Inexplicable behavior is breaking projects

[sean72]

A few days ago I made a post about creating a project in Cakewalk and how the audio engine crashed irrecoverably. I wiped out all audio, MIDI and plug-ins from the project and it still refused to initiate the audio engine. It wouldn't play back even one audio track or MIDI track without the engine crashing no matter what the buffer size was. The solution was to abandon the project and start again. I was also not the only person to experience this behavior according to a reply in that thread. 

So abandon the project I did and I started over with a new test track, slowly inserting plug-ins and audio tracks just to make sure the engine wasn't going to crash on me again. To my delight, it did not crash. So being optimistic I spent the last day creating a custom project template.

After I had the project template built I dragged a MIDI drum track in and set it to play back through Superior Drummer 3. I noticed that the track level meters would stay lit up, frozen in position when the track was stopped and no audio was going through it.

The level meters stayed lit up through the entire audio output chain, from track to bus, to master to hardware out meter, all of them stayed lit up. It was also lighting up the MIDI track levels as if it were an audio track (not sure if that part is normal or not?) The only tracks in the project are one MIDI drum track and one audio track with Superior Drummer 3 inserted into the FX bin. So there wouldn't be any audio signal passed through when the playback was stopped.. but the level meters stayed lit up anyway.

This problem persisted even after I deleted the superior drummer instance and re-inserted it, and deleted the MIDI track and re-inserted it, and shut the program down and re-launched it... and cycled the audio interface power.

So I went back to the blank project template I had created and re-inserted the MIDI track and saved it again under a new name. This time the level meters did not stay lit up when the track was stopped, which is how it's supposed to be.

So now I have two projects with identical content, the only difference is the project name. One works correctly and one doesn't. The one that doesn't work correctly is irrecoverable, as if some hidden value is being saved within the project data that I can't change from the user interface. The only option I have to resume normal program behavior is to abandon that buggy save and move on with another one.

Ordinarily I'd shrug and move on but coupled with the problems I had earlier this week I am losing confidence in this platform and am afraid at some point I will have a large project with weeks worth of time invested and the program will pull some random glitch and destroy it. I've never seen nor heard of behavior like this before as the issues are not repeatable even on the same hardware. I did save both files so Cakewalk can take a look if they want. Maybe they can find some strange write-state being saved that is beyond the reach of the end user?

In the grand scheme of things the level meters staying pegged when stopped is nothing, but it's indicative of a larger problem when projects can just break in random ways. If a project gets too large and I miss something, even if I am interleaving saves with a double-save strategy, who knows what I might miss that will come back to bite me later. I REALLY don't want to have to take a broken project in the future and export every audio and MIDI track and re-import all of them into a new project and then go back and re-insert dozens of plug-ins and duplicate all of the settings (if I could even remember them).

This is a nightmare, LOL it really is. I just want to get back to making music and I've spent the last week troubleshooting this program.

Edited January 13, 2023 by sean72

[57Gregy]

6 hours ago, sean72 said:

one audio track with Superior Drummer 3 inserted into the FX bin

Have you tried using the Insert menu at the top instead of putting it in the effects bin? That's so 2002.

[Glenn Stanton]

usually i would put the VI into the synth rack so i can use it across several MIDI or audio tracks

Edited January 13, 2023 by Glenn Stanton

[Byron Dickens]

SD3 is an instrument, not an effect.

7 hours ago, sean72 said:

This is a nightmare, LOL it really is. I just want to get back to making music and I've spent the last week troubleshooting this program.

Surely the documentation would have helped with that instead of just stabbing around in the dark.

https://bandlab.github.io/cakewalk/docs/Cakewalk Reference Guide.pdf

[David Baay]

2 hours ago, 57Gregy said:

Have you tried using the Insert menu at the top instead of putting it in the effects bin? That's so 2002.

This could definitely be the root of the problem. Inserting instuments in the FX bins is supported for backward compatibility with legacy projects that used this configuration, but is definitely not the preferred routing and has some longstanding issues with stuck meters and stuck notes.

[sean72]

4 hours ago, David Baay said:

This could definitely be the root of the problem. Inserting instuments in the FX bins is supported for backward compatibility with legacy projects that used this configuration, but is definitely not the preferred routing and has some longstanding issues with stuck meters and stuck notes.

Interesting I did not know that was a problem with these latest versions of code, I will try to adapt to using the synth rack instead and see if it makes any difference.

[sean72]

5 hours ago, Byron Dickens said:

SD3 is an instrument, not an effect.

Surely the documentation would have helped with that instead of just stabbing around in the dark.

https://bandlab.github.io/cakewalk/docs/Cakewalk Reference Guide.pdf

Hey, thanks for the link. As for the stabbing around in the dark comment, I've been using Sonar since around version 5 so I am hardly a novice. I've also been using Toontrack drums since the original Drumkit From Hell nearly 20 years ago. My problems have not been with basic functionality they have been with errors like a crashed audio engine and now this, where I have two identical projects where one works properly and one doesn't. I know SD3 is an instrument but you can load it and others like EW Orchestra, Omnisphere or whatever by inserting them as a soft synth into the FX bin of an audio track.

You can also point as many MIDI tracks to that soft synth instance as you like. Doing it that way or inserting on the synth rack are basically two methods of accomplishing the same thing. Both are just routing MIDI data to the plug-in to fetch audio samples and play them back. There are many different ways to accomplish the same things in Sonar/Cakewalk. Sorry if I am taking that comment as a slight, I do appreciate you linking the manual and assuming I haven't read it already though. 🙂 

I will try to adapt to using the soft synth rack and see if that makes any difference.

Edited January 14, 2023 by sean72

[Byron Dickens]

Well, when you do things in non-standard ways it should not come as a surprise to you when you get non-standard results.

[sean72]

"Well, when you do things in non-standard ways it should not come as a surprise to you when you get non-standard results."

It wasn't non-standard when I started making music.

 

I'd like to thank everyone for their help, I inserted SD3 as a soft synth and the problem went away. Nonetheless, it only glitched on one of two identical projects so it's still a hit or miss thing.

Thank you!