality on those services on those services so you really do want to make sure that you get the best possible quality to them now the services I've mentioned do accept wave files and I think most of them do these days they do accept mp3s but I wouldn't do that unless you're really having problems with file size or something like that I don't think many of you will be in terms of the file size you'll get for a regular song so you want to be exporting to wave for distribution services and the other time is if you are still burning to cd do you still burn to cd let me know in the comments down below I don't even have a cd burning device here anymore so the next thing I want to talk about is sample rate I like to keep this at the same sample rate as my project my project in this case is 48 kilohertz but if you were exporting for example to cd then you would want to lower that down to 44.1 okay but as I say I'm going to keep it to 48 it's generally best to keep it the same as your project the next thing that we're going to talk about is dithering so dithering is there to help clean up artifacts which can occur and I do believe that they mostly if not always occur when your bit depth is set to 16 bit okay I don't generally find a use for with other bit depth so but if you are using 16 bit which we'll talk about in a moment you definitely want to use some dithering now I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert on the various different algorithm options you get there I'm not I generally just listen to a couple of them and see which one sounds the best and go with that and often to be honest with you I can't hear the difference but you may hear the difference you may have much better hearing than me or you may be producing different types of music and that may have an effect there by the way if you are a bit of an expert on it you want to give us some advice about it in the comments down below I would love to hear from you moving on from there we go to channel format which is just where you're going to choose things like stereo or mono that's fairly self-explanatory and then we're back to bit depth again so in terms of bit depth it's probably not going to really hurt if you set it higher than your project settings that's fine I generally keep it the same that's going to be up to you but I will say that if you are exporting for cd then you definitely need to put that to 16 bit and as I say you definitely want to apply dithering at that point now by the way if you are uploading to a service which I haven't mentioned here they may have some particular requirements which I don't know about so you want to check that for things like sample rate and bit depth generally I'm going to be keeping that at 32 as I say you can set it higher if you like the last option here is the bounce buffer size I normally don't have to adjust this in fact I've never had to adjust it but in terms of what does it do well I think if you're exporting really really large projects maybe you've got long orchestral pieces or something like that I think that if you set this to a higher setting with the drop down here then you can speed up the export process now the other time where I've seen this mentioned and I can't say for sure whether this helps or not but some people get little glitches in their exports sometimes and I've seen people say that if you increase this to the highest setting then that can help with those glitches but I've never had to do that I've never seen that in action so I'm not I don't know for sure but if you are getting some glitches maybe this is worth a try it won't take you any time at all also let me know if that does help you in the future so normally at this stage in the video I ask you to like and subscribe and if you would like to do that then thank you so much however today I just want to quickly tell you about a new Facebook group I have it's the creative source cakewalk group and there is a great little community building over there at the moment there's beginners and experts alike and I'm so glad to see everyone over there being very very helpful so if you would like to get more information about cakewalk or give information about cakewalk with the community follow the link in the description and join that group right away I would love to see you there leave a comment or a post saying that you were sent from the export video and I'll say hi now let's get back to this video so more often than not you are exporting an entire song and that's why it's got this default setting here under what to export entire mix and you can see my audio interface is listed there it's checked basically that means it's going to export whatever I've been hearing through that audio interface but there are some other categories of export you can do in terms of what to export and they're listed in this drop down here now I think most of them are self-explanatory but I'm just going to go through a couple of the more useful ones which you may be scratching your head over so first of all let's go to tracks this is where you would want to export individual tracks now it starts off with all of them selected if you've got a few like I have here you may want to deselect most of them so to do that I'll just click on the first one press control a on my keyboard to select them all and then press control and hit one of these checkboxes that's going to deselect all of them okay so I can then go ahead and select one I'll select this vocal here for example that's selected now just as a by the way if we go back up to the top here to file name and location I go to tags I can then go ahead and select this track tag here okay and you'll see there I'll just close that that the file name is now changed to the the project name plus that track name there so that's quite useful and quite useful when you're exporting many different tracks for example I could select also the piano here now if I went ahead to the bottom and clicked on the export button you will see from this pop-up here that it's going to produce two files there and you probably can't read them very easily but they both have different file names depending on their tracks so that's quite useful I'll just get rid of that for the moment and put it back to normal so we have this option what about the second category here we'll click on tracks through entire mix let's say again I'll select all and then I'll deselect them all and I'll select that first main vocal there now when I have this selected something a little bit different happens because it will export the sound of that track plus the effects that have been added on any buses that that track uses so if I've used a separate bus with reverb for example as I often do it will then have that reverb on that track if I don't use this tracks through entire mix then I just use the regular tracks option then we just end up with a dry signal so those are some very very useful options there now we can get a lot