Lord Tim

OK, so to make sure I understand correctly: You have outputs 5/6 going to your chorus pedal input jack. This is set up via the Send part on the External Insert plugin, where it's basically taking the sound of the track and sending its signal to output 5/6 on your interface, which you've connected to your pedal. Understood. From the chorus pedal output jack, which input are you connected back to on your interface? If you've plugged into input 3, that's what you need to set your Return on the External Insert plugin to be. Let's ignore arming tracks and recording for now, but if it's set up like this, are you seeing any signal?

Yeah, that's why I'm thinking it's more than just a driver issue at play here. Possibly one of those other rogue entries in the Registry causing it, but more likely something is broken in the system. If you've done a clean install of Cakewalk, we can practically rule that out as the root cause of it (anything is possible of course, but it's unlikely at this stage) so I'd be looking at plugins or environment next.

FlexASIO is the first thing I would have eliminated since it's not a real driver, and switched to WASAPI mode but it sounds like something else is at play here. Your machine is a little underpowered for such a big mix but it shouldn't cause crashes at all. Those buffer sizes are HUGE and you shouldn't ever need to pump it up that high at all, I'd recommend something lower regardless of dropouts. Let's first clean out the old ASIO registry keys for a start: Open the Registry Editor, then first save a backup by doing File > Export, and choose ALL as the option. Then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ASIO and delete all of the entries inside that key. This will bork any ASIO devices on your system at this point, so you'll need to reinstall your Focusrite ones if you plan to use that interface, Quite a few people here run Focusrite interfaces (myself included) and their drivers are solid, so I'd suggest that first. After all of the drivers are back in, start up Cakewalk and see what it does. You'll likely need to go in and choose the correct driver model, your Focusrite timing masters, which device, etc. If it works, great. If not, let's do a system integrity scan. Start a CMD prompt as Administrator and type this: DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth This will scan for corrupted files. It'll take a while though. Then type this: sfc /scannow If these both complete successfully, reboot and try to launch Cakewalk again. If it crashes then, try opening up in Safe Mode by starting Cakewalk and holding down shift when you load your project. Say NO to loading each plugin, and see if it plays then (don't save over your project while in this state though!). If it still crashes with no plugins loaded, that's not great. Try updating your Microsoft Redistributables next: The last thing I'd recommend if you're entirely out of options is to get a crash dump over to the Bakers so they can look into what could be causing it. Info here: Good luck, let us know if any of these things worked

It's super easy in Cakewalk too, but hard in any DAW if you don't know how to do it the first time.

One other slightly out-there suggestion is, what interface are you using and are you doing any specific routing for your headphone sends? I have outputs 1/2 on my interface going to my studio monitors and outputs 3/4 going to a headphone send, and then I set up various sends to go to each place, so I have a unique mix for what I want to hear when I'm tracking vocals, etc. I've found on occasion that I have dust in my mixing desk and I get weird crosstalk between channels so I'll get some of the headphone send going to my studio mains, etc. Could there be something funky going on with your hardware at all? Have you checked to see if your interface's mixer application isn't sending somewhere odd? It sounds a bit unlikely going by your descriptions so far, but it's worth a thought.

OK, let's check to see if there's anything wacky going on (and apologies if you've tried this already or it sounds like common sense, but sometimes it's easy to miss stuff when a project has gone rogue on you): First, go to Tracks > Track Manager and have a look in there to see if there's anything hidden. Next, make sure you're seeing every control in the Track View by changing the Track Control Manager dropdown menu (the one that's under where it says Region FX) to "All" and then have a look through your tracks to see if you have any sends set up anywhere odd, including sends on any busses. Next (and it's been mentioned here, but double check anyway), see if any tracks are set to PRE rather than POST, and set them to POST if so. Next, check your track I/Os. I've had a few occasions where I've had an output of some track going to an incorrect bus or aux track. So rather than, say, a guitar master bus having the input as "GUITARS - S" it's actually getting the send from the reverb instead, so you're hearing a big wash instead of the actual guitar master. The same for outputs - check to see if everything is going to your masters rather than sending directly to the reverb bus. If this all looks good and there's nothing going on with dim/exclusive solo, then it could be some tangle somewhere in your project. Delete the Reverb bus entirely and make a new one, and insert a new Reverb plugin on there (try something other than Breverb first just to rule that out), and then make sure its output is going to your master, and any tracks you need to feed to it have their sends set up. At this point, it should all be working. If so, save it, then save it under a new name so you have a baseline backup for testing. Then delete that other reverb plugin and put Breverb back in and see if it plays nice. Projects do get tangled sometimes, especially with lots of sends and patch points, etc. I personally haven't come across this issue, but it's certainly possible to happen. Good luck!

