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Dave K.

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  1. Okay, further testing indicates that it has to be project-specific. I exported a number of different ways using a different session file from the same project (i.e., similar track count/plugin usage) and could not reproduce the effect. That includes an export with the original settings to the SAME external hard drive that is nearly full (just in a different folder). In all instances on this particular session file, I had normal, expected (desired) behavior. My suspicion is there is 1 particular plugin (I'm not sure which) that is causing an issue on the more recent projects. I don't have a comprehensive listing of all plugin instances at the ready, so I think more experimentation is needed.
  2. Gave that a shot tonight, no improvement in result.
  3. Hi all, Although I've used Cakewalk products since 2007, tonight was my first attempt to experiment with export formats other than WAV. I wanted to preserve original fidelity on the export, so I tried by AIFF and FLAC exports and was greeted with the pop-up prior to export in the first image. For me, the drop-down menu is not populated for either format. That doesn't stop me from hitting "OK" though, but when I tried that for both, Cakewalk threw the error message pop-up in the second image. I did also try MP3 as an export just to see what would happen, and this had very different results. That one even managed to export "a" file, but the audio content therein was just white noise with bursts of pink noise over top. I checked the online manual, and it didn't seem to clarify things for me. So clearly, I'm missing something. Does anybody have any advice on this?
  4. Hi all, Lately (and really for about 6+ months now, but it seems to be getting worse or is at least worse on this particular project) my exports have gotten so slow. Tonight I actually clocked the export time as slower than real-time on a project (by a matter of seconds, but even so). One of the things that really jumps out to me is that for years, during the offline bounce, Cakewalk (and all versions of Sonar going back to 7) would have a relatively smooth animation of the meters and certain plugins (in particular an old analyzer called Inspector and Dynameter by MeterPlugs). I first started noticing issues last year when the animations became visibly "stuttery," for lack of a better term. They were obviously reacting to brief spurts of no audio processing. In the past, I've been just sorta bearing with it, but tonight whatever is causing this may also be causing actual stuttering in the exported mix (it actually sounds like a tremolo effect in parts)? Here's what I've tried to resolve this: Maxing out the bounce buffer size (I even went above the drop-down max of 200 a few times): no discernible effect. disabling all plugins: this did actually resolve the tremolo, but export was still as slow as ever. freezing all tracks with plugins and rendering all synths (in this case, 1 single synth was used: no discernible effect. Exporting to differ file locations, including on different drives: no discernible effect. Exporting to different files: this raised an entirely different set of questions, and I will start a new thread about that. To get through the current project's deadline, I used a Real-Time export instead, and it came out fine, but obviously this is non-ideal for future use. Am I missing something obvious to try? My computer isn't top of the line, but it should be sufficient to do an offline export (and it has been in the past, and is far more powerful than other previous machines I've used in the past): Intel i7-4770 3.4 GHz processor (8-core) 32 GB RAM Cakewalk is installed on an internal system SSD (more than 50% empty on a 1 TB drive) My project/audio is installed on an external USB 3.0 drive (a LaCie Rugged with 7200rpm) and connected via a USB 3.0 port. Audio Interface is a MOTU 828 mk3 Hybrid being used in ASIO mode and connected via a Firewire port on it's own card/bus in the computer. I am, admittedly, wondering if this may be because I'm still trudging along on Windows 7 Pro The external drive is above 90% capacity, but it's a 500 GB drive, and there's still more than 25 GB of open space left on it. That should be plenty large to handle this size of export. I did check the drive using Windows and there are no errors and it does not need to be de-fragmented. During export, the CPU meters in Cakewalk show 4 cores being utilized, and none of them peak much above 50%. RAM usage stays consistent at about 5%. Project complexity is probably involved: the current project is only 42 tracks (most without plugins, none with automation) and about 20 buses (most without plugins, none with automation), but one of the tests I tried was to export only a handful of tracks rather than the entire mix and my export time was reduced substantially as expected (but still stuttery compared to what I would expect). This particular session is just over 4 minutes long. This issue also has regularly popped up on other sessions that are substantially fewer tracks, but substantially longer (stereo recordings of live performances that are 30-40 minutes long). For all the obvious reasons, I'd prefer to tweak settings in Cakewalk before I take the plunge into a full OS upgrade (which won't be feasible until at least a couple more projects get finished up, because I can't risk taking the entire computer out of operation before they're done). I did a search in these forums (and the old cakewalk forums) and tried the few things I could find that might help (with the results up above). Any thoughts?
  5. This new port naming scheme is about 100% better! I've been hoping for additional advancements to the friendly naming since Sonar 8, and this is a definite improvement. My one hope is that additional refinements will let us re-order (or re-number) the ports as listed in the pop-up menus when Friendly Names are active. Windows/MOTU choose to list my ports in a different order than what makes sense to me, so I still have custom numbers as part of the Friendly names right now. If we could re-order our ports as displayed in Cakewalk, I could rely on Cakewalk's port numbering, rather than my own numbering convention. Ideally, we could also just set up a customized menu for ourselves of hardware ins/outs to be displayed. Perhaps with presets so different sessions could utilize different I/O displays/naming conventions (this is one of the few features that Pro Tools has always done really well; Studio One also has a pretty good implementation for this, too). It would be great to set up the pop-up menu so that mono outputs are in a separate sub-menu than stereo pairs of outputs.
