Robert Bone

Thanks, that's what I figured, other than blindly cutting levels out of each component in the effects chain......

Hi - not a guitar player. How can I measure input gain and output volume of each effect within a given preset of either TH3 or Guitar Rig 5 Pro? A friend sent me a project with 2 lead tracks of guitar, that each add about 20 dB to the signal in each track, (one has TH3 and the other uses Guitar Rig 5 Pro), from boosting levels from several of the preset components going through the amp modeling software. I don't know enough about crafting guitar sounds to do anything other than just lop levels coming out of each component - so is there some kind of sensible approach to keeping things gain-neutral between those components? Thanks, A mostly keyboard player, Bob Bone

Can you please detail exactly what effects you have loaded into one of these projects, where you are experiencing the dropouts? Also: What is your Sample Rate for the project? What is your project's Driver Mode? What is your ASIO Buffer Size set to, for your interface? You can see it in Preferences, screen shot it below:

Is it possible you need to update your iLok License Manger app? I had fired up iLok last night, just as I routinely do every month, to check for updates, and at that time, their server was down for some sort of maintenance, so I fired it up just now, and it informs me that an update is available. Here is the screen shot of the message it displayed:

Hi - while we could delete your post - I think leaving it out there might help someone else, should they manage to do something similar, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of such "DOH!" posts, (I certainly have put forth a healthy trail of them, over the years), and a lot of times, when such a post appears, others (me too), frequently - and sheepishly - confess to having done that same thing, so I think it makes good sense to leave this out there. Kewl? Bob Bone

32-bit plugins are frequently crash-prone and otherwise funky, running in a 64-bit environment. Back when 64-bit computers were just starting to be switched to, there were just insane numbers of people crashing right and left, because many 32-bit plugins - specially the freeware ones, just crapped out - made worse by all the money people had invested in their armada of 32-bit plugins., J-Bridge (commercial bridging software about $20), helped a lot of people out, as it sometimes was able to keep some 32-bit plugins running, that just did not work using the free Bit-Bridge software that came with Sonar, but it was still a nightmare, for at least a year, if not longer, until folks got farther and farther away from using 32-bit plugins. There was always the option of installing and using a 32-bit Sonar when making projects where 32-bit plugins would have to be present, and I did that for a while, until I built up a large enough catalog of 64-bit plugins and could finally fully transition to that environment. Most folks ended up switching over to as many 64-bit plugins as possible, certainly for new projects, and reported crashes came way down in numbers. Most commercial plugins offered free 64-bit versions, which helped a bunch. Anyways (sorry for the blast from the past), if any of those old projects of yours still had a 32-bit version of CE in them, that could well explain crashes. Not sure why a new project, with a 64-bit CE, would crash, but maybe the reinstall managed to clean up some leftover 'stuff' in Registry entries, or something along those lines. VERY cool you are back in business. I am curious - do you happen to have any of the error messages from any of the crashes? I am just wondering what it might have been complaining about - I was a computer programmer, so that kind of stuff makes me intrigued. Thanks, Bob Bone

I had an M-Audio (aactually still have it), that suddenly started generating Pitch Bend events. After digging into it on the web, apparently some of the potentiometers (pots) and other electrical components, can go bad after a few years, and that can result in things like generated midi messages, and such. I went into the midi controller's settings, and turned off the Pitch Bend wheel altogether, and all was fine after that - but I did lose the Pitch Wheel for that controller. I would imagine unwanted events could be filtered out, as well - maybe that would help your situation, if indeed the messages are being generated by an external device, such as a midi controller. Bob Bone