Man, I had the WORST time using Bonjour/RPT. When it actually connected, it was fantastic and worked great, but even with a static IP assigned, I had no end of trouble some days just getting it to work, which is a real buzz-killer when you're about to head out to the live room to do a vocal take and then spend 20 minutes being computer tech instead. My "remote control" now is a long USB and HDMI cable through the studio wall connected to an external monitor and keyboard. Works every time! But yeah, when that above setup worked, it was really good and really intuitive - definitely worth giving it a shot.

It really comes down to choosing the right inputs on a multi in/out card. It's all fairly straightforward once you have it down once. Can you explain how you have it set up now? What outs you're sending to, what ins it's coming back on, and how you have your track set up? That'll give us a place to start to help you untangle it.

For anyone wondering why ASIO4ALL is a really bad idea, despite some people suggesting to use it: 1: It's suggested even by the Cakewalk Devs themselves to not use it because it can interfere with correct drivers, and Cakewalk even shows you a warning that this could be a problem if you intend to use it anyway 2: It was invented to fill a gap where if you had an interface that didn't have manufacturer supplied ASIO drivers and your DAW needed ASIO to achieve low latency performance, and it did this by wrapping a native Windows WDM driver to look like an ASIO driver. There's absolutely no performance gain over WDM at all, and in Cakewalk's case, it's entirely unnecessary because it can use WDM directly rather than going through a wrapper, unlike some other DAWs. These days, it's best to use WASAPI Shared or WASAPI Exclusive instead of any pretend ASIO "drivers" like ASIO4ALL. To answer the actual question, if you're typically not getting high latency otherwise, there's likely some effect on the track or in the chain that's introducing latency. Typically, it'll be something like a Linear Phase EQ, limiter with a look-ahead option or some kind of convolution reverb. Have a look through your project and see which effects are running in there, especially looking for one of the above types. There's nothing wrong with using those effects, of course, but they're not for tracking - use them only for mixdown.

Additionally, absolutely do not use the Realtek ASIO driver for anything. It's actually broken and will cause all kinds of issues. If you must use the Realtek, switch to WASAPI mode. But yes, as mentioned, ASIO only allows one driver at a time, so you have to deselect any other ASIO drivers to enable to one you want to use.

This sounds something like CWP 2.x to me, back before audio recording there was "audio events" where you could insert audio clips into tracks. That was 1993 or so. That would explain the ambiguous track type for sure. So actually pre-dating CWPA by a few years.

I mean, if your audio is coming from some external instrument, how do you think it'll get into your DAW? It's got to either be played back live (and you make sure that instrument is connected every time you want to mix down the song), or you arm a track and record the audio from that instrument like any other source. I can't see how any other DAW would do that any different.

By the sounds of things, Randy had those files referenced in a folder where the project knows where to look, so it's more or less like how we do things now with the CWP not containing audio, but references to it. But for whatever reason, CbB can't resolve the links to those audio tracks, most likely due to a tangle with the older track type that these things were saved as. Mark's suggestion is a good one, so long as there's no tempo information in the file (which you can work around by doing a couple of preliminary saves as .MID to preserve the tempo changes). The only other thing I can think of is maybe rolling up a Virtual Machine, running Win 9x, and installing CWPA 6+ on there and seeing if that will open it correctly, and then doing a track by track audio export. That way you only need to import in a few track sized clips rather than a million little fragments, and then split them later once they're running in CbB.

