JonD

Unless money is no object, you really should mention your budget, otherwise you'll just get pages of everyone listing what interface they use. Personally, I'd recommend anything by Steinberg. Not surprisingly, their drivers and build-quality are top-notch as they've got big bucks behind their R&D (Yamaha).

Basically, off the shelf PCs are notorious for having a ton of crap installed that take up valuable resources on a PC running a DAW. The very first thing ANY new PC owner/DAW user needs to do is find a good guide on optimizing-tweaking your PC for DAW use. The first step almost always is removing all the crap installed by the manufacturer. That step alone solves probably half of the performance issues. Kudos to OP for doing this! It's incredibly frustrating when we see CbB users get a new PC and upon experiencing problems, do NO research or troubleshooting, and immediately come on here complaining that there's something wrong with CbB.

Why mix down to 16-bit? The only reason I can think of is if you make CDs, along with mp3. My understanding is best practice (For audio intended for streaming services) is to "stay at top bit depth until the end". So that's what I've done -- 24 bit all the way through mixdown. Not criticizing, as there's no right or wrong here. Just curious.

I'd disable AV and run latencymon again...

Who promised you that it would or should be user-friendly? No other DAW this feature-rich is user-friendly either. If someone installed an old rotary phone in your home, and told you you could use that to make phone calls -- or you could have a brand new iPhone 15 with a gazillion features, which would you choose? If you chose the iPhone, would you expect to know every available feature right out of the box? Or would you take the time to learn it? I'm guessing the latter.... So why would you have a different attitude about a complex piece of software?

Since the problem is clearly not universal, it's hard to know what to troubleshoot. Maybe the download was corrupt? Did you reboot your system afterward? As long as you can rollback (in case something goes wrong), maybe try the update again?

Any chance your file association was recently changed for .MID files? When you double click on a MID file what program opens the file? Also, check the BIOS settings and disable the nVidia audio there as well.

Heard good things about this freebie: https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2020/07/14/chow-tape-model/

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but you may be interested... Amplesound provides the MIDI files for all of their demo songs. You'll have to go through them and extract/edit the parts you want, but this is a treasure trove for those who aren't skilled keyboard players or who have trouble creating realistic virtual guitar parts. Log into your Amplesound account and you'll find them in the Downloads section.

Maybe a corrupt installer file? Do you have another backup source for the files? Also, wouldn't hurt to try "Run as Administrator".

Oscar, you've only mentioned the nVideo onboard sound (from your video card), but what about the one on your motherboard? That one would certainly be worth testing too, with all the various driver types. Some people manage to get decent performance from their generic/realtek onboard sound.

If everything on your iLok works except PCM effects, have you tried to refresh/activate/deactivate them individually in the ILok License Manager? Failing that, how about reinstalling PCM Effects? Also, I don't know what you mean by "It not iLok because it works on Samplitude" when earlier you mention the error message in Samplitude.

Looks like you have Live Synth Pro installed. If it's working correctly, can't you use that as your soundfont player?

Once you unzip the download file, it's a DLL file. No installer needed. In Cakewalk, go to Preferences- VST Settings - VST Scan paths to find your VST folders (Where your VST files are located). Just copy the virgin choir dll file to a VST folder and restart Cakewalk. It should recognize it after that.

Is Bandlab considered social media? Okay, you got me, lol! But I only use it to install Cakewalk.

Ken, I'm a happy Cakewalk by Bandlab user, and don't have any social media accounts. NONE. Bandlab products require an installer that downloads/installs the programs. That's it. Nothing to do with social media. Many audio software developers have similar installers/program managers (Steinberg, Native Instruments, Toontrack, XLN Audio, Izotope, Waves, just to name a few).

So you DIDN'T try running the Toontrack Product Manager again to make sure EZD is still properly installed? You need to do this first. None of the other fixes will do anything if the installation isn't there or has gotten corrupted.

This video covers importing a MIDI file into Cakewalk and using TTS1 (a soft synth) to create an audio file, IOW the middle portion of what you are asking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY5kh6geRZo You will need to find a tutorial on how to create a MIDI file from MuseScore, then follow the vid above and substitute EW Hollywood Orch for TTS1. Hope this will at least get you started.

So this is a realtek (onboard) sound card? These rarely come with decent ASIO drivers (when they do at all). Solid audio drivers are CRUCIAL for DAW use, regardless of how powerful your system may be. If you haven't already, try the free ASIO4ALL drivers. These are sort of a last resort and can sometimes work well with onboard sound cards when all else fails. http://www.asio4all.org/

It does install on your PC. It is perfectly safe, and will identify the processes by rank of highest latencies and also indicate hard pagefaults. In most cases it will also find the drivers and processes responsible for executing them. Bottom line, it highlights the processes on your system that could be causing your issues. You mentioned that DAW optimization guide, but I'm not clear on if you did the tweaks. Some of them are rather crucial (like adjusting power/USB management) regardless of whether or not it's a dedicated DAW. IOW, you should go ahead do the tweaks. They won't negatively impact hurt your other tasks.

Have you run latencymon to determine what process(es) might be causing the dropouts? https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon How about Win 10 system tweaks for DAW use? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FAHqrphv9k

Disabling the antivirus is advisable when you're seeing strange glitches or your downloads are corrupt. I'd leave AV on when extracting (I don't recall it ever creating a problem, but of course, if the extracting bombs, just disable AV and try again). IIRC, you have to download all five parts before extracting since they are essentially one package. Do this: - DL all five parts. - Extract Part 1. It will unzip all of them.

Yep, five parts. It's been awhile since I downloaded it, but I don't remember any problems. Of course, as always, a successful download depends on your ISP connection and system. Assuming you have a reasonably fast ISP connection, I'd just let it do it's thing and the test is extracting the compressed parts. If it goes well, you're golden. If it gives you errors, then the download is likely corrupt. If that happens, I'd disable any bg processes (ie. anti-virus) and try again.

There are a number of excellent nylon guitar VST libraries out there. I'd be surprised if the best of them didn't do hammer ons/offs... Of course, you should evaluate them for yourself. Some of my fave devs: https://indiginus.com/Renaxxance.html https://www.orangetreesamples.com/products/evolution-modern-nylon https://www.amplesound.net/en/pro-pd.asp?id=8 https://www.ilyaefimov.com/products/acoustic-guitars/nylon-guitar.html#review

A few tips: - Try switching to a different USB port. - If there are dedicated drivers, do a reinstall. - The "Nuclear Option": I haven't seen this issue in a while, but on occasion USB devices would stop working and the only fix was clearing out USB traces from the registry with a utility like USB Oblivion. Then re-attach the USB device and have it "recognized" by Windows again. Of course after doing this you'll need to reinstall all of your USB devices.