Sep 26, 2002 05:28 pm Sounds like a weak sound card to me...without more details it's hard to be sure...tell "your friend" to come here and register and explain further. ;-)
cakewalk 9 & audio dropout
Posted on Sep 26, 2002 04:24 pm
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Contributor Since: Apr 03, 2002
i am not a cakewalk user.. so dont think i converted =P but ive got a friend who is having his cakewalk dropout everytime he trys to go over 10 tracks.
heres what he had to say:
hey, does anyone know about Cakewalk 9.0 and troubleshooting dropout? My disk meter starts going crazy when i have more than ten tracks of audio. it'll stay around 50% and then spike, causing cakewalk to crash. (even if they are muted) My cpu is pretty damned big, and i've messed with just about every knob and button. (defragged, disabled all programs background, adjusted buffer size, removed it from my network... yada yada)
heres a picture of his problem:
any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated. =)
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Sep 26, 2002 05:28 pm Sounds like a weak sound card to me...without more details it's hard to be sure...tell "your friend" to come here and register and explain further. ;-)
Sep 26, 2002 05:40 pm heres his computer related gear
sampling: Gina Sound Card
CPU: 650mhz, 14gig, 256meg
im suspecting it might be a ram issue (simply not having enough).. because the card should be alright.
heres the specs for the gina 24 card that hes using:
www.echoaudio.com/Products/Gina/ginaspecs.htm
ill see if i can get him to stop by and fill in more info =) im just going off of what i know at the moment
Sep 26, 2002 07:31 pm This happens to me as well, I'm running Cakewalk Pro9 on a PIII 700MHz coppermine with 320MB RAM and I get alot of dropouts when I playback a dozen or so tracks, half as many tracks when I patch in a few DX plugins.
Muting doesn't help, the tracks still reside in RAM, so you have to "archive" the tracks to free up space. Right click the selected track and choose "Archive" from that menu... you'll notice the "M" mute button had lit up yellow and become an "A".
Cakewalk can automatically configure itself if you're like me and have no idea where you buffer settings etc should be, but I think I automatically does so at install. If you're looking for it choose "Options" menu > "Audio" and select the "General" tab and there's a button at the bottom, it says "Wave Profiler". That might help out some.
Naturally dropouts aren't a problem during mixdown since the computer takes it's good old time at that at it's own pace, so I have my indicator turned off, I could care less about a a click or a stutter that *isn't* in my recording :O)
Make sure there's nothing running in the background gobbling up resources. Sounds like the CPU is fast enough, and he has plenty of RAM. Another thing to check would be the harddrive itself. Slower harddrives, like the old 5400rpm dont cut it, go for 7200rpm, or what is it 10000rpm? they have now? and make sure he defragments the audio drive often, that really slows things down when the drive has to look everywhere to gather up one big audio file.
And there's always the "Bounce to Tracks" under "tools" menu > "Mix Down Audio", although usually my last resort, there's no rule that says you can't premix a few tracks to clear up some space. Just solo all the tracks you want to mix (or mute those you dont) and bounce them to an empty track, then archive those soloes track to get them out of the way. If you decide later you want to remix them differently, just unarchive them.
You can also use this archive technique if your effects plugin are too RAM-hungery. Just apply the effects and mix them down effected to a new track, then archive the uneffected track for later, just in case you want to go back and make some changes.
Well, I hope I've been some help. Let us know how things went. -j
Sep 27, 2002 05:16 am Well that PC should easily be able to handle at least 24 tracks of audio (without plugins) but Jamie does bring up a very good point about the plugins. And collapse, I am guessing you know that as well, things like delays and reverbs are very CPU intensive and take some ram as well. It takes a whole lot of math calculations from the CPU to produce reverb.
What kind of plugins is he running at the time? And the hard drive as well? With a setup like his, I am guessing at least a 7200...
I think Jamie handled this pretty darn well though, so pay good attention to his post.
Hey Jamie! Every think about contributing some articles to HRC? ;-)
Sep 27, 2002 11:13 am i'd love to dB, I'm actually a pretty good writer when i stop and take the time to add punctation and spellcheck, what did you have in mind? :O) -j
Sep 27, 2002 11:45 am Dude, whatever strikes your fancy. Maybe a tutorial on something you know well, Cakewalk or some of your softsynths...whatever trips the ol' trigger...
Noize is our resident Cakewalk guru, but he hasn't submitted an actual article in ages...neither have I for that matter...I am kinda stumped for ideas for new content as well...
Sep 27, 2002 03:32 pm well, im kinda new to all this myself. i bought this PC two years ago and it came with Cakewalk9 WaveLab3, the Delta44 soundcard and a bunch of other stuff, so i just started teaching myself digital audio production.
It was all really confusing at first. I remember trying out all the free downloadable programs out there thinking to myself "oscill-what? ADSR-who?"... so maybe i can pen something targeted more towards the beginner who has no idea where to start.
I've learned alot in these two years, but I'm nowhere near ready to make a career out of it. But i'll get started on some kinda of article... I'll let ya know if anything turns up. -j
Sep 30, 2002 09:21 pm I am a little late here, but I'll through my 2 cent's worth in anyway. I use Sonar and 9 still. When I used 9 heavily, I could stack plenty of track's up without over load. I am running a PIII coppermine also, 667Mhz, with 768meg of ram. I have never really gotten it to gag. As Jamie said, you need to make sure you have a faster hard drive, and preferably it is only for audio. I run my program's on a primary drive and all the audio record's to a seprate dedicated drive. This really make it run smoothly as the PC is not trying to search for program code and audio all on the same drive. I do process alot off line, and try not to stack up too many FX running live. This will draw a monster amount of processing power from the PC and might choke the audio on playback. I alway's archive the track raw without FX just in case I get down the line and the FX I applied suck furhter down in the mix. Then you can bring back the dry track and try it again.
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