Yeah, this is a tough one because this pre-dates SONAR and, if I remember right, audio clips were handled very differently in CWPA - there was no slip editing for a start, they were just kind of objects inserted on the timeline initially, and then when audio recording eventually came in, they were kind of a monolith thing that needed the audio editor view to be destructively edited. If you saved a copy of the project as a CWP, then opened up both the WRK and CWP projects, could you select all of the audio in the WRK file, then go to the CWP and paste them into a new audio track, perhaps? I think the fact that they're not showing up as WAVs in the WRK is a big thing though. Can any other old-timers remember if we had OMF back in the day, or did that come in with SONAR? That might be an option to export an OMF if it's available and see if that works. Another thing that might work is to save the WRK as a BUN and see if that includes any audio when it's opened back up. Seems unlikely, but worth a shot. Ignore this, I missed that you tried that. I guess, other than that, is to do what you've just done, and use the blank clips as guides as to where to drop the re-imported files manually.

If you save the project as a CWP, then insert in a new audio track and then drag the clips from the old MIDI track to this newly inserted audio track, does it work after saving and reopening the CWP?

Please don't take any replies that anyone has said in any of your threads as any one of us being annoyed with you (I guess I can't speak for all of us, but that's the general sentiment around here) - we just want to make sure you're getting the right advice, and sometimes it's at odds with info that people find on the internet, or how some new users assume it should work. There's a lot of questions about the same things (interfaces, ASIO, etc. especially) and I think sometimes we can all be a little short with our replies, but I'm sure there's a genuine intention to help out. I think if there's anything that's annoying from some posters over the years is when they've been given solid advice from a lot of the smarter people on the forum, and they choose to ignore it, and then come back later complaining about problems that could have been resolved if they'd just followed the advice. I know myself I've learned so much from the very knowledgeable and experienced users on this forum, and I've definitely learned to try their advice first before wasting anyone's time (including mine) with crazy alternatives. I'd rather just get on with making music rather than playing amateur computer technician!

It won't be a Cakewalk update issue too, since there's been no changes since November, so can you think of anything you've gotten since then? Possibly a Windows update that's changed a power setting or something? You might want to try renaming your aud.ini file to aud.old (make sure Cakewalk is closed when you do this) and have it rebuilt itself to see if something hasn't gotten corrupted somehow. You'll find that at: %appdata%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core (paste that into Windows File Explorer and it'll take you to the right directory)

Not sure what's actually selected in the project entirely, but if you click the blue arrow < in the Sources category, that'll open up another pane where you can see checkmarks in everything that's being included in the export. If anything's missing, check them there. Obviously if this works, that's great, but we should then go back and work out why some stuff you think you should be exporting isn't there so you don't need to do this step. EDIT: Just a thought - are those MIDI tracks that aren't working? Don't forget, you also need to select their synth audio tracks to get them to export as well, if they're not Simple Instrument Tracks. Just exporting the MIDI tracks does nothing without the corresponding audio tracks that are playing the instrument output.

I mean either way works, really. I personally never really record any drum stuff with EQ or compression unless there's a good reason to do so, and then I process later. There's pros and cons to that - if you do it on the way in, you're committed to the sound, and anything you record after that will build on that sound, but you're locked into your decisions then, good or bad. On the other hand, having endless choices later can mean endless points where you get caught up in the minutiae rather than actually getting on with the damn job! My boss (me) is a jerk but thankfully he keeps me on track when I want to start fiddling around with effects rather than actually mixing, so the second scenario works for me.

I like how the rest of us give dinky suggestions and Glenn comes in with fully rendered tech drawings and acoustic measurements! 😂

I do think a bad audio driver can affect stuff to a degree too. I've had wildly different levels of performance from interface to interface - it's night and day between my Scarlett 18i20 and my old TASCAM 16x08 as far as clicks, pops and low latency goes.

Yeah, it closes the gap when you remove sections (or shifts things along if you insert or move something too). In this case, there was some rogue data there between where you wanted the song to end and where Cakewalk assumed the end was, so you've essentially just closed the deleted hole between both of those places.

On the plus side, if you pick up the right station you could have a free backing track to jam over.

What astounds me so often (and I'm not specifically referring to the OP here, but just in general) the amount of people who go "My system is a i9-13900K, 128GB RAM, 48PB of fast SSD RAID storage, powered by a small nuclear reactor, will this $12 USB card with mini jack connectors I found on Ali Express be good enough to record?" One of the most important parts of a DAW is a decent audio interface with good drivers. You could be plugged into a Borg Cube with a crap interface and still get pops and clicks (and likely assimilated - be warned!)

^^ agree with this. Also, paging @Glenn Stanton to the thread for professional advice.