TASCAM 1608

[KRISSSY STRINGZ]

Good afternoon CW forum. 

Does anyone have a set of instructions on how to set up a Tascam 1608 digital interface using the latest iteration of CWBBL under Windows 10.  I have been trying for about 2 weeks off and on and simply can't get it working.  It's not a defective unit by the way as I've swapped it once.
 

I have never come across something so complicated to set up and would be very grateful for any help available.  I have attached a couple of screenshots of the kind of messages I keep getting. 

Thanks in advance

Chris S

cwbbl setup.pdf

[KRISSSY STRINGZ]

Thasks for your support. 

My PC does have form when it comes to rejecting usb devices.  It will not under any circumstances recognise a Boss BR800 8 track recorder / interface, though it worked fine for months.  

The tech guy from Boss couldn't get it to work either.  

As radical as it sounds,  I'm a hairs breadth from buying a new PC, exclusively for audio.  Music is much too important to me for me to be spending my time messing around like this.  All in all, with the down time of returning the goods, I've wasted nigh on 4 weeks. 

[KRISSSY STRINGZ]

39 minutes ago, Chuck E Baby said:

One thing I overlooked once (and I felt like a fool) was the USB Cable itself. It would work but intermittingly.

I also had a problem with a bad USB port once (I bent it, pinning a device cable). Trust me I've been through almost every thing in the book when it comes to this department so hang in there and we can try to problem solve it.

 

Edited February 10, 2019 by KRISSSY STRINGZ
Because my earlier reply wasn't displayed on the notification emeil I received, I assumed it hadn't been sent. I therefore re-wrote a similar reply and sent it again which made me look like a chump.

[Kurre]

I changed my useraccount on my CbB pc. From a windows live account to a local account but still admin.

It seems i got a relatively new set of registersettings for my new user. I have no idea what good it can do. Just produce ideas.

PS. About that HD audio. Forgot to tell that i did two things.

1. Uninstalled.

2. Went into Bios and disabled onboard sound.

In the old days of win 95/98 it wasn't that unusual to have to do that when you added a pci soundcard. Maybe it's a ghost from the past.

Edited February 10, 2019 by Kurre
Addition.

[Lord Tim]

I have a 16x08 and it's generally been pretty good for me, other than the odd pop and click on my woefully outdated laptop I'll be replacing soon.

However, another former user from the old SONAR forums also had one and he had no end of trouble with his. From what I've seen around the place, the 16x08 is a bit of a crap-shoot of which unit will work correctly and that seems to be a combination of both the unit and the Windows install - some will work absolutely fine with one install of Windows but not others. Some units are just generally junk for everything. I've been lucky with mine, others... yeah, not so much.

If you have an afternoon spare, try doing a complete disk image of your machine, then doing a scorched earth install from scratch of EVERYTHING - Windows, all drivers, CbB and the 16x08 drivers. That shouldn't take more than an hour or so. If THAT all works correctly, then you can start to rule out any hardware issues or compatibility issues between the 16x08, your machine and Windows. Restoring your system image should only take a couple of minutes to get you back to where you were before the testing.

If it turns out to be working correctly with vanilla everything, then you can start looking at a full removal of CbB and reinstall, or some registry/driver alterations for your machine to get the ports working. If you don't have a baseline to work from, any testing you do will just be guesses at the moment.

 

Edited February 11, 2019 by Lord Tim
becoz i cant spel

[KRISSSY STRINGZ]

2 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

I have a 16x08 and it's generally been pretty good for me, other than the odd pop and click on my woefully outdated laptop I'll be replacing soon.

However, another former user from the old SONAR forums also had one and he had no end of trouble with his. From what I've seen around the place, the 16x08 is a bit of a crap-shoot of which unit will work correctly and that seems to be a combination of both the unit and the Windows install - some will work absolutely fine with one install of Windows but not others. Some units are just generally junk for everything. I've been lucky with mine, others... yeah, not so much.

If you have an afternoon spare, try doing a complete disk image of your machine, then doing a scorched earth install from scratch of EVERYTHING - Windows, all drivers, CbB and the 16x08 drivers. That shouldn't take more than an hour or so. If THAT all works correctly, then you can start to rule out any hardware issues or compatibility issues between the 16x08, your machine and Windows. Restoring your system image should only take a couple of minutes to get you back to where you were before the testing.

If it turns out to be working correctly with vanilla everything, then you can start looking at a full removal of CbB and reinstall, or some registry/driver alterations for your machine to get the ports working. If you don't have a baseline to work from, any testing you do will just be guesses at the moment.

