jkoseattle

Not that, I watch the shuttle move normally during playback but NOT when trying to record.

I'm not sure what you mean by "showing playback". If you mean the volume meters are active, I can tell you they are not. If the global mute or solo buttons are activated, wouldn't that light them up? But if perhaps the issue is that one is active but not lit up, which I will check. Pretty low confidence though, because I probably already did so at some point.

I'm at the very last step of this project. Two little changes left, then time to export tracks to audio files. Went in to make these last couple changes, and suddenly I get no audio from the project at all. Other projects will work, (at least a new Midi-only one did). I checked obvious suspects, like soloed tracks, audio output issues, all that. This project contains both midi and audio, and neither type plays. I can play and the shuttle moves, but if I try to record, the shuttle does not move at all. Again, all this works fine in a new project. So it's not an OS or audio driver issue. Even if there is some hidden soloed track that just isn't showing up as solo'ed, you'd think soloing another track would allow it to chime in. But I can't make any sort of peep out of this project whatsoever. This means that attempting to record audio does not even cause the meters to light up, though the audio is clearly audible from the mic through to the speakers. Everything in the Preferences dialog looks completely normal for both Midi and Audio, yet neither is working.. Lastly, I decided hell with it, I won't make those changes, and I'll just export tracks to wavs and be done with it. But doing this only generates useless 4 Kb files for each track. what's going on?? This has got to be something really stupid, right?

One more thing: I do have an external SSD drive available, but currently all my wavs are stored on the local internal HD. Would I gain anything by storing my 10 Gb on the SSD while working on this master project, or does that not make any difference?

I want to master my album now. It consists of 12 projects, about 30 tracks per project. 35 minutes total. Each project has been mixed independently to my liking. Most of the instruments are the same from project to project, but not all. This is an orchestral suite, not a collection of songs, and movements bleed into each other with the use of sound effects. Therefore, it is important the sonic profile matches across all movements, because it should mimic an orchestra playing the whole thing through. Here is my plan. Will this cause me problems or is this the right way to go? 1. Export Tracks through Entire Mix, as stereo wavs, being careful with my naming tags. I estimate the entire collection of all tracks across all movements to be around 10 Gb. 2. Create a new master audio-only CW project with tracks for each instrument I use. Will probably be about 40-50 tracks 3. Import each wav file into the master project, so that, for example, all the Oboe tracks across the length of the piece will occupy the Oboe track in my master project. 4. Line movements up properly and finesse the transitions between movements as needed. I will now have a single CW project consisting of 40-50 stereo audio tracks spanning 35 minutes. Because I exported Tracks Through Entire Mix, this master project will not have any effects whatsoever. At least not yet. 5. Go through the whole thing painstakingly ensuring consistency from movement to movement. I already know each individual movement is the way I want it, but I don't know if they sound consistent. I suspect there will be a few inconsistencies, but not a lot. When I find them, I will either go back to the source project and fix something, or I will cover for it using envelopes and effects as necessary in the master project. Is a 35-minute, 50 stereo audio track project going to give me processor or RAM problems? To repeat, effects in this master project should hopefully be pretty minimal, though I may make a lot of use of volume envelopes. Because most of every wav file is silence, just to keep myself sane, after importing I might remove the long silent parts of idle instruments to better visualize where things are happening. Advice most welcome!!

Hmm, both interesting answers. To both, as it turned out, I ended up deciding I didn't want two of the instruments in there musically, and as soon as I deleted those clips, it stopped always dropping out. Those two clips were tremolo strings and tremolo cellos. @reginaldStjohn When I moved the music out 10 bars, it still stops at the same place in the music, not the same place in the project. Copying a new version of the project to test would have been a good idea, and I'll remember that for next time. So on one hand I can understand that tremolos consist of a whole lot of fast notes, but I guess I assumed it was just a single piece of audio rather than each individual note in the tremolo being it's own thing. But apparently not. What's weird is that I suspected as much before I removed them, so I pre-loaded the entire patches, which added a Gb or 2 to my RAM footprint, but I had plenty of headroom so it was ok. But even pre-loading didn't help. Which I don't understand at all. Doesn't that pre-load all the audio into RAM so it doesn't have to fetch off the SSD? I guess I don't understand it. @Noel Borthwick It was always error code (1). Where do I look those up? The problem is not cumulative, because I was specifically just playing a short section when the dropouts were happening.

I get it. dropouts of the audio engine have to do with processing at runtime, so increasing buffer size, reducing effects, etc are all remedies to improve it. But how do I know which? This project has a couple dozen instruments with some effects on some of them. I keep getting dropouts in the same places. Specifically today, it's at a part where only about 5 instruments are even playing, yet this quiet little part drops out EVERY F___ING TIME. I try turning off effects - still drops out. Try pre-loading all instruments that are playing at that time. RAM usage goes way up, but dropouts still happen. I'm shooting in the dark here. I don't know WHY a dropout ever happens. It's like CW just says "Sorry, nope", and if I want it fixed, well that's my problem. But I have nothing to go on. 5 instruments playing FX disabled Buffer size maxed out Drops out every time. WHY??? Is there any way to narrow it down and find the culprit or do I just try stuff (and eventually give up and move on)?

