Robert Bone

32-bit plugins are frequently crash-prone and otherwise funky, running in a 64-bit environment.

Back when 64-bit computers were just starting to be switched to, there were just insane numbers of people crashing right and left, because many 32-bit plugins - specially the freeware ones, just crapped out - made worse by all the money people had invested in their armada of 32-bit plugins.,

J-Bridge (commercial bridging software about $20), helped a lot of people out, as it sometimes was able to keep some 32-bit plugins running, that just did not work using the free Bit-Bridge software that came with Sonar, but it was still a nightmare, for at least a year, if not longer, until folks got farther and farther away from using 32-bit plugins.  There was always the option of installing and using a 32-bit Sonar when making projects where 32-bit plugins would have to be present, and I did that for a while, until I built up a large enough catalog of 64-bit plugins and could finally fully transition to that environment.

Most folks ended up switching over to as many 64-bit plugins as possible, certainly for new projects, and reported crashes came way down in numbers.  Most commercial plugins offered free 64-bit versions, which helped a bunch.

Anyways (sorry for the blast from the past), if any of those old projects of yours still had a 32-bit version of CE in them, that could well explain crashes.  Not sure why a new project, with a 64-bit CE, would crash, but maybe the reinstall managed to clean up some leftover 'stuff' in Registry entries, or something along those lines.

VERY cool you are back in business.

I am curious - do you happen to have any of the error messages from any of the crashes?  I am just wondering what it might have been complaining about - I was a computer programmer, so that kind of stuff makes me intrigued. 

Thanks, 

Bob Bone

I had an M-Audio (aactually still have it), that suddenly started generating Pitch Bend events.

After digging into it on the web, apparently some of the potentiometers (pots) and other electrical components, can go bad after a few years, and that can result in things like generated midi messages, and such.

I went into the midi controller's settings, and turned off the Pitch Bend wheel altogether, and all was fine after that - but I did lose the Pitch Wheel for that controller.

I would imagine unwanted events could be filtered out, as well - maybe that would help your situation, if indeed the messages are being generated by an external device, such as a midi controller.

Bob Bone

If your laptop supports an actual 2.5 drive, a 500 GB SSD runs about $50-$100, and a 120 GB SSD can be had for as cheap as $20, and that would make life a lot more comfortable for you - to clone your existing drive to a new SSD, as certainly a drive as small as you have will give you nothing but headaches.

Additionally - is there an additional partition on your boot drive?  Lots of times, manufacturers of pre-built computers create a recovery partition that is an image of the laptop's boot drive as it existed when it left the factory.  If that is no longer needed, like if you created a Windows Recovery DVD, for instance, you could recover Windows from that, you could consider deleting that recovery partition and reclaiming that space to extend your OS partition, which would add that space to what is available to you on the boot drive.

Lastly, while some folks use the M-link junctin or connection or whatever it is called, to move folders while they still appear to everything as being at their original locations, I move my user folders (documents, pictures, videos, downloads, etc) to a different drive, by going into the Properties of each of those user folders, and using the Location tab to specify an alternate location, and that moves all of that stuff off of the boot drive, just like those M-links or whatever those are called.  That reclaims a bunch of space.

And, whenever possible, I specify a different drive for any plugin's content files, like sample libraries, or whatever, just to keep it off the boot drive.

(edited - forgot to add something) - if you do look at picking up a larger boot drive - a standard 2.5" SATA III SSD, I suggest you look for those that have V-NAND technology, as opposed to regular NAND, TLC-NAND, or MLC-NAND, because while a bit more expensive than the other types, V-NAND technology wears better over time, and can last a lot longer than the other types - that being said, they all should last a while.  Just a thought - others may have different opinions on this - it is what I tend to choose, when choices are available).

Bob Bone

Here is a lnk to a similar issue from January, that was resolved:

Bob Bone

There is a Kontakt setting under the Engine tab, that allows you to tell it how many CPU cores you have, it goes up to 16, though mine has 32, but it works fine set to 16.

Anyways, it helps Kontakt split up the workload among the multiple cores - and may help folks performance wise with large Kontakt instances.  I believe splitting things into multiple instances also splits work among the cores, but why not embrace both options?

Give it a whirl, and see if performance is improved.

Bob Bone

Could it be hiding in the Uncategorized category?