 

Thanks for your comments MLud.   

I will certainly give some consideration to that.  I'm not massively tech savvy, so I am a bit confused how I would re-install windows 10 as it's a download package.

My broadband speed is 12mbps at best. 

[KRISSSY STRINGZ]

13 hours ago, Kurre said:

I changed my useraccount on my CbB pc. From a windows live account to a local account but still admin.

It seems i got a relatively new set of registersettings for my new user. I have no idea what good it can do. Just produce ideas.

PS. About that HD audio. Forgot to tell that i did two things.

1. Uninstalled.

2. Went into Bios and disabled onboard sound.

In the old days of win 95/98 it wasn't that unusual to have to do that when you added a pci soundcard. Maybe it's a ghost from the past.

Thank you for your comments Kurre, I will look into that. 

[Lord Tim]

3 hours ago, KRISSSY STRINGZ said:

Thanks for your comments MLud.   

I will certainly give some consideration to that.  I'm not massively tech savvy, so I am a bit confused how I would re-install windows 10 as it's a download package.

My broadband speed is 12mbps at best. 

I feel your pain - up until recently I had half of that speed on a good day, drop-outs included free of charge too. Australian internet hey? Not even once! ?

OK, so the steps would be to do this:

Grab Macrium Reflect Free: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Grab a Win10 ISO file: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10

Set those to download overnight or something, shouldn't take more than a few hours on a 12mbps connection.

Use Macrium to do a complete disk image of your machine's system drive and make a rescue disk. That system drive should have your Windows installation, CbB, etc. on it. That should be backed up to some external hard drive (if you don't have one, it's a good idea to grab one and do regular backups like this anyway - you never know when you'll have a disk go down on you, and this will get you back and running in minutes once it's replaced).

Make the Windows installation media as per the instructions on the download page - you'll need a thumb drive for that. It says you need a license for Win 10 - don't worry about that, it won't be on your machine long enough to worry about activating it, etc. - it's just for this quick test.

Assuming you've done your backup first, you now want to boot from your Win10 media drive you just made and do a clean installation of Windows, erasing the system drive. Set up Windows, install drivers, etc. Install your 16x08 drivers, install Bandlab Assistant, use that to install CbB.

Test away!

As I said, if this all works fine, you can rule out your 16x08 or your machine as the culprits in this problem.

Boot up using your Macrium rescue disk and get it to restore your system image - you'll be back exactly to where you were before you started this process.

The trick then is to work out where the problem lies if the test showed everything was fine.

My first suggestion would be to completely nuke anything Cakewalk - installation folders, registry entries, etc. and do a truly fresh reinstall of everything. There's a few people here who can give you advice for that process. If that doesn't fix it, my next thought is to delete all of the USB devices from the Device manager and get Windows to redetect everything.

@Kurre had a good suggestion with disabling the onboard sound in the BIOS - I'd try that first before any of this.

@Chuck E Baby also made a good point about USB cables. I remember having a Firewire mixer that was SUPER picky about what cable I could use with it. Some would just stop working entirely with it, but they would work just fine with other devices. It's not out of the question to think that you might have a weird port or the 16x08 could be finicky too. Something to consider.

This is all a bit of work to do this kind of troubleshooting, so try what you can that's easy to do with your existing installation first, I'd say. But if you run out of options, starting with a clean baseline is the way to go so you're not just chasing your tail and you can rule out as many variables as possible. Worst case is you need a fresh install of everything to just make it all work, but that's very much a last resort - I'd be surprised if the brains trust here can't help you get it all working.

 

 

[chuckebaby]

1 hour ago, Lord Tim said:

I remember having a Firewire mixer that was SUPER picky about what cable I could use with it. Some would just stop working entirely with it, but they would work just fine with other devices.

^^this exactly what I was referring to^^ Even though some USB Type-B cables will fit and look the same, might not work. Use the cable that came with your device.

[Lord Tim]

Actually something occurred to me that might get you back in business: changing the driver model to WASAPI Exclusive in Preferences > Audio > Playback and Recording.

Now ordinarily using the hardware's supplied ASIO driver is the best choice in almost every circumstance, but just before Gibson shuttered Cakewalk and it moved over to Bandlab for CbB, a lot of work was being done using the native Windows 10 driver model.

This was mostly to let us use in-built soundcards at low latencies (which worked great for me - I was on the road and needed to do some editing but didn't have an interface with me, and my built in rubbish Realtek audio worked amazingly with the WASAPI driver) but I found I got comparable results as far as performance goes on my 16x08 between the native ASIO driver and WASAPI Exclusive.