more granular with this by clicking on this arrow on the right hand side we'll click on that and we get a few more options here we can select different tracks we can mute tracks over here we can solo tracks and it is actually muting and soloing them in the project so you may have a few tracks selected over here ready for export but you may decide that you know one particular bus with some effect on it you actually don't want that so you could mute it so there's some kind of very very handy features there so that's how you are going to select what to export so the mix and render section is really helpful for filtering in or out certain functional aspects of your project an example of this for me would be when I've got towards the end of my project I've got a whole bunch of automation but I just want to quickly export a static mix okay so in this case I would go in here and I would turn off all of my automation so that would be track automation bus automation synth effects automation maybe even clip automation as well and then I can just export the static mix without having to bother with sort of rejigging resaving the project okay you can see there's some other options in there as well for things like whether you take into account the mute and solo on tracks or on buzzers etc now one thing I do want to mention here is the 64 bit engine this is really handy if you've got plugins which can take advantage of 64 bit processing switch that on and those plugins may give you a better quality in terms of their processing if your plugins can't take advantage of that I then I just think they use 32 bit processing so that's fine so that is the mix and render options so you may want to export the entire length of your song or maybe just a section of it like a verse or something like that that is what the range selection is for now we can go to the default selection here entire project that's what you're normally going to want to use to export a song I just want to quickly sort of warn you of some weird results you may get from that because sometimes people export and they find that there's some you know big spaces at the end or something like that uh cakewalk is generally quite clever in determining what the entirety of your song is but it can get a little bit confused at times when you've got things going on a little bit later which are not actual sound for they may be for example things like automation which are happening you know after the sound is finished may be left over after some edits you've done so you need to sort of check out that you haven't got any other sort of data happening after the actual sound is finished if you are getting those long gaps at the end now you may want to determine a specific part of the song for export in which case you would go down to time selection now you can go in here to the start and end times and you could type in a time here or you can click here and then select by markers now I've only got a couple of sort of manual markers that I put in there so I could select a marker there and it will change the time there and you can do the same for the end or you can sort of select a manual range a specific range now it's a little bit tricky here at the moment because once this export dialog box is open I can't actually go up to this ruler at the top here and select that range but you can close the export box there and if you wanted to select a range like so just by dragging on the ruler like I did there I'll go and open the export window again and when I go to time selection you can see that the start and end times correspond to what I had selected there so that's probably the best way to do it again if you are having problems when you're trying to do the entire song and you just can't figure out why you've got this sort of long gap at the end then sometimes using this time selection method is just a quick and easy way of solving that problem and moving on with your life. Next we move on to one of the most interesting parts of this new sort of export dialog box from Cakewalk and that is tasks and queues this is where you can set up several different export tasks and then sort of run them all while you go off and have coffee or tea or beer or wine whatever it is you're going to drink while you're producing music. So let's say I've got this entire song here which I want to export and I just go down here to the bottom I click on this add to the task queue or add task to queue I should say click on that plus button there then give it a name I'll call it whole okay for the whole song that's not going to be the file name or anything like that we've already set that up up there it's just the name of the task something that I can remember what that task is all about then let's say I also want to make sure that I'm going to export an individual track so let's go up to the top again here go to tracks again I'll just select all of them and then press control deselect them all and select that one main vocal like I did earlier also I'll just add in a little sort of tag there for the track so we can see now if we close that the file name for this particular task is going to be the name of the song plus the name of the track and I just go to the bottom and I add that task to the queue and I'll call that task vox okay so we've got two tasks set up now when we run the task those both are going to be exported to the project that we set up there so I can just run that task it will run one after the other and it's really really handy because they can stay there and we could be closing this continuing to make changes to our project etc and then the next time that we go to export open that up those tasks are still going to be there if we want to exclude one of them we can just deselect it there and then run the task again and it's just going to select the ones that we have checked there so overall a very very useful feature now just quickly before I forget I'm just going to talk about those song attributes that we can use with our tags if you press B on your keyboard to open up the browser you over to this section over here where you normally sort of insert plugins and things and there's a tab right next to that called browse notes just click on that and that's where you can add that song metadata if you remember if we open up the export dialog box here that means that when we create tags up here we can use things like the name the album name the artist and the copyright year as well now don't forget I really want to see you in my new Facebook group follow the link in the description for that I look forward to seeing you there what do you think about these new export features is there anything they missed out what's your favorite part let me know about that in the comments down below and as ever check the link in the description for my patreon.com where as little as one dollar per month you can help me help you by making more videos like this I'll see you in the next video