slartabartfast

Some graphics cards that connect via HDMI have an onboard audio capability that presents itself to Windows as an audio interface. Make sure that the audio on your card is not hijacking the output from Cakewalk or presenting itself as a second ASIO driver (not allowed) . Check to see if there is a setting in your graphics card that lets you disable the onboard audio features.

How are you exporting your audio, and exactly how are you playing it back and hearing it? Exporting digital audio as a digital file should not introduce any extraneous noise, and since it does not involve the audio interface at all, what audio interface you are using should not be related to the problem. How you play back the digital audio could very well be the source of a buzz or hum, which is more often due to electrical noise than to digital artifact. Do you know 60 cycle hum when you hear it?

The stumbling and crashes may or may not be cured by buying new hardware. At any rate new hardware would have to be set up de novo which might solve your problems by itself. Your laptop will likely run without an external audio interface using the built in sound chipset. The simple mixing you describe should run with acceptable latency, but you need to let Cakewalk know that you are using the onboard audio. http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=AudioPerformance.29.html

Interesting, but... We fully understand that, although we continue developing and updating this conceptual offspring of ours, it is still in its very preliminary phase, and thus is full of bugs.

https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/115002006329-Can-I-use-ASIO4all-with-my-Focusrite-Interface-

The SL keyboards do not have any onboard sounds, so you need to find out what instrument is playing. It would not be unusual to have a sampled piano that does not sustain on high notes because that is the natural behavior of a piano that is being modeled. A carefully modeled sustain pedal will typically just disable damping, the way the pedal on a real piano does and not loop the sound to any given length as many softsynths or electric pianos do when the key is just held indefinitely. Short light piano wires dissipate energy very fast compared to long heavy piano wires so even with damping disabled the sound will die out much more quickly. A similar effect is expected with realistically sampled guitars or other plucked instruments.

https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3

Now that is crazy. If this guy is charging for his time, I can not imagine anything that would take more time to get the same job done as telling someone what to do over the phone and having him do it step by step. It goes to the old contractors' adage: $50.00 per hour if I do it $100.00 per hour if you watch $250.00 per hour if you help

OK so I am confused. Does the distant engineer want you to send the DAW output over the phone while he somehow controls your DAW remotely? Does he intend to listen over the phone and tell you what to do at your controls? In any event, if he is judging your mix from a telephone transmission it is likely he is not going to get a really accurate signal to sort out. Engineers make such an issue about having the best monitor speakers in a perfect room to do their mixing, that I am surprised to find someone who wants to set his reputation on what he can do from a telephone transmission, presumably captured off an unknown monitor system through a microphone that is designed for voice (not music) transmission at an unknown bit rate depending on the intermediary telephony system. If he does not have a copy of and familarity with the original DAW on which the recording is made, I would think the usual way to do this would be to request exported stems to be sent to him as digital files.

The new Scarletts use a driver/software mixer named Focusrite Control that controls routing within the interface. There is a separate user manual for that software available in your Focusrite download area. The short answer is that you open Focusrite Control and route the input you want to monitor to the output that serves your headphone jack. On the 4i4 you probably have outputs 1&2 assigned to monitor (which allows you to control volume or monitor speakers attached to those outputs) with the knob on the unit) , and probably 3&4 will show with a symbol of headphone in addition to line plugs. Click on the window with the headphones and click on the plus sign tab and it will let you add as input the input you are recording on. There are factory default presets that may confuse you and make it look as if you have no options to change things, so go to file>presets> Empty to open a preset that clears all entries. You can also route the same recording input to your DAW so that it records, but you will need to mute or disable the output from your DAW to the headphones or you will get an echo. Once you get it set up the way that works for you, you can save it as a new preset and open it any time.

Hyperlinks work as expected under Windows 10 Foxit Reader 9.7. You might want to try a different pdf reader.

You cannot access an audio file as an instrument directly via MIDI. You need an intermediate plugin application: a sampler (application can record and play back audio clips) or a rompler (application only plays back clips that are stored in it). You would need to load the audio files into the sampler and then you can play them back under MIDI control. You can directly paste audio clips into an audio track manually, but if you only have the clip/sample at one pitch you would need to pitch shift it to match each instance. Trying to do that in Cakewalk would be challenging.

Are your speakers or headphones recognized by Windows as audio devices? Are one or both connected by USB to your computer?

That sounds like a problem with a physical/electrical connection. A loose plug or cold solder joint inside one of the connectors come to mind. Does this only happen with Cakewalk or does it happen with the same output signal chain playing music from another application?

The quality of the "sound" within Cakewalk is not affected by the machinery that is processing it once it gets past the analog/digital stage--typically your audio interface. It is digital data, and no computer on the market today will produce significant errors in how the digital data is calculated or moved around. The digital files that you export or burn to CD from Cakewalk will have the same quality no matter what type of audio interface, sound card etc. Again they are data not "sound" at all. A newer /faster computer may perform calculations faster, but there is no reason to believe it will get more accurate results. The real sound that you hear when the data is passed through the digital to analog converter in a playback device, or the digital data that is captured in the analog to digital stage of the audio interface may be colored by the device, but not by the computer. Played on a better audio playback device the digital data (wav file) will sound better, but once digitally recorded the signal can not have any better quality than it had at the initial analog to digital conversion, although you can make it sound better by filtering out noise etc. So if you are looking for capturing quality, the investment has to be in the analog signal chain (microphones, preamps, outboard mixers etc.), and in a reasonably good audio interface. Most are quite good enough, including the onboard sound chips of most contemporary machines. If you are interested in exporting quality all that stuff is irrelevant. If you are interested in hearing quality, then the investment is in high quality playback devices, speakers, amps etc. that you plan to listen to it on.

