System fail after using z3ta +

[Jan Venken]

I was testing some sounds of z3ta+ in cakewalk and noticed that some presets wouldn't play. After a while all of the sudden it seemed as if the entire audio engine stopped. Nothing played anymore. Other projects I've been working on wouldn't play either.All I heard was an occasional click. When I tested the sound in the windows settings , it worked fine. 

After some reboots of my pc and mixer (Mackie firewire 1620) and switching between WDM and ASIO and cakewalk and producer X1 everything worked again. Why, don't know.

I have some problems with the firewire interface which doesn't work well with windows 10 I think. If I try changing the buffer size in the ASIO panel it's the blue screen of death with mostly an IRQ error.

Has anyone found a way to solve this or am I better off buying a recent soundcard (my eye is on the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 3rd Gen. 

Or is this a software problem? My computer is rather old, still dual core with 4GB Ram but after replacing the old HDD with a SSD it still works like a charm. I held on to my old pc because of the firewire port it has and newer models lack.

 

[Max Arwood]

My cakewalk VST scan stops and says :

z3ta+ is risky do you want to enable this synth?

Does your scan say that?

 

Max Arwood

[user 905133]

I mostly use z3ta+ [v1.5.4.0 VST2, 64 Bit, In: 2, Out: 2] as an FX processor, but the synth dll also works. (PC = 4GB RAM, duo core, legacy PCI audio card). It is as reliable or more reliable on my PC than Dim Pro and Rapture from around the same era (+/-). Never got a z3ta+ issue on scanning VSTs. I scan manually, after a reset.  I do get warnings about other plug-ins, though, but not z3ta+.

Maybe these details will be helpful in debugging your z3ta+.

 

[scook]

1 hour ago, Max Arwood said:

My cakewalk VST scan stops and says :

z3ta+ is risky do you want to enable this synth?

Does your scan say that?

After enabling z3ta+ once, if that message appears again during a regular scan, the scan options are set up wrong. Disable the two "rescan option."

Often when a known good plug-in fails like this it is a symptom of a problem with a plug-in scanned before it. This is one motivation for the "Scan in Sandbox" option. This option is on reason to always scan from preferences and never scan from the Plug-in Manager.

[scook]

2 hours ago, Jan Venken said:

I was testing some sounds of z3ta+ in cakewalk and noticed that some presets wouldn't play. After a while all of the sudden it seemed as if the entire audio engine stopped. Nothing played anymore. Other projects I've been working on wouldn't play either.All I heard was an occasional click. When I tested the sound in the windows settings , it worked fine. 

It is hard to say from this if it is a driver or application issue. Windows audio does not use the ASIO driver. If possible toggle the audio interface off and on.

 

2 hours ago, Jan Venken said:

I have some problems with the firewire interface which doesn't work well with windows 10 I think. If I try changing the buffer size in the ASIO panel it's the blue screen of death with mostly an IRQ error.

This is likely a hardware/driver problem.

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, Jan Venken said:

dual core with 4GB Ram but after replacing the old HDD with a SSD it still works like a charm

Way to go, seriously. Running a DAW on a system like this puts the "stud" in "studio" as far as I'm concerned.

Both of the systems I use to run Cakewalk were hand-me-down castoffs I got for free because someone at some big company or other considered them obsolete. My laptop is an i5 that ran just fine with 4G of RAM before I maxed it out to 8G. Honestly, I saw little difference in performance after the upgrade, but hey. It's still running off its 7200RPM drive. I imagine it will seem like a rocket sled once I put an SSD in it.

My desktop is more in line with what someone would expect in a hobbyist DAW, but not exactly a powerhouse, you can see in my sig.

As you can also see in my sig, I'm a Firewire jockey. I started with a PreSonus Firebox and the thing worked so well on low end hardware compared to the USB interfaces of the day that I've stuck with it as long as I can. Even when USB 2.0 has more raw speed, Firewire has inherent advantages that translate well to use with audio. For instance, Firewire is full-duplex, so information can go in both directions at once. That is a huge advantage when you're doing A/V work. USB below 3.0 doesn't do that. A USB 2.X interface has to time slice in order to do things like real time monitoring. Firewire also offloads a lot of the processing so that the main CPU and bus don't have to work as hard.

Anyway, back to your issue.

Given that your Firewire controller is onboard, I'm less inclined to go with it as a source of IRQ conflicts. Windows 10 is good at managing that sort of thing. You might take a look at your video card driver, also make sure that if it has an HDMI sound device that it is disabled.

Something to look for is whether you have shut down all other programs that might be trying to use that sound device. I'm sure that with a lower-end system like yours you practice good hygiene as far as making sure Cakewalk is the only thing running, but make sure. There's a program I use called Process Lasso that's good for finding and terminating unnecessary processes. Just in general, with an older system, we have to be more careful about giving it too much to juggle.

Also make sure that system sounds are turned off, etc. If another program is trying to grab your sound device, you are more likely to see errors like these.

A good thing to do is journey into the past and run Control Panel (yes, it still exists in Windows 10) and run the Sound app and check the settings there. Windows shouldn't be trying to use your sound device when Cakewalk is. As scook said, Windows doesn't know about ASIO. It can jump in and try to use a sound device while it's in ASIO mode. Most ASIO drivers, in my experience, will tolerate this, but some will not.

Best of luck, I suspect you can sort this out without resorting to dumping your interface.

[Starship Krupa]

BTW, I think this thread may help answer the perennial question "why hasn't BandLab released the other Cakewalk software that came with SONAR."

[Jan Venken]

On 3/29/2020 at 11:40 PM, Max Arwood said:

My cakewalk VST scan stops and says :

z3ta+ is risky do you want to enable this synth?

Does your scan say that?

 

Max Arwood

Nope.

[Jan Venken]

I tried all of the above but alas.

I eventually upgraded my systeem because cakewalk kept crashing. Got an i7 8GB RAM and SSD drive, it's an old i7 but faster than my old configuration. I also bought a focusrite 2i2 3rd gen so I can be sure the problem isn't firewire related.

I haven't had the problem with the z3ta but now my VIP player is acting up. If I freeze the VIP and unfreeze it, often the synths in the banks of the VIP won't produce any sound anymore. The midi still gets through but no sound. If I unload a synth from a bank and then reload it, it works again. 

This is the case for cakewalk and sonar producer X1.  

So I'm pretty certain it's me *****ing something up but I can't seem to find what I'm doing wrong.