There's also WASAPI Shared mode but I found that gave me a lot more pops and clicks, especially at lower latencies.

This isn't fixing the root cause of the problems, of course, but if your goal is to just get on with making music, this might just get you over the line. See how you go!

Edited February 12, 2019 by Lord Tim
clarity

[KRISSSY STRINGZ]

19 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

I feel your pain - up until recently I had half of that speed on a good day, drop-outs included free of charge too. Australian internet hey? Not even once! ?

OK, so the steps would be to do this:

Grab Macrium Reflect Free: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Grab a Win10 ISO file: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10

Set those to download overnight or something, shouldn't take more than a few hours on a 12mbps connection.

Use Macrium to do a complete disk image of your machine's system drive and make a rescue disk. That system drive should have your Windows installation, CbB, etc. on it. That should be backed up to some external hard drive (if you don't have one, it's a good idea to grab one and do regular backups like this anyway - you never know when you'll have a disk go down on you, and this will get you back and running in minutes once it's replaced).

Make the Windows installation media as per the instructions on the download page - you'll need a thumb drive for that. It says you need a license for Win 10 - don't worry about that, it won't be on your machine long enough to worry about activating it, etc. - it's just for this quick test.

Assuming you've done your backup first, you now want to boot from your Win10 media drive you just made and do a clean installation of Windows, erasing the system drive. Set up Windows, install drivers, etc. Install your 16x08 drivers, install Bandlab Assistant, use that to install CbB.

Test away!

As I said, if this all works fine, you can rule out your 16x08 or your machine as the culprits in this problem.

Boot up using your Macrium rescue disk and get it to restore your system image - you'll be back exactly to where you were before you started this process.

The trick then is to work out where the problem lies if the test showed everything was fine.

My first suggestion would be to completely nuke anything Cakewalk - installation folders, registry entries, etc. and do a truly fresh reinstall of everything. There's a few people here who can give you advice for that process. If that doesn't fix it, my next thought is to delete all of the USB devices from the Device manager and get Windows to redetect everything.

@Kurre had a good suggestion with disabling the onboard sound in the BIOS - I'd try that first before any of this.

@Chuck E Baby also made a good point about USB cables. I remember having a Firewire mixer that was SUPER picky about what cable I could use with it. Some would just stop working entirely with it, but they would work just fine with other devices. It's not out of the question to think that you might have a weird port or the 16x08 could be finicky too. Something to consider.

This is all a bit of work to do this kind of troubleshooting, so try what you can that's easy to do with your existing installation first, I'd say. But if you run out of options, starting with a clean baseline is the way to go so you're not just chasing your tail and you can rule out as many variables as possible. Worst case is you need a fresh install of everything to just make it all work, but that's very much a last resort - I'd be surprised if the brains trust here can't help you get it all working.

 

 

Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule your Lordship. I have probably reached the extent of what I'm comfortable doing now to be honest.  The troublesome PC is actually also the workstation I use for my business, so I worry about screwing things up irrevocably.  Sadly, I have a day job outside of being a rock God. 

I've decided I am going to get a dedicated PC optmised for audio rammed with whizzy gadgets and gizmos all pupose 'designed' for recording.  It's about time I headed that way to be honest as I'm not getting any younger.  No doubt, I will be back on this page in a few weeks when the fuse blows or some such.

Once again, thank you to everyone. 

[KRISSSY STRINGZ]

9 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Actually something occurred to me that might get you back in business: changing the driver model to WASAPI Exclusive in Preferences > Audio > Playback and Recording.

Now ordinarily using the hardware's supplied ASIO driver is the best choice in almost every circumstance, but just before Gibson shuttered Cakewalk and it moved over to Bandlab for CbB, a lot of work was being done using the native Windows 10 driver model.

This was mostly to let us use in-built soundcards at low latencies (which worked great for me - I was on the road and needed to do some editing but didn't have an interface with me, and my built in rubbish Realtek audio worked amazingly with the WASAPI driver) but I found I got comparable results as far as performance goes on my 16x08 between the native ASIO driver and WASAPI Exclusive.

There's also WASAPI Shared mode but I found that gave me a lot more pops and clicks, especially at lower latencies.

This isn't fixing the root cause of the problems, of course, but if your goal is to just get on with making music, this might just get you over the line. See how you go!

I've done the wasapi thing Lord Tim: both versions, also MME.

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, if MME isn't working, something is seriously wrong. 

You know, sometimes just biting the bullet and getting a dedicated and audio optimised machine is the ticket - I'd say you're on the right path.