If you find it there, you can change its category to Synth, and thereafter you will find it there.

If the above is not the issue, check to see if the Cakewalk Plugin Manager shows it as a VSTi, to make sure the scanning of it didn't fail for some reason.

Bob Bone

I forgot to add - for whatever reason, this issue is not occurring on my desktop or my laptop, and I am current with all maintenance, so perhaps it is indeed something to do with system-specific conditions, such as video drivers - ie perhas NVIDIA.  My desktop has a high-end EVGA video card, Geforce RTX 2070 Super XC, and I cannot recall what graphics is in it, but for whatever reason, neither experiences these clicks/noises/dropouts at project open or close - perhaps that can help a little - hope so anyway, I am no expert with this.  The Geforce card in the desktop says it is NVIDIA-compatible, but I think that is as close as it gets to NVIDIA.

Bob Bone

In the meantime, perhaps cutting volume to any speakers or headphones, while opening or closing a project in CbB, might be worth doing, until some kind of solution is figured out....

Bob Bone

34 minutes ago, Kevin Perry said:

Ha - good job then my Windows 10 install refuses to install that update!

What error code?

6 hours ago, Blindeddie said:

It looks like you just have to have a default Saved (once) and you can change it per instance/project and the (without setting any changes as the default).

for example I opened an instance of K4 created 8 stereo outs and renamed them Out 1-8. Without saving that as a default, the out list in CbB looked wonky like the one shown above.  I saved as the default then reloaded the project and all was good.  I opened a new project, loaded K4 and the outputs were named as the default I had saved (out 1-8).  I   renamed the outs in the new project and everything looked perfect (without saving my changes as the default). saved the project and closed.  Reopened the first project and outs were still named out 1-8.  closed that project opened the second one (where I had renamed the outs) and the names I had changed for  the outs were reflected properly in CbB.

 

what I did not test was if any  out names in existing projects/instances were affected by  setting the default... I don't think they should as the default should only be applied to "New" instances of Kontakt... I think...🤔

I hope that makes sense.

 

Peace,

 

Blindeddie

BEAUTY!

I will give it a whirl.  I do have the Engine option, in Kontakt's settings, set to distribute its workload among 16 cores, which is the max the setting allows. My CPU is an AMD Ryzen 1950x Threadripper, which has 32 cores, so spreading workload also figures into it all, so looking forward to the outputs finally working right on the names shown as audio track Inputs in CbB.

Bob Bone

13 minutes ago, Blindeddie said:

Once you make the changes, you need to save the  Kontakt Out mapping as the "Default" (Either All or VST), then close the project and reopen the project...the outputs should then show properly.  I tested in K4, K5 and K6 (appears the issue does not occur in K6, but if it crops up, this should work).

I am assuming that due to the "Dynamic" nature of creating and naming outputs, that unless the changes are "Saved" so to speak, that they do not translate properly...One of the many weird Kontakt things...

 

Peace,

 

Blindeddie

Thanks - I will check this out, though every instance is almost certainly going to have different loaded instruments,  so not sure how saving as the default would work, but I will find out when I get a chance to test it all out.

Bob Bone 

I have experienced that for years and years, and for the past 10 years or so, I have just limited each Kontakt instance to having no more than 4-5 loaded instruments, and that way I don't trigger the weirdness.

Perhaps there are others that can offer a solution - I have never been able to figure it out, so the above limiting approach works every time.  I have so much memory on my computer that I have zero issues by running however many Kontakt instances I need....

Bob Bone

we have all had moments of DOH.

3 hours ago, Stewart Kingsley said:

Mine was set 3, changing that to 2 has solved my latency issue and also the crackling problems.

Good job!

Just a thought - that parameter is described in the release notes as experimental, and potentially unstable.

11 hours ago, DevDevy said:

NOTE: some processes were hit by hard pagefaults. If these were programs producing audio, they are likely to interrupt the audio stream resulting in dropouts, clicks and pops. Check the Processes tab to see which programs were hit.

I hope others know what svchost.exe hard page faults are caused by, as I am no guru on that. I also have 128 GB of memory, so just don't see those.

There are some folks in the forum community that can help get you squared away. I will do some digging into this too, to try to help.

55 minutes ago, DevDevy said:

I tried the link you provided and the driver didn't fix the issue for me.. I wonder if there was something else in the process you might've done?

