Mark Bastable

Just in case anyone excavates this thread in future, I'll answer it myself.

The SEND bit of the strip has its own pan control.

 

Let's say I'm a lousy bass player. I can get all the notes in the right order, but I'm not as dead on the groove as I would like. So, post recording,  I shift an awful lot of audio transients to get the notes just where I want them.

I don't know how Cakewalk 'stores' my changes. I guess either as a kinda edited hardcopy of the original, or as a file of instructions of what to change, or by processing my changes on the wing each time it's played. But in either case, all those changes are taking up resource of some sort.

Is it possible to 'accept' the changes, like you would an edit in Word? So, make them permanent, so that what you're left with is just a simple audio track? 

It's not that I'm short of storage. It's more that I feel that the edit is sort of 'not set', and that bugs me a bit. And if CW's processing the changes every time, that's needless CPU usage.

M




 

I just watched Mike E’s excellent video on Sends, Busses and Auxes. I  recommend it.

It raises a question….

I have two monophonic unison guitar parts. They are obvious candidates for sending to a bus, in order to apply FX and to preserve relative levels on one fader.

One’s panned halfway left. The other’s panned halfway right. Will that panning be preserved on the stereo bus?

You may say, ‘Well, just try it.” And I shall. But right now I’m sitting in a car park with twenty minutes to kill, and the question just occurred to me.

Okay. That’s helpful. Thank you for putting time into it. It’s appreciated.

M

I've had a thought.

The problem might be that I had an effects chain with MidiGuitar in it - but it wasn't first in the chain. So it might have been trying to midi-fy guitar-plus-delay. 

I can see how that might blow its tiny mind.

Thank you for all the suggestions. I'm following them up.

18 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

@Mark Bastable I need the actual minidump file not the text file. Can you please send the original file (it has a .dmp extension)
BTW the reason your zip file was so big was because you had audio from multiple versions of the project file in the audio folder. If I do a save as and save to a new folder it will copy only the associated audio files. After I do that The size dropped to 81 MB which is quite normal.
There is no audiosnap data here as I first thought. 
I don't see any obvious problems with your project. I suspect your crashes are all caused by that plugin. When you send the dump file I can get better information.

Gotcha. Please see your messages.....

Thank you.

50 minutes ago, Michael Vogel said:

I’ve always recommended getting to grips with the basics and building skills of greater complexity rather than “seeing” a task to complete and only taking those steps necessary for that. You lose cohesion between the various program functions. 
 

For me, it's a usual way to learn. As long as I understand the underlying principles, everything sort of stays in place while I fill in the gaps. 

It's like learning the geography of London by travelling on the Tube. You go to Tottenham Court Road station every day and you know the surrounding area. And once in a while you go to Covent Garden station, so you know the streets around there quite well. There's a kind of splodge of 'known London' surrounding each Tube station you emerge from regularly.  But one day circumstances take you to Holborn, where you've never been before, and as you're heading to your appointment,  you go, "Ahhh - so, if I kept going along here, I'd get to Tottenham Court Road and Covent Garden's down there to the left. Got it, got it." The splodges start to join up.

To push my analogy a little further, I'd never get that from the Tube map, which'll show in principle how to use the system, but can't impart the experience of actually walking the streets.

@Noel Borthwick

Here's a more recent dump, that led me to believe that MidiGuitar is the culprit. It's on a few tracks, but it's Track 3 seems to be the one that has a problem with it....

 

Cakewalk Plug-in Crash Dump (c:\program files\Cakewalk\vstplugins\MIDIGuitar2-64bit.dll)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dump File: C:\Users\markj\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\MiniDumps\Plugins\ROOM_07232021_203926.dmp
Exception Code: c0000005d
Faulting Module: c:\program files\Cakewalk\vstplugins\MIDIGuitar2-64bit.dll
App Version: 27.06.0.053
User: markj
Serial: CBCO-1.00-DCMUXI-WRSKMT
Project File: C:\Cakewalk Projects\ROOM\ROOM.cwp
IsPluginCrash: 1
Total Phys Mem 16694516 KB
Avail Phys Mem 10025364 KB

---------------
Audio Settings
---------------

AlwaysOpenAllDevices 0
DynamicArm 0
DynArmOnlyInputs 1
MultiProc 1
MinimizeDriverStateChanges 1
MMCSS 1
WaveRT 0
CloseOnLostFocus 0
Default Bit Depth 24
Default Rec Bit Depth 16
Default Render Depth 32
Default Sample Rate 44100
Playback Buffer Size 4
Bounce Buffer Size 4
Core 2
Play Timing Master Focusrite USB ASIO Output 1
Record Timing Master Focusrite USB ASIO Input 1
 

13 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

@Mark Bastable were you able to capture a crash dump yet?

Yeah, it's in the zipfile.

6 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

It would be good to get to the bottom of what is causing the crashes. Send me a PM and I can help you with the exception severity if you havent been able to set that. 
Most crashes should be caught immediately in that mode. Please also try the latest early access release that was posted in case that helps with your problems.

PS: received your project. We'll look at the project file and try and repro.

