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I can’t even begin to do anything in my cakewalk project as the audio engine drops out every 2 seconds

Stewart Cormack

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Stewart Cormack

Stewart Cormack

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Every single time I press play in my cakewalk project the audio engine drops out almost immediately. This is extremely frustrating as I have no way of recording any more tracks or listening back to my mix. If someone could help me out and offer a solution to fix this, that would be much appreciated. Thanks.

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Colin Nicholls

Colin Nicholls

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Does this happen with a new, empty project? Try creating a new project and adding one MIDI track and recording a couple of notes. Does it drop out immediately?

Try bypassing all FX (see Mix Module). Does it still drop out?

What Audio Interface are you using? External, onboard, RealTek Audio? Etc?

What driver type? ASIO? Are you using ASIO4ALL? What are the buffer settings?

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Matt Dunn

Matt Dunn

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This exact thing (I think) has pretty much always happened to me ever since I started using SONAR a billion years ago. This is just my hobby and I'm only an amateur, so I've never followed up on it until today -- and then I saw this post! It happens consistently and it's massively annoying.

Initially I thought it was my PC - age, RAM, or something - but now I'm using a brand new Win 10  laptop with 16Gb RAM and I was told that, as it's a "light gaming" machine, it would be more than sufficient for my purposes. But as soon as I started using Cakewalk on this new machine, the same thing happened with the very first project I opened.

I'm not very tech savvy with this stuff, so I don't know all the right terminology, but basically what happens is that I'll go back to listen to what I've just done and as soon as I start playback there's this kind of 'pop' sound, then nothing. It still plays on-screen, but the sound doesn't kick in for ages, and then continues to lag behind the on-screen playback progress. Sometimes when this happens I just stop it immediately and wait until I hear the echo (or whatever it is) of (what I assume to be) the final note in that part of the recording, which tells me (sometimes, but not always) that I'm good to go again. Then when I hit play it (sometimes but not always) starts playback as normal. But sometimes this same silence happens multiple times before it kicks back in and I can resume playback. It doesn't always result in an audio dropout dialogue either (although this also happens pretty frequently, independently of the instances I'm discussing here).

I also notice when this happens that I can't reset the playhead either. I can click and click and click at the point I want it to return to, but it just continues along with the silent playback and only kind of snaps back to where I want it when this silent freeze thing gets over itself and decides to play nicely.

Per the questions asked of the OP, yes I've had the very same thing happen with a new project where I've recorded about 15 seconds of vox with literally nothing else in the project. I've also had the same thing happen with ~15-30 seconds of recording via multiple different VSTs where there was nothing else present in the project, no changes to default settings and no FX yet added. In at least one of the VST examples I recall it dropping out the very first time I went to listen, then on and off from that point onwards.

In my current project, I turned off all FX for an extended period while I continued to work on the project, but the dropout thing continued to happen. There are two MIDI tracks with my vox, 5 MIDI tracks for a bunch of samples, and a handful of VST tracks. Is there something else I can try to address @Colin Nichollssuggestion to "Try bypassing all FX (see Mix Module)"?

I'm using an onboard audio interface (to the extent that I understand what that means — i.e. all I use is an external mic and my MIDI keyboard, both of which are plugged directly into the laptop. Hoping my interpretation is correct!)

My driver mode is WASAPI Shared. Sampling rate is 44100. Buffer settings are fixed at Fast, I can't change them. The video above suggests this is due to my soundcard?

Sincere apologies @Stewart Cormack, I feel like I've just totally hijacked your post, but from what you've said, I think we may have the same (or at least a very similar) issue.

Any feedback, suggestions or assistance greatly appreciated. 

Cheers,
Matt

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Colin Nicholls

Colin Nicholls

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I have a laptop with onboard audio (Conexant ISST Audio) and when I installed Cakewalk, it used "WASAPI Shared", and I see similarly that the buffer slider is set to FAST and not being able to change it.

If I change the driver mode to "WASAPI Exclusive", then after some futzing around with a message relating to bit depth being not supported, I can re-set it to 44100 and now I can adjust the buffer size. You might want to try this and see if you can get different behavior, just for experimental value.

Also WDM/KS might be worth a try.

(Although ASIO is offered as an alternative driver mode, I don't have an ASIO driver installed for my onboard audio and chances are there is no such thing. Don't try to use ASIO with on-board audio interfaces, unless you know what you are doing.)

