Jon L

Thanks I'll keep that in mind!

Yeah, getting an interface is definitely in my TODO! In the end I don't know what the issue was but I have a workaround so I'll mark this as resolved. Thanks for you help!

Yeah that's what I ended up doing, it took a while but I found the issue. Actually nothing to do with MIDI, it was one track that only had one sample (4MB WAV) playing only once, with a single automation lane on it and a single effect. Weird...

I have dozens of effects on my tracks and busses but I tried bypassing them and ended up getting Audio Engine Dropout again. I thought it could be plugin related but I'm not using any plugin I haven't used in other projects before. It does seem to be project related, because I opened an older project that has even more tracks and effects and no problem there... I guess I need to figure out what's different about this new project (there is a new VST I just started using but these problems predate it). Regarding specs: i5-13600K, ASUS Z790-Plus, 32GB DDR5 RAM, 256GB SSD, GTX 2070 Super, Windows 10, DT 770 Pro, no audio interface And nothing else is running except Chrome but with no audio or video. HWInfo64 seems to show everything is ok (no disk issues) and Latency Monitor says my system appears to be suitable so far (not sure how long it's supposed to run).

Thanks Jorge and Bristol! I tried increasing the Playback Buffer to 1000ms but to no effect. I'll try the clean install next 🤞 EDIT: same problem after the clean install...

Hi, For the past week, I've been having a lot of issues with Cakewalk. Half the time when I launch the playback, nothing happens for 4 or 5 seconds and the sounds comes in but it's not synced with the cursor anymore. And I regularly get Audio Engine Dropout (9) . According to this document, I should "Increase the Prepare using n Millisecond Buffers value in Edit > Preferences > MIDI - Playback and Recording", but I can't find that setting. I tried WASAPI shared and exclusive, increased the Playback Buffer Size, the DropoutMSec and disabled CPU Throttling but it doesn't fix the issue. For context I've been using Cakewalk for years on this computer. I upgrading it about 6 months ago (CPU, motherboard and RAM) and it was running really smoothly until very recently. Thanks!