Thanks, Noel. 

Having experiemented a bit further, I suspect the culprit is MidiGuitar2 on a specific track (the second green one).

58 minutes ago, bdickens said:

How often do you save? If and when CbB crashes for me, more often than not it is after I have made a bunch of changes without saving.

Autosave every ten minutes, and manual save as soon as I've got the bloody bass part even close to right.

Incidentally, I suspect I'm going through exactly the same process that I encountered when I taught myself a computer coding language thirty-odd years ago - which is that I'm learning things in the order I need them to solve immediate problems, rather than in any simple-to-complex sequence.

When I eventually got a job working with trained programmers, it turned out there were some very straightforward and fundamental techniques about which, rather embarrassingly,  I had no clue at all. But on the other hand, I sometimes cobbled together unconventional solutions about which my co-workers said, "Blimey, how did you get it to do that?"

Which is not to suggest I’m even close to impressing anyone on this forum. I’m a long way from that. I’m just admitting to ignorance. 
 

It's not so much a learning curve as a learning splatter. It'll take me a while to get it all to join up.

Trouble is, if I am intentionally using Audiosnap, then I have to bounce to clip to save them, and it's bouncing to clip that's causing the crash.

I'll try to get around that...

Back soon...

I'm really sorry to be such a pain about this...

Apparently a message can handle only 5MB files. My zipfile of the project folder is more like 100MB. 

First, is that weird? I mean, does that indicate something awry? It's only ten audio tracks on a two-minute song, and five or six FX in use.

If it is weird, maybe that's something to do with the crashing problem.

And if it's not weird, shall I upload to Dropbox instead?

......I need a drink.

M

Okay. I'm not sure about how the various elements are stored, but should I assume that everything you need will be in the folder called 'SONG TITLE'?

4 minutes ago, Nigel Mackay said:

If you did you would know the answer. Even if you only have Kontakt Player you would know. 😀

Oh, I know I have Kontakt something-or-other. But as I haven't ponied up any money, I suspect it's not Full.

Right now I have a random crashing problem. I'll be back on this less pressing problem shortly.

Thank you, all.

Curiouser and curiouser....

So, no (recent) dumpfile in the location you specified.

I thought the problem might have to do with FX on a couple of tracks, so I tried to archive them - and Cakewalk just hung. Revolving blue circle. 'Not responding' message. Had to kill it from Task Manager. This has happened a couple of times before too, when performing different functions.

I tried to save the project as a bundle, but I got the message shown below. Is that expected?

...and it just did it again when I deleted a clip.

No error message displayed. Can you tell me where I can find the dump file?

....And, of course, this time it didn't do it, though it did three times before I posted. I haven't re-booted since it last crashed. Unless having a chicken sandwich is a workaround, not a thing has changed since the last fail.  Typical, huh?

However, I've set the Exception Severity, and I'll capture the next time it falls over. Thank you so much for the swift response.

...no error message, nothing. Just disappears from the screen.

One thing that invariably causes it is bouncing to track - even just two clips. But other functions seem to do it too.

I have no CPU or RAM problems. And it's been running fine for a couple of months. Just started this crashing thing in the last few days. 

Any insights would be welcome.

Running on Windows 10, four-month-old Lenovo laptop, Cakewalk version 2021.06, Build 53

On 7/22/2021 at 2:43 AM, bitflipper said:

Do you have full Kontakt?

That's a very good question. 

Without intending to sound facetious in the least, I shall go away and research the question, and return with an answer.

I shall. Thank you.

....can anyone recommend a free or dead-cheap solo French Horn VST? Or failing that, a muted trumpet?

Okay,

Having done everything mentioned above, I was still getting pops and crackles, but less severely. Too often to want to work with though.

Following some trail or other, I found this...

https://www.tenforums.com/sound-audio/178473-solution-audio-glitches-how-ensure-general-real-time-performance.html#post2210762

Basically what it says is, Make the services that use the problematic drivers run on different CPU cores to the services that the DAW uses.

And it works. I have very few pops and crackles now, though some. 

It's not a full solution though, for two  - perhaps three - reasons.

1. All those manually assigned affinities and priorities  get re-set when you turn the computer off and on. So you have to do all this every time. It's a five minute job, but irritating. I'm currently looking at tools that claim to set this stuff up permanently.

2. You have to know which drivers are associated with which services and  - in the best case - thence to which processes. That's not always easy to figure if you're starting with what latency monitor tells you. WFD01000 crops up as a problem, but as @bvideosaid, it seems to couple with other drivers, and there's no way of telling which, so you have to hope that the companion driver that's making WFD01000 hit red is one of those that  you've coralled with the affinity assignment.

3.  I'm not sure about this, but I think that this solution makes latency monitor a less useful tool. Presumably if a driver is racking up high numbers, latency monitor's bars will go red, even if those high numbers are on CPU cores that the DAW's not using. Dunno. You can take a look at the Core tab to see what's working hard. but that's pretty difficult (for me) to interpret.

I'm stll getting crackles and pops, but not so often that it stops me working.  I'll carry on pursuing the issue and report back if I have any breakthroughs.