EDIT: Actually I see @John Vere's excellent video kind of covers all this already.

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John Vere

John Vere

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As my video say's. You can " get by fine" with on board audio if it is set up properly as pre my instructions in the video.  I made the video to try and help first time users get started with Cakewalk. It takes a while for first time users to get their feet under them.  There's no point purchasing an audio interface if you are just starting out and only wanting to mess around with loops and midi.   

  But I also say that if you plan on doing any serious audio recording then this is when a proper ASIO driver and interface is needed or you WILL have issues.  I also show how to hook up a small mixer to record with a mike but I also warn of the substandard quality of the A/D convertors that computers use. Mine has a noise floor of around 30 db. And this is just in general as every computer uses different quality components. 

I use on board audio on my office computer just to mess around. It generally has no issues but it cannot handle complicated projects with a lot of VST instruments and effects as smoothly as my other machine that uses an ASIO interface. You can "feel" the difference in performance.  It does not surprise me if it drops out or takes forever to start playback. This is expected.  

Do not attempt to use the Realtech ASIO driver Cakewalk staff have chimed in many times warning about it's instability.  

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Starship Krupa

Starship Krupa

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5 hours ago, John Vere said:

I also warn of the substandard quality of the A/D convertors that computers use. Mine has a noise floor of around 30 db.

As you know, I'm sympathetic to people who get started with onboard sound. I still want to perform the experiment of recording an entire audio project by running the output of my Yamaha mixer to the line in on my laptop just to see how it goes. As you point out, if someone's doing electronic type music with MIDI and samples, they don't really need to invest in an external interface (put the money into a good set of cans first!).

I'm such a geek that I downloaded and read Realtek's datasheets on their hardware CODEC. They'd have us believe that they've been working on it like it's the cure for cancer. There are many features like S/PDIF that every current Realtek chip can do that just aren't used by the people who design them into their motherboards. Based on that, I suspect that in current systems the noise floor issue might be more down to the motherboard manufacturers' implementation than something inherent to Realtek's CODEC. Still, it's not like we can go in and change anything. Love to have access to that S/PDIF, though. Can you imagine being able to connect an external A/D directly to your laptop without going through USB?

5 hours ago, John Vere said:

Do not attempt to use the Realtech ASIO driver Cakewalk staff have chimed in many times warning about it's instability.

I've long suspected that the other interface manufacturers are paying off Realtek to keep them from coming up with a functioning ASIO driver.  It's certainly not like they haven't had enough time.?

To anyone reading this, I too can start getting the "hit Play and instant dropout" if I run Cakewalk in WASAPI Shared vs. Exclusive. It's also essential to launch the Sound applet in Control Panel and make sure that Properties/Advanced for your output device has both Exclusive Mode boxes checked.

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John Vere

John Vere

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The noise floor I admit is only on the one computer I do use the on board audio on. My main daw when I tested it was more like 10 db which you won't really hear. It could even be the fans emitting RF to all those unsheilded audio cables and circuit boards. But it is worth thinking about if you want to optimize your system. 

To test I open Gold Wave audio editor and record the "silence" . You can even see it sometimes on cakewalks meters

 

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John Vere

John Vere

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Thank you Bill. I get lots of positive feedback about my videos being easy to follow. I know what they mean. I get lost when I watch certain tutorials either because the person is mumbling the narration, moving way to fast, not exactly explaining what is going on, Assuming a newbie knows what a " insert technical name here" is,  making errors and getting too complicated for beginners to follow. I've got a bunch more started but it's real nice weather here right now so no time for fun in the studio. 

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Bill Phillips

Bill Phillips

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3 hours ago, John Vere said:

Thank you Bill. I get lots of positive feedback about my videos being easy to follow. I know what they mean. I get lost when I watch certain tutorials either because the person is mumbling the narration, moving way to fast, not exactly explaining what is going on, Assuming a newbie knows what a " insert technical name here" is,  making errors and getting too complicated for beginners to follow. I've got a bunch more started but it's real nice weather here right now so no time for fun in the studio. 

Keep it up!

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Stewart Cormack

Stewart Cormack

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On 5/29/2021 at 9:11 PM, Colin Nicholls said:

Does this happen with a new, empty project? Try creating a new project and adding one MIDI track and recording a couple of notes. Does it drop out immediately?