It sounds like you are saying there is a delay of a couple of seconds before your project begins to play, but after that everything is normal. Are you sure the recorded project (MIDI? audio?) starts at the beginning and that there is not a rest or unrecorded leading space?

A delay in recording what you play (latency) could be due to buffer or processing issues, but you are saying that the recorded notes are ahead of where they should be. Since in the real world a sound cannot be recorded before it is played, the only common cause for that is that your system is applying delay compensation incorrectly. Usually that happens because a plugin that has its own buffer to allow it to do the processing sends a message to Cakewalk that it needs to adjust the time so that the delay introduced by that buffer is NOT recorded as the note being recorded late. Try bypassing any effects to see if this solves the problem. https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Recording.22.html If not you may need to manually set the offset.

I expect that by the time you do the necessary upgrades, you will in essence have a new machine. You can generally reuse the case, power supply and drives, but by the time you get a new CPU and a board that has Thunderbolt either as is or via an add-in card you will probably not have saved all that much. The memory is also often tied to the board. It is often a better investment to buy the new case and PS, move all but one drive to a new machine and use the old one as a general PC. Of course you can spend a fortune on case and PS, but the performance will not benefit from the cost. Two grand is a pretty expensive machine, and you would probably have to pay extra for what you want from an assembler, since most off-the-shelf systems are made for gamers, and are not automatically suitable for audio. You can save a lot over a gamer machine simply by using an inexpensive graphics card or just the on-CPU graphics capability--should be more than enough for a DAW. I also doubt you are going to notice a lot of improvement in track count by adding another 16 GB of memory, unless you have a sampler that needs to load everything into memory initially and a huge use of samples. The audio interface connection speed is of little consequence unless you are trying to simultaneously record dozens of tracks. If you are doing softsynths and in-the-box mixing, you only need two tracks as output, and the throughput of a USB is more than adequate for that. A single Apollo Twin is a two preamp interface, and the only big advantage you are going to get for that price is built in effects, and bragging rights about noise and sampling that most of us would be unable to hear. I built my current machine because I won one of the 5 GHz Core i7 8086K CPU's in their fortieth anniversary lottery a couple of years ago., and I needed a place to put it. A case, two new drives, a PS and 16 GB RAM and a motherboard that has the option to add a Thunderbolt add-in (which I have no intention of ever getting) brought the cost up to a bit over $400.00, which is as much as I have ever spent on a DAW. I added another 16 GB of memory when I saw it on sale for about $70 a year ago, but its only purpose is to keep the room a bit warmer in the winter--16 was more than enough for my actual use.

Blanket statements of this sort are in essence religious. Are you prepared to criticize the unfortunate consequences of the thirteenth amendment?

Not every buyer is so lazy that he will consider having to pay an exorbitant price for a product a reasonable cost for not having the burden of doing comparative shopping. That choice is taken away by fixing the price at manufacture--a practice that only benefits the manufacturer. While it is certainly a choice for sellers to not carry a product, it is also a choice for them to offer the product at a lower price and consequently take a lower profit in order to incentivize a purchase. An end price need not be so high as to result in a failure of the manufacturer to sell at all to represent an imposition of an unfair rent being collected by him. Service is largely a myth in retail as in every other sale. All a customer expects is an exchange of goods for money, unless the boutique is offering a blow$job or its equivalent along with the purchase. In that case the service itself is a separate product being bundled under the same price. What the MSRP does for the seller is permit him to avoid competition with other sellers who might choose to offer a lower price. That is arguably a good thing for a small seller and protects him against being bullied by a big seller who by economies of scale could afford to underprice him. A mom&pop would be protected from a wealthy discount house, but only at the level of the price at which he can sell. Nothing in the MSRP scheme prevents the manufacturer incentivizing large sellers to buy the product in larger quantities by offering them a discount--thus ensuring that they make a higher profit at every sale than the mom&pop. The protection the small seller enjoys is pretty limited. The big seller making a higher profit on the same sale can use some of the extra income to advertise, to lower prices on other products or to offer blowjobs with his sales, which the small seller cannot afford to do. In fact it is new--Legan vs PSKS was decided in 2007. Although it determined that such a scheme was not strictly forbidden under the Sherman Antitrust Act, it does not mean that such a practice is ultimately fair to the consumer or will produce the most effective competition among sellers to deliver a lowest price. A law seeking to maximize the benefit to the individual as opposed to business would not permit it. The British law apparently does so. the US law does not.

Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S. 877 pretty much legalized this practice in the United States. While it would be illegal for various distributors to band together and set a price for a product, it is perfectly legal for a manufacturer to retaliate against any seller that sells for less than their manufacturer's suggested retail price. A typical 5-4 decision and another example of how the US has largely sided with businesses against individuals in what is laughingly called competition enforcement.

The 64 bit double precision engine increases the bit size of the sample representation and should theoretically reduce any rounding errors in internal processing of the data. I can not imagine how that could possibly fix your problem.

If it is anything like the full features of Notion, then it is much much better than CbB's staff view. On the other hand I already have Notion, and that would be the only new feature that would tempt me it I did not.

My recollection is that it was reproducibly seen when someone tried to "import" an MP3 that contained certain kinds of tags in SONAR. The message used to come up pretty frequently as a problem in the forums and never seemed to be due to actually lacking free space.