Lord Tim

No, you're right - it doesn't look like you have any loop points set. Hmm.. this is a weird one, it all looks good so far. If you go to Options > Stop and Project End and make sure there's no checkmark on that, will it continue to play? I'm happy to have a look at the project itself if you PM me a link, to see if there's something weird going on, but it doesn't sound project specific to me - this sounds like something set up wrong on Cakewalk (like the loop points, but... yeah, clearly not)

Can you take a screenshot of your main Cakewalk window? That way we can see what you have activated up on your Control Bar and if there's any makers set in your ruler, etc.

Press L. It sounds like you've set yourself a short loop point and it's going back and forth only in that section.

Next is cross-platform. I'd be surprised if they try the Mac route for Sonar any time soon though. I'd love to see one, mind you! I'm stoked for Sonar, but I think Next is actually the more interesting product out of the two. I have a lot of clients who do recording at home, and people I've introduced to recording that I've set them up with CbB. Having something that opens up the platform to Mac users and beginners is super handy, and integrating it into Bandlab itself is smart - it looks like it's kind of a computer front-end to the Bandlab editor and their sound library, which could mean creating a project in Next, uploading to your Bandlab account and then being able to Browse Bandlab Projects in CbB or Sonar to get those tracks in to keep working in the flagship app.

It says on the FAQ on the Sonar page that it installs to its own directory, so as a different app, so I'd say that CbB will continue to work, but just won't get all of the updates going forward like Sonar will. EDIT: Ha, Jack beat me to it by a couple of minutes and I didn't see the page refresh. Yeah, what he said!

Sorry, @Einstein R - just replied to you in the other thread regarding this.

It's a completely different company though. Gibson was who owned the Cakewalk brand and charged the price. It was the code that was bought by Bandlab, and hired the dev team that found themselves out of a job when Gibson pulled the plug. We (including me - I paid for lifetime licenses, etc.) paid Gibson this money, not Bandlab. No company is going to go "well we bought the code and released a product but since you gave money to someone else, I guess we'll give our paid product to you as well because the name is similar" - it doesn't make any kind of financial sense. I have no insights at all to what the plans are, but considering the good faith shown since 2017 with compatibility and letting us use locked products with CbB, etc. etc. then I'd be surprised if there wasn't some kind of fair deal.

That's an entirely different company who no longer exists, so I guess you need to ask Gibson about that rather than Bandlab. There's been a lot of good faith so far with Bandlab allowing compatibility with old products locked to the previous company, and access to old accounts and all of that stuff, so while I wouldn't expect any company to just give away a product that was sold by a completely different company, I'd expect whatever they do to be at least fair.

HA, I thought my monitor was being weird for a minute, then I saw this:

It is, but I was using an old Dual Core laptop for ages and running fairly large projects. It was painful and I had to be really careful to freeze off tracks or play with my latency slider, but it worked, so yours should be able to do the job fine if you're careful with how you load it up. It's a lot more powerful than what I was using. Even plugged in, a lot of laptop manufacturers set their power profiles to be fairly safe, so this is definitely still one good place to look and see if you're running at your full power. it's good that you ran those system tests and they came back clear, but now that we know it's a dropout rather than a crash, they were probably unnecessary (but still good to know just in case something else is going on). Dropout Code (1) means "Audio processing took longer than the buffers allotted time slice." which points to your audio interface's buffer being part of the problem, so if it's still happening only with the Focusrite installed, I'm starting to suspect something may be interfering with your USB or hogging your PCI bus, which is not sending through data as fast as it should. Power profiles that have energy saving on USB ports is a big cause of this, and so is running your audio device into a USB hub first before going to your laptop. Additional thoughts: What plugins have you got running in the project and how many instances of each? This could be a thing - as you found, some don't like the Double Precision engine, so this could be another good place to look. When you stared in Safe Mode, and said NO to loading each plugin, are you saying it still produced a dropout with no plugins at all loaded? That's definitely leading back to it not being a CPU issue but something to do with how it's getting the data to and from your audio interface.

Wow. Not gonna lie, having the Sonar name back is giving me the warm and fuzzies This is starting to explain the long wait between updates this time!

Huh... I didn't know that one. *files that away*

^^ this. This is why I suggested the Focusrite drivers before anything else, since we know they're solid and work for many people here. If you can get those working first, then you can explore other alternatives. I'd still recommend against FlexASIO though. Uninstall that, and do a registry cleanout for your ASIO entries and reinstall the Focusrite drivers only and see how that goes. You're right that a few plugins have issues with the double precision engine, so keeping that off probably isn't a bad idea in general. On a lower spec'd machine like yours, especially running 32 bit depth, this is asking for dropouts. This is a laptop, yeah? There's a good chance it's also set to be kind to your battery rather than giving maximum performance, so definitely check your power profile settings too. To clarify, is it actually crashing or is it just dropping out? This is an important difference to help sort out the problem. A crash is suggesting something is broken somewhere, but a dropout could mean a bunch of factors that could be causing it.