Try bypassing all FX (see Mix Module). Does it still drop out?

What Audio Interface are you using? External, onboard, RealTek Audio? Etc?

What driver type? ASIO? Are you using ASIO4ALL? What are the buffer settings?

No it doesn't happen with empty projects, however when I bypass all FX it plays just fine and doesn't drop out at all.

I'm using a Soundcraft Notepad-8FX audio interface, and ASIO for the driver type.

My buffer settings are 46.4msec, 2048 samples.

 

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Stewart Cormack

Stewart Cormack

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On 5/30/2021 at 3:34 AM, Matt Dunn said:

This exact thing (I think) has pretty much always happened to me ever since I started using SONAR a billion years ago. This is just my hobby and I'm only an amateur, so I've never followed up on it until today -- and then I saw this post! It happens consistently and it's massively annoying.

Initially I thought it was my PC - age, RAM, or something - but now I'm using a brand new Win 10  laptop with 16Gb RAM and I was told that, as it's a "light gaming" machine, it would be more than sufficient for my purposes. But as soon as I started using Cakewalk on this new machine, the same thing happened with the very first project I opened.

I'm not very tech savvy with this stuff, so I don't know all the right terminology, but basically what happens is that I'll go back to listen to what I've just done and as soon as I start playback there's this kind of 'pop' sound, then nothing. It still plays on-screen, but the sound doesn't kick in for ages, and then continues to lag behind the on-screen playback progress. Sometimes when this happens I just stop it immediately and wait until I hear the echo (or whatever it is) of (what I assume to be) the final note in that part of the recording, which tells me (sometimes, but not always) that I'm good to go again. Then when I hit play it (sometimes but not always) starts playback as normal. But sometimes this same silence happens multiple times before it kicks back in and I can resume playback. It doesn't always result in an audio dropout dialogue either (although this also happens pretty frequently, independently of the instances I'm discussing here).

I also notice when this happens that I can't reset the playhead either. I can click and click and click at the point I want it to return to, but it just continues along with the silent playback and only kind of snaps back to where I want it when this silent freeze thing gets over itself and decides to play nicely.

Per the questions asked of the OP, yes I've had the very same thing happen with a new project where I've recorded about 15 seconds of vox with literally nothing else in the project. I've also had the same thing happen with ~15-30 seconds of recording via multiple different VSTs where there was nothing else present in the project, no changes to default settings and no FX yet added. In at least one of the VST examples I recall it dropping out the very first time I went to listen, then on and off from that point onwards.

In my current project, I turned off all FX for an extended period while I continued to work on the project, but the dropout thing continued to happen. There are two MIDI tracks with my vox, 5 MIDI tracks for a bunch of samples, and a handful of VST tracks. Is there something else I can try to address @Colin Nichollssuggestion to "Try bypassing all FX (see Mix Module)"?

I'm using an onboard audio interface (to the extent that I understand what that means — i.e. all I use is an external mic and my MIDI keyboard, both of which are plugged directly into the laptop. Hoping my interpretation is correct!)

My driver mode is WASAPI Shared. Sampling rate is 44100. Buffer settings are fixed at Fast, I can't change them. The video above suggests this is due to my soundcard?

Sincere apologies @Stewart Cormack, I feel like I've just totally hijacked your post, but from what you've said, I think we may have the same (or at least a very similar) issue.

Any feedback, suggestions or assistance greatly appreciated. 

Cheers,
Matt

Not at all! Just glad there's someone who shares a similar issue with me.

Thankfully it doesn't happen with every project I work on, the current one I'm working on has 43 tracks and most of them have multiple FX plugins, so I'm assuming that's too much for cakewalk to handle. When I bypass all FX it plays just fine, but that's not exactly practical for mixing, or even recording vocals for that matter.

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John Vere

John Vere

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6 hours ago, Scott Kendrick said:

Same issue here - if I'm not plugged into my Scarlett using ASIO, Cakewalk is basically unusable. Would love to have a solution to this so I"m not always chained to my home studio.

Did you watch my video. On board sound works perfectly fine for me on my office computer. I only use it for listening and midi editing. But Laptops can be all different and some have been found to have issues built into the BIOS which make them bad news for audio. The difference I think is they try to optimize laptops for battery performance. 

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