Cakewalk Instrument files, on Linux

[dawful]

I have a handful of MIDI hardware, that can be a pain to pair with many DAWs. The issue is selecting the specific patch/bank you want, from within the DAW (if you even can). You can use midi events,, to trigger a program change. But it is just nice when you have your hardware selection, right in the DAW. Cakewalk is a King among DAWs, here.

Some DAWs offer a collection of popular hardware instrument files. With most, you can make your own. Since I've been a long time Cakewalk fan, I have a collection of it's instrument files (many custom). This is one of the reasons why Linux is not very appealing to me.  Ardour has it's own instrument files (midnam), and you can find a collection of them here and there. But I was glad to find Qtractor has native support for Cakewalk instrument files. It's a nice quick'n'easy option, if you want to try that gear in a Linux environment.

I does stink, that Qtractor doesn't have automation for MIDI CC. But it does have the option to do a "poor man's" automation, via the MIDI editor. Right under the midi note matrix, where note velocity is commonly found, you can select the MIDI control you want to automate. The bummer is that it automates the same as you would with note velocity (probably not as smooth). I'm using an older version, so it is possible that CC automation has been added. Note: there are two icons for drawing , in the midi editor. They are both pencil icons. But the one with a wave behind it is ideal for editing the CC area.

Anyway, as a long time Cakewalk user, this was a cool discovery.