No, your best bet is to use a an application made specifically for video editing. If you're a DAW user, something like Magix Vegas Pro would be a good fit. https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/us/

Yep, definitely keen for that! But in the meantime, the "Use a Track Template to Rebuild The Project" technique works fairly well for now.

No, Save As will save a project. You want to Export the audio of that track as a WAV file. Alternatively, just rip the audio from the CD using a dedicated audio app and save that to a Reference Track Library folder that you can just drag into any project you want.

Mix it down like any other WAV, and then drag that into any project you want to use it for a reference.

Just clarifying for anyone reading this, there's a couple of things that aren't quite right in this post. First: Cakewalk and your PC is definitely able to use ASIO. What it's probably telling you is the ASIO driver you're trying to use is known to be problematic, likely the Realtek ASIO driver, which is known to be broken and will cause stutters and lockups. Do not use that driver at all. Second: ASIO4ALL is also known to be problematic and can interfere with proper ASIO drivers. This isn't a real driver at all, it's just a wrapper for native Windows WDM, which Cakewalk can use natively, so there's no real advantage of using ASIO4ALL in nearly every situation. Cakewalk will warn you it could be a problem, but won't prevent you from using it, but they recommend against it. You can only use one ASIO driver at once, so if you do have a professional interface with proper ASIO drivers, make sure you deselect all of the other devices in Preferences > Audio > Devices. It doesn't sound like you do, however, and you're likely running an internal sound chip like a Realtek. In this case, if your device doesn't have proper (ie: not wrapped virtual ASIO "drivers") manufacturer supplied drivers, use WASAPI - either Shared, or Exclusive.

Ahh yes of course, that would be TH2 Producer, not TH3 being that far back. I knew it was some TH(x) related thing. Glad you got it mostly sorted

Those FX Chains contain, well, a chain of FX, like it says on the tin. If any one of those effects aren't installed, or the wrong version of it it is installed, there's a chance you'll get wrong or no sounds. Usually it just bypasses that effect and you get everything else. I have a recollection of something to do with TH3 that is included in a lot of these chains that have issues with controls not being assigned properly, which could cause silence. Maybe you could try extracting the plugins by right-clicking the FX Chain in your FX Bin and choosing Extract FX Chain Plugins. https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Mixing.34.html Some are locked for editing though, so this may not be possible, but it's worth a shot. But failing that, support is the way to go.

It sounds very much like there's something causing Play to freak out in this somehow. Capture a Crash Dump the next time it hangs and get that to a Baker: You'll get confirmation of what's going on rather than us regular users taking guesses at it. The other thing I can suggest, if you're open to it, is to send the project (minus any audio if there is any) to one of us to see if it opens. I'm not sure how many of us have Play but seeing as you tried that on your laptop and that doesn't have Play installed and it still froze, it'll be an interesting exercise to see if it does that for other people, and if not, what are the common elements between our systems and yours. I'll be happy to have a look if you PM me. Other than that, it's really hard to say what's going on here. That core spike you're seeing could easily be just from the Play usage alone, so I'm not sure we could point to that as anything conclusive.

Bonus tips: Folders and sub-folders - project organisation is the key to getting around a monster project with heaps of tracks and sections. The more I can fold away, the better. Browser > Notes - I have my main control room monitor where I do most of my work and I mirror a screen out to my live room where I do live instruments and vocal takes. I'll usually have lyrics in the Notes view so I can see the track view as its recording, and still have lyrics up in font of me, rather than needing any other app or reading from a page.

For me, aside from keyboard shortcuts for a lot of stuff, there's 2 main things: Track Templates - who wants to go through the boring grunt work in setting up basic track and bus structures every time? I have ones for quickly demo'ing material, for adding multi-out synth drums, setting up for a live kit, for vocal takes and choirs... you name it. All of my effects and routing get dropped in, in one go. That's not to say that I'll use the same settings on each project, but this is a great starting point that saves me a lot of time later. I tend to prefer Track Templates over Project Templates just because I might be half way though a quick demo and go "you know, this is coming along great, let's make this into something" and it's a breeze to just import all of my structures and move tracks into them. FX Chain Presets - these are great. Much like Track Templates, a lot of time they're for saving me time. I'll have a chain of my favourite guitar or vocal processing effects on there, a mastering chain, sometimes some nutty routing using Blue Cat's Patchwork plugin... heaps of uses. And you can assign controls to them as well, so rather than digging through each effect for a parameter, you can just automate the main FX Chain controls instead. The more things I can do to save me doing boring set up work, the better.

Man, that is the WORST. You're doing everything right but nothing makes sense... and then you find out later you were right all along but it was actually something entirely unrelated making it fail. Been there. 😒 But yeah, it sounded like it was some connection issue coming out of the pedal. Glad you got it sorted 🙂

If you mean the numpad keys, perhaps your NumLock has been turned off?