Also, and I don't know if this is related, but lately CW just out and shuts down on me maybe a couple times a week. It's not crashing exactly, not freezing, no warning in terms of messaging or behavior, it just plain old shuts down completely. and I go into Task Manager and by Jove, it's really gone. I'm not doing anything unusual afaik. This last time, (the 8-9 Gb of RAM had dwindled down to 4-5 Gb, still a lot for this modest project), I had turned off FX and reduced the buffer size to reduce recording latency for a rhythmically challenging bit. So with the aforementioned dimensions of this project AND with FX disabled, CW still up and just closed on me.

Why is this project of 3 minutes in length with about 20 midi tracks and 3 audio tracks consuming 8-9 Gb of RAM, bringing my entire PC to a crawl? Obviously you can't know, but how can I go about troubleshooting this?

That was it, thank you!

In my current project, selecting a single clip on any track selects clips on all tracks. This is true regardless which clip I select, on which track. If a clip spans only a portion of my project, only the clips which exist within that span get selected. Dragging the one intended clip drags them all. I have closed and re-opened CW. This does not happen on other projects. This project was working fine yesterday. What's happening?

@msmcleod Thanks for all the detail. I followed along perfectly. After listening to everything I've got so far, I'm thinking the differences between projects are subtle enough that I can proceed assuming all the parts match and then just go in and fix where that obviously isn't the case. I'm thinking I might do something like your best of both worlds scenario.. Here's my plan: 1. In Project 1, export using Tracks or Track Through Entire Mix as my Source Category. 2. Import these tracks into a new master project 3. Repeat this step for all projects, appending the audio clips to the appropriate existing tracks. So for example, there will be a Bassoon track containing the clips from each movement. The whole project will then be 35 minutes and exclusively audio. 4. Right off the bat I'll be able to see visually clips that are different levels across movements, and that's where I can begin to investigate, re-mix, ignore, etc. Yeah?

@A Tolerable Quietude Thanks! So if I do it that way, aren't I asking for trouble having such a long single Cakewalk project? I've had projects maybe 10 minutes long and CW gets almost too sluggish to be able to work with. This piece is over 30. So what's the reality with that? Yesterday I had the idea of exporting everything as audio clips and making a big project of the whole piece that is only audio, and then listening carefully through everything to only find areas that sound obviously different and doing what I need to for those, but leaving the rest as-is. Can Cakewalk handle a 30+ minute project if it's only audio better than it can with all Midi tracks? Or was my prior sluggishness about something else besides the length of the piece?

I think I need to be using Track Templates for my project, and I'd like to hereby solicit tips and tricks that may make my life easier, as the stakes are high and I've never used them before. I have a 12-movement piece in which each movement is a separate CW project with mostly the same set of midi instruments. Each movement features (solos) different instruments, however. I mixed each movement separately as I would finish it. Now I have to put it all together and make each movement sound the same as all the others. Shoulda been thinking about this long ago, I know. But here I am now, so there we have it. I don't know how I should proceed here. Should I save each track as a track template in each movement, and then try to reconcile them somehow? That sounds like a grueling month of work. Maybe I should export audio for each movement in separate wavs for each track, and plug those into some sort of master project? That sounds more doable, but am I going to tear my hair out trying to work with a 35-minute CW project consisting of 50 audio tracks? And if I do that, what do I retain in my exported tracks, and what should I take out and re-insert in the master for all tracks? O woe, o woe... Shall I ne'er be free of this torment?

Every few days or so I will see that CW is starting to act slightly glitchy, in any of a hundred possible ways. Minor things, but noticeable, like all of a sudden the expression pedal response is off and on, or I can't right click somewhere or something. This is a sign for me to close and restart it, which usually does the trick. However, I've noticed (and now make sure I check for) after I've completely closed Cakewalk, I go into the Task Manager and see that there is still an instance of CW open and taking up a normal amount of RAM. I simply End Task and all's well. Does anyone know why this happens? Are there really suddenly two instances running sometimes?