  6. While I'm thinking about it, I think maybe this is generally a bigger issue that comes up infrequently. My last posted thread was directed to a similarly-bizarre issue where the keyboard couldn't be properly captured because of window priority/focus. This might be one of those boring "under-the-hood" things that users don't notice or care about, but devs should still pay attention to because they can seriously break the software.
  7. Hi all, I discovered a huge problem for the devs to fix. To start, I need to refresh my activation for Cakewalk by BandLab. However, when the "Sign in" window pops up within Cakewalk so that I can log into BandLab, I can't actually log in. What's happening, is that the keyboard hotkeys are still mapping to functions within Cakewalk, but aren't inputting in the Sign In screen. My BL username has a 'c' in it, so there's no way I can even input my username to log in, because every time I hit 'c' the Control Bar in Cakewalk toggles on/off. I'm experienced enough with the software that I know to use the offline activation method. But there's no reason to assume a new user will know to do that. We have a major hurdle to actually using this software that's gotta be fixed!
  8. I stumbled upon a really weird situation in Cakewalk that I don't think is a "bug", per se, but did sort of break the usability of the program. Quick notes: using updated version, but also have a Mackie MCU (original grey series) to control the DAW via a MOTU Microlite. I was doing a stereo-file cleanup/transfer project (I'm actually making a CD out of an Internet broadcast), but the important part is that I was working on a new project. I have a habit of hitting the "Save" button on the MCU before adding certain older/freeware plugins just in case they case a problem. However, this time I hadn't yet saved the file under its own name yet. Cakewalk did the proper thing in response to that, and opened up a "Save As..." dialog for me to save the file with a name of my choosing. However, because I hit the button while I had the FX menu open in the Console View, it seems like Cakewalk got confused about where my attention should be with respect to keyboard/mouse input. I couldn't force the mouse to operate either the FX menu or the Save As dialog. Clicking around seemed to adjust the zoom in the Track view, and I couldn't really interact with any of the Cakewalk windows (including the Windows-level interface, so I couldn't hit the "Close X" on the upper right of the Save As dialog, either). Nothing about Cakewalk seemed to actually be having real problems: the audio kept running as per normal, and Windows reported nothing strange in the task manager: I just couldn't interact with Cakewalk in a meaningful manner at that moment. I ultimately had to force-close Cakewalk via the Task Manager and start from scratch. Cakewalk loaded normally without issue. Not sure what that mean, and it seems like it'd be a pretty rare situation, but I think the lesson here is to always Save your projects with their own name before you do anything else. Just thought I'd throw that one out there to let people know I found something bizarre.
  9. So I finally had some time away from projects this weekend, and it looks like the culprit was indeed "digiasio.dll", which was placed into two different directories (1 in the Windows/System32 and 1 in Windows/SysWOW64). I pulled them both out of their folders and Cakewalk stayed online through a VPN status changeover. I will need to do some additional testing for Pro Tools, but no indications of problems yet. If I'm honest I use it maybe twice a year, so if that breaks it's less critical for me. Thanks for your help everybody!
  10. You're almost definitely correct that this is a problem caused by Pro Tools. The problem is that Avid will almost definitely decline to care because I'm using a build that isn't technically supported within their extremely narrow specified hardware for support (I'm also using a version of Pro Tools several years old because that's what is compatible with Windows 7).
  11. Here's a weird thing. I recently started using NordVPN on my DAW computer, and any time there is a change in VPN connectivity while Cakewalk is running, I experience a fatal exception that crashes Cakewalk. Nominally this isn't a problem, except when there's an unexpected interruption in my VPN connection. If NordVPN changes its connectivity status (either to connect or to disconnect), within a few seconds Cakewalk throws an error message that reads: (The crash dump file changes each time, but it also appears to simply be the data and time of the system when the exception occurs.) Note that I can generate this message reliably irrespective of whether or not Cakewalk actually has a project open: in the attached image I did it immediately after startup of Cakewalk. I did find this exact error message being dealt with over on the Avid forums: I do have Pro Tools and Avid Link on this computer. This behavior persists even if I have neither Pro Tools nor Avid Link running in the background or have had them running at any time since a fresh boot of the computer. https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=400096 It appears that user had help from Cakewalk devs to eliminate their problem. But their solution did not work for me. As of now, I'm still 100% reliably able to recreate this problem. While I was initially inclined to blame NordVPN itself, it also appears that I can reliably generate this exception by disabling the network adapters via Windows Control Panel, too. Behavior is exactly the same whether I'm disabling or enabling the associated network adapter within Control Panel. So it appears that Cakewalk, in the current incarnation, is highly sensitive to changes in internet connectivity. I'm a long-time user, and I still have Sonar Platinum on this computer, and was able to recreate this behavior there, as well, so this is not a new problem. Does anybody know a way to get Cakewalk not to care about the Internet? I suppose I could try disabling my network card every time I need to use the program and switching back on (something I used to do when I was working on a laptop), but this is non-ideal because I've taken to keeping track of mix revisions from clients in emails or online, and having a browser open to track those notes is very useful to me. I have already tried blocking Cakewalk from all Internet access via the Windows Firewall, but that didn't solve the problem either. Any thoughts?
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