I again ask for latencymon's report on your system's latency analysis 

9 hours ago, DevDevy said:

I have a similar issue with the exact same interface. Guitar Rig has pops and crackles, but this issue doesn't exist in other DAWs with the same buffer settings...
Really want this to work, because I like Cakewalk.

Something is definitely not right. I set the buffer ALL the way up to 1024 samples and still stutters, odd... I tried deleting the AUD file, but the issue persists.

What does latencymon report on your system's latency?

Bob Bone

Yay!  Can you please edit the initial post in the thread, and add something like 'Solved' to the subject line? 

Thanks,

Bob Bone

Are you loading a VST 3 version of Falcon in your project?  Maybe, try loading VST 2, and see if that makes a difference.

Also, I am aware of some display issues if the Windows Scaling is set large enough, like when using a 4k screen resolution, folks may bump the Scaling up by as much as 200%.

Bob Bone

1 hour ago, Sunset Recording said:

Again thank you, didn't mean to make ya type so much. Yes, I've ran it with the fx off and that lowers the problems,but it's still an issue. To cut to the chase all my research, forum chatting and personal experience tells me Bandlab Cake walk is simply Junk. I purchased a perpetual license of Pro Tools  last night. This is my living, I have to have rock solid performance.

Again, thanks so much, I learn from everyone.

-C

Best wishes for success to you, regardless of the platform.

On 4/5/2020 at 2:48 PM, Sunset Recording said:

Hey Bob,

Yes, everything possible is up to date. And no, I have not tried running without efx. I understand that from a diagnostic approach, but real world I can't mix without a certain amount turned on.

I pretty much took a break from testing yesterday, just research and conversation with @NSFW. I just changed up some buffer settings and will be testing in a bit. I did order a DEll NVMe Optain drive, that will arrive on Friday. Btw, I use Brainworx SSL e quite a bit, my understanding is it has minimal drag on the CPU. You know anything about that plug?

Thanks again, and what day is it?

-Cary

I was only asking you to temporarily bypass your currently loaded effects, only long enough to see if bypassing them made a difference with the dropouts. 

So - I again ask you - please click the FX button, to temporarily bypass your effects, then hit Play, let it run for a minutes, then go ahead and hit the FX button again to engage all the loaded plugins again, and report here with whether or not your project played back properly when the effects were bypassed.

It is a test that you could complete in less time than it has taken me to type this post.

I am not asking you to not use effects - I am only asking that you bypass them, to determine whether or not something with one or more of your effects is causing your issues.

The FX button is just to the right of the metronome button, just right of the Transport Module at the top center of the screen.

Bob Bone

Is it that you don't find AD as a VST synth in the Browser Pane?  Perhaps it is under the Uncategorized category?

I have both Addictive Drums and Addictive Drums 2 (64-bit for both) running happily in Cakewalk by Bandlab, and Sonar Platinum.

Bob Bone

Please detail exactly what you have plugged into what, what buttons are pushed, etc., so we can help you figure this out.

Here is the Quick-Start Guide for it - I don't see any sort of actual complete user manual, on the Behringer site, so this looks like it:

https://media63.music-group.com/media/sys_master/ha3/hb8/8849665064990.pdf

By the way - the above link is where the link to the guide on Behringer's site took me, so it is actually their guide - don't know what this 'media63.music-group.com' site is, but it is where their link took me.

Bob Bone

I also think this whole thread is instructive - at least for me - as I will start asking about any tweaks or modifications folks may have made, to either Windows, or to Cakewalk parameters, a lot earlier in the diagnosing of weird issues like this thread presented.  

One of those 'note to self' moments. 

Bob Bone

2 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

Mine is set to 2...12 core/ 24 thread Ryzen 3900x .. I didn't set it to 2 though, so did CBb select it's own setting ?

Seems to work pretty well, not had any issues and all the threads seem to be doing something

I changed mine, a while ago, from the default 1, to its current 2 - that works wonderfully, and my system is quite stable (haven't crashed in almost 2 years), so I am quite happy to wait for the go-ahead from Noel, before attempting to use the new value of 3 they added.  My desktop uses an AMD Ryzen 1950x Threadripper, so has boatloads of cores, and it is quite happy cranking away on the setting of 2.

Bob Bone