I'm re-posting this question after posing it in response to another post two days ago—I feel like I kinda hijacked the OP's question, so best to post afresh as my own. I realise this is probably a bit long and somewhat rambling, but I'm trying to be as clear as possible about what's happening; at the same time I'm kinda struggling to describe it, coz I'm not very tech savvy with this stuff so I don't know all the right terminology.
Basically what happens is that I'll go back to listen to the part of a project that I've just recorded and as soon as I start playback there's this kind of 'pop' or 'click' sound, then silence. It's playing on-screen, but the sound doesn't kick in for ages—I guess about 5 seconds on average, maybe longer—and then continues to lag behind the on-screen playback without ever catching up.
Whenever this happens, sometimes I immediately stop playback again until I hear the echo (or whatever it is) of (what I assume to be) either the first or final note in that part of the recording—this is what tells me (sometimes, but not always) that it's good to go again. After that, when I hit play again it sometimes starts playback as normal, but sometimes the silence thing happens multiple times before the sound kicks back in and I can resume playback.
I also notice that when this thing happens, 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 as if it's actually playing, and only snaps back to where I want it when this silent freeze thing gets over itself and decides to play nicely again.
NOTE: when this happens, it almost never results in an audio dropout dialogue, although I do also experience audio dropouts with dialogue pretty frequently, but these instances are independent of the issue I'm discussing here. And yes, I've often consulted the help codes over the years, with little or no improvement noted from any action I ever felt bold and brave enough to take.
Initially I thought it must've been something to do with my old PC — its age (2011), its RAM (12Gb), its aging processor (whatever i7 was top of the line ten years ago); that said, it's been happening pretty regularly since I started using SONAR in late 2011 when the old PC was close to brand new. Now I'm using a brand new i7 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 it, the same thing happened with the very first project I opened.
I've tested multiple project content scenarios and have seen the same results with a new project containing about 30 seconds of vox and literally nothing else; also 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 added—in at least one of the VST examples (the project I'm currently working on, although it's definitely happened in the past too) it dropped out the very first time I went to listen to the very first portion of the very first track I recorded on, and it then continued to happen as the project grew—whatever tracks I've muted, replaced or removed altogether, or whatever FX I've bypassed or removed, hasn't made any difference at all because it keeps happening.
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 (same for both Cakewalk and Windows). Buffer settings are fixed at Fast, I can't change them (I believe this is due to my soundcard?).
Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it too much of a coincidence that I'm seeing almost identical behaviour on two similarly-specced machines built a decade apart? Is there perhaps some change I can make in the settings that might resolve this?
Any feedback, suggestions or assistance will be hugely appreciated and if you made it this far, thanks for reading to the end
Question
Matt Dunn
Hi,
I'm re-posting this question after posing it in response to another post two days ago—I feel like I kinda hijacked the OP's question, so best to post afresh as my own. I realise this is probably a bit long and somewhat rambling, but I'm trying to be as clear as possible about what's happening; at the same time I'm kinda struggling to describe it, coz I'm not very tech savvy with this stuff so I don't know all the right terminology.
Basically what happens is that I'll go back to listen to the part of a project that I've just recorded and as soon as I start playback there's this kind of 'pop' or 'click' sound, then silence. It's playing on-screen, but the sound doesn't kick in for ages—I guess about 5 seconds on average, maybe longer—and then continues to lag behind the on-screen playback without ever catching up.
Whenever this happens, sometimes I immediately stop playback again until I hear the echo (or whatever it is) of (what I assume to be) either the first or final note in that part of the recording—this is what tells me (sometimes, but not always) that it's good to go again. After that, when I hit play again it sometimes starts playback as normal, but sometimes the silence thing happens multiple times before the sound kicks back in and I can resume playback.
I also notice that when this thing happens, 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 as if it's actually playing, and only snaps back to where I want it when this silent freeze thing gets over itself and decides to play nicely again.
NOTE: when this happens, it almost never results in an audio dropout dialogue, although I do also experience audio dropouts with dialogue pretty frequently, but these instances are independent of the issue I'm discussing here. And yes, I've often consulted the help codes over the years, with little or no improvement noted from any action I ever felt bold and brave enough to take.
Initially I thought it must've been something to do with my old PC — its age (2011), its RAM (12Gb), its aging processor (whatever i7 was top of the line ten years ago); that said, it's been happening pretty regularly since I started using SONAR in late 2011 when the old PC was close to brand new. Now I'm using a brand new i7 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 it, the same thing happened with the very first project I opened.
I've tested multiple project content scenarios and have seen the same results with a new project containing about 30 seconds of vox and literally nothing else; also 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 added—in at least one of the VST examples (the project I'm currently working on, although it's definitely happened in the past too) it dropped out the very first time I went to listen to the very first portion of the very first track I recorded on, and it then continued to happen as the project grew—whatever tracks I've muted, replaced or removed altogether, or whatever FX I've bypassed or removed, hasn't made any difference at all because it keeps happening.
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 (same for both Cakewalk and Windows). Buffer settings are fixed at Fast, I can't change them (I believe this is due to my soundcard?).
Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it too much of a coincidence that I'm seeing almost identical behaviour on two similarly-specced machines built a decade apart? Is there perhaps some change I can make in the settings that might resolve this?
Any feedback, suggestions or assistance will be hugely appreciated and if you made it this far, thanks for reading to the end
Cheers,
Matt
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