Cakewalk sometimes does not play some or part of instruments' tracks

[El Gato Loco]

Hi there,

I0m experiencing a very weird problem

Sometimes hitting play, it happens that some instruments are not played at all or played partially

If I stop and play again, it starts playing everything correctly, but during the same working session the problem happens various times

For example. Sometime the Drum truck doesn't play the kick and some of the hihat. 

For other tracks, like synth or brass, again it is missing some notes.

If I stop, go back to the beginning of the song, and play it again it fix it , but is suddenly happen several times during the same session,

Note: the problem IS ALWAYS happening when I load the project and hit play for the fist time.

System performance are below 40% of CPU usage .Even the ram is at the same %.

Any idea?

Edited September 30, 2022 by El Gato Loco

[Terry Kelley]

I see this too. Restarting the track seems to clear it up. It appears to happen when I do a very rapid start/stop a couple of times with the space-bar. I've never figured out why. It's like half the instruments don't start.

[David Baay]

Try increasing the MIDI "Prepare Using" Buffer under Preferences > MIDI > Playback and Recording.

I believe the default is 50ms. My desktop DAW with ASIO runs fine at 20, but my slowest laptop with WASAPI needs 100.

[El Gato Loco]

7 hours ago, David Baay said:

Try increasing the MIDI "Prepare Using" Buffer under Preferences > MIDI > Playback and Recording.

I believe the default is 50ms. My desktop DAW with ASIO runs fine at 20, but my slowest laptop with WASAPI needs 100.

I didn't touch it and I see it is at 200 ms. I'm running ASIO

Currently using 

Surface Book 2 with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8650U CPU and 16 GB di Ram

Interesting the fact that I tried to move all VSTs I had to another external SSD  and ... it seems much better.!!

Really don't know if it is related to that, but in my last working session on the same project, I experienced very few of the issue mentioned.

 

Btw. I'm now building a new workstation ..

Waiting from my parts to arrive

Intel Core i7-12700KF, S-1700, 5.00GHz, 8-Core 

32 GB DDR5

Asus Z690-A

SAMSUNG Electronics 870 EVO 2TB 2.5

This way I'll remove any computing capacity from the equation.

 

[El Gato Loco]

Unfortunately , the issue is not resolved by moving VST .. as I think everything is loaded into memory.

I've noticed that if I'm recording a Midi Track while the issue happens, the midi track is OR recorded at wrong bit (it's moved by a 1/16 ..1/8  forward compared to when I recorded it) or it's not recorded at all.
After looking at the ,manual, I tried increasing the Number of Buffers to 128.

 

Edited October 1, 2022 by El Gato Loco

[David Baay]

54 minutes ago, El Gato Loco said:

After looking at the ,manual, I tried increasing the Number of Buffers to 128.

I assume you mean Buffer Size in samples...? ASIO buffer size shouldn't really have a bearing on soft-synth rendering so long as you're not actually getting audio engine dropouts. It takes a fairly well-tuned machine (low and stable DPC latency with reputable ASIO interface and drivers) to run cleanly at buffer sizes below 128, but I do it all the time on my desktop DAW and do not encounter soft synth rendering issues. But I have seen/heard dropped MIDI notes on  laptops using WASAPI with not the greatest DPC latency, especially if the MIDI Prepare Using buffer is too low.

[abacab]

20 hours ago, El Gato Loco said:

Unfortunately , the issue is not resolved by moving VST .. as I think everything is loaded into memory.

I've noticed that if I'm recording a Midi Track while the issue happens, the midi track is OR recorded at wrong bit (it's moved by a 1/16 ..1/8  forward compared to when I recorded it) or it's not recorded at all.
After looking at the ,manual, I tried increasing the Number of Buffers to 128.

 

As a starting point set your buffers to 256 or even higher, until it resolves the problem. As David said, anything below 128 takes a highly tuned system.

[Will.]

Yeah. This happens some times. I just never think anything of it. It's not only specific to instrument tracks though. 

Edited October 2, 2022 by Will.

[David Baay]

A couple other thoughts in case this is project-specific.

- Having MIDI FX in a project can mess with buffering, even if the FX is not on the track that's mis-behaving. Improvments to the MIDI buffering implementation some years ago eliminated some issues from Pre-Bandlab versions but some may persist.

- In the past I have also seen issues with a particular note being consistently dropped that would resolve when the note was moved a single tick or the tempo was changed by a single point. I believe this is more common when all MIDI start times and durations are quantized 100% to the grid so that many notes are starting/ending at the same time on different instruments. This isn't as likely to happen if you record MIDI in real time and don't hard-quantize.

[57Gregy]

On 9/30/2022 at 11:06 PM, El Gato Loco said:

I didn't touch it and I see it is at 200 ms. I'm running ASIO

What audio interface are you using? ASIO with a RealTek would be a problem.

[abacab]

1 hour ago, 57Gregy said:

What audio interface are you using? ASIO with a RealTek would be a problem.

Since no interface was mentioned, RealTek would be a BIG problem running with a buffer size of 128 or less!

[msmcleod]

It's hard to give a definitive answer without knowing much more detail about your system, but the fact that you say it improved when you moved to an SSD leaves me to suspect this is simply due to some of the instrument samples having not been loaded yet.

A lot of sample based VSTi's load samples on demand - i.e. they'll only load the C3 at velocity 64 sample when you actually play it.  Some also have a limit as to how much memory they'll use for samples before they swap out older samples (i.e. ones that haven't been played for a while) for newer ones.  This behaviour is usually configurable within the VSTi plugin itself.

Although some VSTi's allow you to load ALL of the samples up front, this isn't usually desirable as:
1. It'll use up an enormous amount of memory
2. It'll take ages to load them all
3. You probably won't be using every note, at every velocity over 6-8 octaves.

Well written VSTi's should remember which notes were played, and therefore which samples you actually need within a session.  It should then load these samples upon opening your project.

You usually have to play your project all the way through first before saving your project for it to have an accurate idea of this though.