Audio engine problems

[sean72]

Hi all, this is my third most recent post along these lines. Every time I think I have things sorted a new problem comes up. Tonight I was setting up a simple blank project with some empty tracks and buses, to save it as a blank record template project for future use. I had inserted one instance of Superior Drummer 3 and several instances of Neural amp sims. Everything was going fine until I hit the play button and  the audio engine shut down. No audio was being passed through the amp sims, only audio was the MIDI track feeding Superior Drummer 3. Only thing I recall unusual is I was naming tracks I must have started typing in the wrong filed on a MIDI track because some dialog box came up which I was apparently typing into as I looked away. It seems after that when I tried to play the MID back the audio engine completely crashed.

 

I saved and closed Cakewalk, rebooted the audio interface and reloaded the project. Same problem, engine stalled. So I set the buffers to 1024, 2048, 4096, same problem audio engine dead. So I rebooted everything again and this time deleted every single amp sim and the Superior Drummer instance. Same thing,, total shutdown of the audio engine regardless of buffer size (and with no audio going through it and only a few blank tracks, why would it shut off anyway?)

 

So I reloaded the same project saved from an earlier state and it played the MIDI fine, even though it had about 8 amp sims loaded up, no problem CPU was never seemingly under stress, yet the one saved version of the project where the audio engine dropouts were happening every time remained broken. It would never play back again, while the same project saved at an earlier revision played back fine with buffers set to 128 (as low as I tried to go) and never dropped out or popped or stalled.

The machine is top spec all around (from about two years ago) with an AMD 5950x and the fastest best hardware available at the time all across the board, so I do not believe this is a hardware deficiency. OS is Windows 10 x64. Interface is Presonus Quantum 2626 Thunderbolt 3. I'm very perplexed I guess you could say as to why I am having so much misery migrating from Sonar 8.5 to the latest version of Cakewalk on much more powerful hardware. Just running into a lot of strange things so far.

Edited January 9, 2023 by sean72

[mark skinner]

 Delete the broken project and carry on .. This has happened to me a couple of times and not worth the effort to keep fighting it. Especially one with very little recording done. If it happens again take a close look at all your vst's and amp sims  I've found problematic projects always come back and bite you again later ..

[chris.r]

Wouldn't it be worth it to send the broken project to cakewalk support, since more people are affected with the engine hung?

[sean72]

Hey Mark, thanks for confirming I'm not the only one out there running into this. Could be disastrous if it happened to a mature project. I'd have to resort to carefully saving every project along the way and also making backup saves to make sure I had a safety net. Auto save would actually be more dangerous because the project could save in a broken state before I even realized what had happened.

I'd be happy to share what little there is of the project I created with Cakewalk, although as mentioned all plugins and soft synths were removed and the project still kills the audio engine every time it loads... I'm wondering if Cakewalk techs would even be able to recreate the problem on their end with different hardware? Might be able to uncover something at least. This should definitely be at the top of their list of bug fixes.

Now I'm seriously contemplating just switching DAWs outright because some of my projects are massive and take months to complete. If I ever lost one of those I'd probably have second thoughts about ever touching a DAW again or even picking up an instrument, LOL 😉

Edited January 9, 2023 by sean72

[Noel Borthwick]

The issue has nothing to do with the audio engine. Its very likely to be a plugin in your project leading to this. Not hardware or Cakewalk itself or even due to a corrupt project.
There isn't anything necessarily that we can "fix" without being able to reproduce whatever problem you are seeing or getting a dump file that shows the issue. If the app itself is not hung and you are getting silent audio, the most common cause is that one of your plugins has internally "crashed" and is producing silence or random floating point data. 

If you can reproduce the issue, use a process of elimination to remove plugins one by one till the project starts working again. 

[sean72]

Hi Noel, thanks for replying. 

I already did what you suggested as my first suspicion was that a plugin or soft synth was to blame. But as I mentiomed the engine was still crashing even with ALL plugins and soft synths deleted and the program and audio interface restarted. Also happened regardless if buffer size was seto to 128 or 4096 or anything in between. Once the file was broken there was no recovering it no matter what I did, 

I will take another look tonight to see if I can uncover anything else. It likely was a plugin conflict initially but it's a lingering effect that remains even after the offending plugins have been removed from the program, that's the strange part. 

Edited January 10, 2023 by sean72

[sean72]

OK I tried again tonight amd thr problem has not returmed. I was able to do a test run w 9 neural amp instances and 1 superior drummer 3 midi track(18GB kit all bleeds on) and no issues with latency or delayed start at 128 buffer size. Engine doesn't seem to he breaking a sweat. Engine load about 18% over 33% and all core meters are just barely dancing into the visible area of the level meters in the Performance widget. 

I don't know WTF happened with that other track last night but looks like I'm good for now. 

 

Thank you everyone, 

Edited January 10, 2023 by sean72

[David Baay]

You should let @Noel Borthwick take a look at the project that's still misbehaving with all plugins removed.