If your laptop supports an actual 2.5 drive, a 500 GB SSD runs about $50-$100, and a 120 GB SSD can be had for as cheap as $20, and that would make life a lot more comfortable for you - to clone your existing drive to a new SSD, as certainly a drive as small as you have will give you nothing but headaches. Additionally - is there an additional partition on your boot drive? Lots of times, manufacturers of pre-built computers create a recovery partition that is an image of the laptop's boot drive as it existed when it left the factory. If that is no longer needed, like if you created a Windows Recovery DVD, for instance, you could recover Windows from that, you could consider deleting that recovery partition and reclaiming that space to extend your OS partition, which would add that space to what is available to you on the boot drive. Lastly, while some folks use the M-link junctin or connection or whatever it is called, to move folders while they still appear to everything as being at their original locations, I move my user folders (documents, pictures, videos, downloads, etc) to a different drive, by going into the Properties of each of those user folders, and using the Location tab to specify an alternate location, and that moves all of that stuff off of the boot drive, just like those M-links or whatever those are called. That reclaims a bunch of space. And, whenever possible, I specify a different drive for any plugin's content files, like sample libraries, or whatever, just to keep it off the boot drive. (edited - forgot to add something) - if you do look at picking up a larger boot drive - a standard 2.5" SATA III SSD, I suggest you look for those that have V-NAND technology, as opposed to regular NAND, TLC-NAND, or MLC-NAND, because while a bit more expensive than the other types, V-NAND technology wears better over time, and can last a lot longer than the other types - that being said, they all should last a while. Just a thought - others may have different opinions on this - it is what I tend to choose, when choices are available). Bob Bone

Here is a lnk to a similar issue from January, that was resolved: Bob Bone

There is a Kontakt setting under the Engine tab, that allows you to tell it how many CPU cores you have, it goes up to 16, though mine has 32, but it works fine set to 16. Anyways, it helps Kontakt split up the workload among the multiple cores - and may help folks performance wise with large Kontakt instances. I believe splitting things into multiple instances also splits work among the cores, but why not embrace both options? Give it a whirl, and see if performance is improved. Bob Bone

Could it be hiding in the Uncategorized category? If you find it there, you can change its category to Synth, and thereafter you will find it there. If the above is not the issue, check to see if the Cakewalk Plugin Manager shows it as a VSTi, to make sure the scanning of it didn't fail for some reason. Bob Bone

I forgot to add - for whatever reason, this issue is not occurring on my desktop or my laptop, and I am current with all maintenance, so perhaps it is indeed something to do with system-specific conditions, such as video drivers - ie perhas NVIDIA. My desktop has a high-end EVGA video card, Geforce RTX 2070 Super XC, and I cannot recall what graphics is in it, but for whatever reason, neither experiences these clicks/noises/dropouts at project open or close - perhaps that can help a little - hope so anyway, I am no expert with this. The Geforce card in the desktop says it is NVIDIA-compatible, but I think that is as close as it gets to NVIDIA. Bob Bone

In the meantime, perhaps cutting volume to any speakers or headphones, while opening or closing a project in CbB, might be worth doing, until some kind of solution is figured out.... Bob Bone

What error code?

BEAUTY! I will give it a whirl. I do have the Engine option, in Kontakt's settings, set to distribute its workload among 16 cores, which is the max the setting allows. My CPU is an AMD Ryzen 1950x Threadripper, which has 32 cores, so spreading workload also figures into it all, so looking forward to the outputs finally working right on the names shown as audio track Inputs in CbB. Bob Bone

Thanks - I will check this out, though every instance is almost certainly going to have different loaded instruments, so not sure how saving as the default would work, but I will find out when I get a chance to test it all out. Bob Bone

I have experienced that for years and years, and for the past 10 years or so, I have just limited each Kontakt instance to having no more than 4-5 loaded instruments, and that way I don't trigger the weirdness. Perhaps there are others that can offer a solution - I have never been able to figure it out, so the above limiting approach works every time. I have so much memory on my computer that I have zero issues by running however many Kontakt instances I need.... Bob Bone

we have all had moments of DOH.

Just a thought - that parameter is described in the release notes as experimental, and potentially unstable.

I hope others know what svchost.exe hard page faults are caused by, as I am no guru on that. I also have 128 GB of memory, so just don't see those. There are some folks in the forum community that can help get you squared away. I will do some digging into this too, to try to help.

I again ask for latencymon's report on your system's latency analysis

What does latencymon report on your system's latency? Bob Bone

Yay! Can you please edit the initial post in the thread, and add something like 'Solved' to the subject line? Thanks, Bob Bone

Are you loading a VST 3 version of Falcon in your project? Maybe, try loading VST 2, and see if that makes a difference. Also, I am aware of some display issues if the Windows Scaling is set large enough, like when using a 4k screen resolution, folks may bump the Scaling up by as much as 200%. Bob Bone

Best wishes for success to you, regardless of the platform.