Playback stuck at beginning of timeline, won't budge, I'm gonna cry

[Lucie]

Hi!

I'm having an issue since this morning. When I press play, the cursor stays stuck very rapidly going back and forth between 00:00:00:00 and 00:00:00:01. Every now and then, it will randomly decide to go through and play correctly (I can hear my audio perfectly fine when it does, so it's not an audio output issue), but then it gets stuck at the start again and I can't scrub through my timeline. When I try and put the cursor anywhere, it snaps back to the start.

I did not have this issue before, and I didn't change anything since yesterday. I tried restarting  Cakewalk a few times, opening new projects, but nothing works. I've also tried changing from  WASAPI to MME and ASIO, same issue. 

I'm still a newbie and don't know much about hardware so please explain everything like you would to a very stupid 10 year old who somehow got access to all of this. Thank you so much in advance for your help!

 

[Lucie]

Hey Tim, thanks for the reply but that doesn't seem to be the issue. Pressing L doesn't change anything, my cursor is still stuck at the start.

[Lucie]

my Cakewalk is in french but you get the point haha

[Lucie]

Sadly that didn't change anything either...

I'll PM you a link to the project, but it's empty (I created this one purely for testing out this issue, this is happening with all of my other projects as well).  If you can find anything in there that'd be awesome, but it does look more like a set up or hardware issue to me too (which, once again, doesn't make sense since everything worked just fine last time I used it yesterday).

 

[Lucie]

I recorded a little video to show you guys what happens :

As you can see, the first time I play through works fine. This happens every now and then. When I then try to play again, it gets stuck at the beginning and the timer goes crazy.

2023-06-06 11-05-10.mkv

[Lucie]

When the track plays correctly, the audio is fine. I did get the "audio device dropout error" (or something similar?) once, but every over time I get no warning from Cakewalk that something's wrong.

I'm using WASAPI Shared.  Just tried switching to Exclusive - same issue.

Ticked "Suspend Audio Engine when Cakewalk is Not in Focus" - same issue.

I'll try rebooting my machine and opening Cakewalk first, and report back on what happens.

Thanks a lot for your time, I really appreciate you trying to figure this mess out! ?

[Lucie]

...... aaaaaand it worked!!

Restarting my laptop and opening Cakewalk before anything else seems to have done the trick. Tried opening Youtube and Spotify after that and it still works. So you were right, something must have been hijacking my audio.

Turns out you were the Smart Person Of The Forum ?

Thanks again for your help Tim, and I hope you have a great day! 

 

[Byron Dickens]

Rebooting the computer fixes so many of these weird issues that it should be one of the first things you try

[Billy86]

On 6/6/2023 at 7:26 AM, Lucie said:

Hi!

I'm having an issue since this morning. When I press play, the cursor stays stuck very rapidly going back and forth between 00:00:00:00 and 00:00:00:01. Every now and then, it will randomly decide to go through and play correctly (I can hear my audio perfectly fine when it does, so it's not an audio output issue), but then it gets stuck at the start again and I can't scrub through my timeline. When I try and put the cursor anywhere, it snaps back to the start.

I did not have this issue before, and I didn't change anything since yesterday. I tried restarting  Cakewalk a few times, opening new projects, but nothing works. I've also tried changing from  WASAPI to MME and ASIO, same issue. 

I'm still a newbie and don't know much about hardware so please explain everything like you would to a very stupid 10 year old who somehow got access to all of this. Thank you so much in advance for your help!

 

Try this: add an audio track. Drag in some audio. Any mp3 with some run time will do. Mute the audio track. See if your simple instrument track will play. I’ve had this issue before and it seemed CW wasn’t reading anything after an initial little blip of Midi if there was no audio.  It would blip then simply stop. The added audio track gives CW something to process and should run however long the audio is and your MIDI should play.  YMMV.