BUNDLE OR .CWB FILES ARE YOUR FRIEND.

[Waldemar Pawlik]

Recently I have revisited some of my earlier work with the view of updating and remixing them, ( after all, I now have twenty five years or so experience of working in Cakewalk, so I can now make them better .. yeah)?  Well, it hasn’t been without its problems.

My idea was to re-record the drums on some, (I am now able to record 16 tracks of audio), and use newer plugins where required, and generally spiff things up. And so I began, and soon the glitches began also.

I could start recording ten tracks of drums and very soon the audio engine would stop and throw up an error. I have an Intel I7 processor and 32Gb of Ram and can normally record at a buffer size of 64 but I was getting audio engine dropout all the time. I would disable all plugins, but still the audio engine would drop out. It soon became apparent that the dropouts were occurring in the same places most of the time.

In  my earlier work I did a lot of editing to the tracks and would leave them in their raw state without bouncing  to clips after, and so everything was a bit untidy.  I would then bounce down to a stereo track, export to wav and mp3, and that was it…done. Also, often I would be working on a number of different projects at the same time, so I would be back and forth between projects at different times all on the same hard drive.

You see where I’m going. My projects were becoming fragmented, although I didn’t realize this at the time.

Now I read somewhere that .bun files collected all the audio of a project and kept the files together, so I wondered if this would solve my problem. I had never used .bun files before so I saved a project as a Cakewalk bundle. The saving of the project can take some time as Cakewalk collects all the scattered files together in a new file. I then opened the new .bun file in Cakewalk and played the file to check. I then saved the project as a Normal file, closed the project and then opened the new .cwp file in Cakewalk to check.

After saving to bundle .bun files and then to new normal .cwp files I was able to record new tracks without audio engine dropouts.

We see many people on these forums complaining of difficulties with audio engine dropout and recording, blaming Cakewalk as problematic, so I wonder if some can be solved in the manner I have explained.

[John Vere]

I think you might get the same results by simply bouncing all the fragmented tracks into clean fresh continuous tracks. Midi of course doesn’t factor, only audio. 
Probably the issue arises when what was originally a continuous track gets chopped into dozens or even hundreds of clips that Cakewalk now has to compute in real time as you play the song. 
I recently wanted to speed up a song and the only way Cakewalk would allow this using Audio Snap was to bounce all the audio to new tracks and delete the originals. 
 

As well as bundle I think using save as to a new location with copy all audio checked will also clean stuff up. I’ll have to try this later. 
 

 

[scook]

16 minutes ago, Waldemar Pawlik said:

After saving to bundle .bun files and then to new normal .cwp files I was able to record new tracks without audio engine dropouts.

We see many people on these forums complaining of difficulties with audio engine dropout and recording, blaming Cakewalk as problematic, so I wonder if some can be solved in the manner I have explained.

Maybe but you can skip the bundling step and use "Save As" or "Save Copy As" to rewrite a project to a new location if this is an issue. Just make sure to enable "Copy all audio with project" so all the audio referenced in the original project is placed in the new project folder.

IIRC, the one thing bundling does that the save functions do not is re-write the project file.

 

Of course, whether bounced or copied there is no guarantee that the new files will not be fragmented. That mostly depends on how much space is available and how continuous space is on the hard drive. Disk fragmentation is not much of a problem with SSDs.

 

Dropouts generate a message with a code and a link to the help with information about the dropout code.

[Starship Krupa]

7 hours ago, Waldemar Pawlik said:

My idea was to re-record the drums on some, (I am now able to record 16 tracks of audio)

One thing to know, especially when recording multiple takes of drums, which usually have, at minimum, 4 mics is that during playback, Cakewalk streams every audio file in the project whether the track or lane or clip is muted.

So let's say you're using 6 mics on your kit, and you record 5 takes before you start comping. At that point, you'll have 30 audio files streaming from the disk every time you hit Play (or begin overdubbing).

The way I found out about this is that I once had a friend do 20 takes of drums on my kit with 4 mics on it. That project got kinda sluggish, so I set about trying to figure out why. I used Resource Monitor to see what Cakewalk was doing.

What can you do to alleviate it without deleting the tracks or takes? Archiving tracks stops the audio in them from being streamed. What I do to set takes aside until I'm ready for them, or just for deep storage in case I want to use them for further comping is that I drag the takes to new tracks and then put them all in a folder and Archive them.

Mr. Cook and I have advocated for a means to archive Take Lanes in addition to entire tracks, but it doesn't seem to be on the horizon yet.

[Waldemar Pawlik]

On 2/1/2022 at 10:51 AM, Starship Krupa said:

 

So let's say you're using 6 mics on your kit, and you record 5 takes before you start comping. At that point, you'll have 30 audio files streaming from the disk every time you hit Play (or begin overdubbing).

 

Woah ... I didn't know this. All the more reason to plan your takes and overduds, especially in a busy mix.