I am working on an orchestral piece which will be about 30 minutes and consist of 8-10 movements, each its own Cakewalk project. Most of the movements have about 25 CW tracks, plus a handful of sound effect audio tracks as well. It's mostly the same ensemble every project, but maybe about 80% overlap. Most of the movements fade into each other, with sound effects bridging between them and sometimes ostinato things. I am responsible for the entire finished product. I've already decided not to spend a lot of time mixing and EQing and everything because it would be slightly different for each project. I've not used track templates before, and I think it's too late for me to learn it at this point (deadlines). So each project, when finished, has a decent but not final mix close enough for demo and reference. When I'm done, however, I am going to want all the instruments to sound consistent from movement to movement. So my plan has been to disable all the effects (but leave things like expression, modulation, and volume envelopes) and export each project so that every track is a separate file. Then I will create a new project and import all my audio stems into a big-***** 30 minute audio-only project. This project will have all the effects for each instrument and I can work on the entire piece as one thing. It's 30 minutes and dozens of tracks, but they're all audio, so I'm thinking that might not take CW to its knees. Yes? No? Anyway, I don't know that to be true, so I'm asking here well ahead of time how I should plan on doing this?

Well, the stuttering seemed to clear itself up for a week or so, but it's back again big time. At this point I just don't have anything else I can think of to try. And the thing is, I DON'T CARE! I am willing to just pay someone to make my setup work as well as I'd like it to. I don't want to waste any more time or anxiety trying to figure this thing out, because in reality, once it's fixed, I'm going to forget all about what caused and remedied the problem. Then next year it will crop up again and I'm back to square one. How on Earth can I find someone to just "take care of this" for me? PC repair places don't deal with Midi setups, and music equipment people don't go in and mess with Windows. Out there somewhere there must be someone who can just sit down and fix it.

I know all about the selection trap, and have made sure that's not the problem. I thought for a while maybe I was just not being careful about which keys I was hitting, so I'm watching out for that. Also, thanks a bunch for the 'Go To From' shortcut. It was already set up by me at some point in the past looks like, and now I'm using it thanks to you, saving me some small but frequent hassle, so thank you!

This has only started happening to me the last few months. It's weird. I'm in PRV and have decided that a certain passage should be in the celeste instead of the french horn. So here is my process. It's fast IRL, but I will explain in detail here for completeness sake. (Let me know if there's better way.) 1. In PRV, select the passage I want to move 2. Set loop times to match selection (Ctrl-Shift S) 3. Move shuttle to the start of the loop, which ensures it is at the exact starting point of the passage I'm moving. 4. With the passage still selected, hit Ctrl-X 5. Go to the target track 6. Hit Ctrl-V. Because the shuttle was at the exact start of the passage and I did not move it when copy-pasting, it appears in the exact same spot in time. Most of the time this works fine. In fact, until a few months ago it always worked fine. But now quite often the notes simply don't paste at all. And yes, I've tried making sure I had the right tracks selected and everything. Just nothing. One time when I did this, the notes did appear in the target track but way later in the piece, although I only saw that once. Usually when this problem occurs just nothing pastes at all. What's going on?

Thank you for all that! I tried a lot of things, but nothing worked until you mentioned that Audacity doesn't use ASIO drivers, so I installed Gold Wave and the stuttering is gone. Spotify still stutters, but less of a problem. Thanks again!

Thanks for the suggestion. But well, that's not it. Everything matched at 44.1K, but I switched both CW and Audacity to 48K and restarted them both. CW still plays fine, Audacity stutters. It's a very regular stutter, about 120bpm, not random like when audio playback cuts out in CW. And I can tell the audio is actually pausing, and not merely going mute, because the tempo sounds a tad slower when it stutters.

I should probably understand why this is inherently, but, well, I don't. Shame hereby acknowledged. Whenever I have CW open, (which is almost always), any other application playing audio stutters annoyingly about twice per second. This includes Audacity, Spotify, WMP, etc. , although things like Prime Video are fine. My audio is going to the Focusrite 2+2 via ASIO drivers. Why is this happening?

I habitually export audio from a work in progress so that I can listen away from the workstation. Sometimes when exporting audio, CW will only mix down a single track. I've had this happen before and discovered I only had that track selected, or it was solo'ed or something. But lately it will do this when I'm POSITIVE that isn't the case. I will see CW select everything I want exported, so everything looks good, and playing back in CW works fine, but then I just get one track in the mp3. I'll do it again and it will work fine. Anyone experience this?

Buffer size is slid all the way over to safe, as you're right I don't need real-time recording snappiness at this stage. And still it's bad. I've learned that disabling FX doesn't save me that much, I'm gathering it's the automation because I'm using a lot more expression pedal on these tracks. For the official record, when I say "tracks with roughly the same effects on them" I'm referring mostly to EQ, but as I said, I don't think the FX is the problem as much. My compositions long to be sparse, but this one sure ain't. https://drive.google.com/file/d/180povCzKllLuW_yKcdDX7mldcaVfg1Cw/view?usp=sharing

A freeze of a single track takes 30-45 seconds apiece. I'm gathering from the responses here that automation is the big resource hog. Also, disabling FX isn't proving to save me that much.