Track templates crashing Cakewalk, especially when recording..

[Christian Jones]

So I'm an amp sim user and I've been creating track templates that are basically bass amp rigs that consist of two audio tracks, each loaded w/ an amp sim and IR loader (Brainworx Ampeg VR and Kazrog Recabinet 5 and a Brainworx distortion pedal on one of them), an aux track for fx that's currently dormant w/ nothing loaded on it and which both audio tracks are sent to, and three stereo buses to manage it all - and all of that is saved into a track template so I can recall the amp rig easily and load it into any song and go. I have a couple of bass rigs like this that I made yesterday, and yesterday they were loading up into a clean session and playing just fine, though I hadn't tried to actually record any audio on these tracks once they were loaded from the template.. until tonight... So tonight I started trying to record audio on these template tracks and the waveform starts drawing like normal, but when I stop recording the time line freezes where I stopped it and soon after I get the "Not Responding" as the screen fades to white. About 7 seconds later when Cakewalk starts responding it behaves all wacky, where pressing "W" which usually rewinds the Now Time line instead immedaiely starts replaying from it's current position each time I press "W" and won't stop. The Now Time line itself glitches on the screen and weird stuff like that. A couple of times tonight just merely loading the template into Cakewalk made Cakewalk not respond.

I recreated one of these amp rigs on the fly w/o saving it to a template and found that I was able to record on the tracks just fine. But when I saved it as a template and loaded it into a clean session and went to record I got the same behavior as described above, so I believe it's the Cakewalk templates that are the issue and probably not any of those Brainworx amps or the Kazrog IR loader that's loaded onto those tracks, but idk. Those are supposed to be quality plugs and this issue only happens when saving and loading these rings from a template. Any ideas what's going on? I was really looking forward to being able to create these amp rigs into easily recall-able templates ?

Edited November 4, 2019 by Christian Jones

[DeeringAmps]

Aux tracks have created issues for me in the past. Try the template without the aux. Haven’t had aux issues in a long time. Send the template to Noel. 

Tom

[lapasoa]

Aux tracks have created issues for me too.. Sending your signal/signals to a bus is much better.

[Robert Bone]

I have always gone the bus route - just habit, for me.

Bob Bone

[David Baay]

If you save a copy of the track template without the plugins loaded, does that cause trouble by itself when re-loaded?

If so, maybe share a copy of that 'empty' template for others to try and see if it's reproducible on other platforms.

Edited November 4, 2019 by David Baay

[Christian Jones]

7 minutes ago, David Baay said:

If you save a copy of the track template without the plugins loaded, does that cause trouble by itself when re-loaded?

If so, maybe share a copy of that 'empty' template for others to try and see if it's reproducible on other platforms.

Thanks I'm going to test this today - this problem happened at the end of my night/session so I didn't get a chance to do the elimination process last night. After I do more due diligence I'll see about contacting support if necessary and will update here. 

For future reference how would I share a copy of the template? You mean just outline in detail how I created it, or would I upload the actual template file in a post here and that would work? 

[Christian Jones]

52 minutes ago, lapasoa said:

Aux tracks have created issues for me too.. Sending your signal/signals to a bus is much better.

 

49 minutes ago, Robert Bone said:

I have always gone the bus route - just habit, for me.

Bob Bone

Well I do send the bass tracks to buses, but that aux track is for FX, like if I want to add a chorus pedal or an octaver etc that I can run both amps (i.e. both audio tracks) through, so the aux track is basically the shared pedal board for both bass amps. Are you guys saying that instead of using an aux track for this I should use a stereo bus as my shared pedal board, put any bass effects on there and send the two audio amp sim tracks to this bus instead of an aux track? 

What I have are two audio tracks where I run a dual amp rig for basically real-time parallel processing or whatever you want to call it - one track w/ a clean amp, one w/ a dirty fuzz amp, and each of those get sent to their own stereo bus (clean and dirty buses respectively) so I can keep the audio tracks at unity while being able to blend the two amps with the bus faders. Then those two buses are sent to a "Bass Master" bus, and *all* of this, tracks and buses, is part of the template I've made. 

Btw, a side note: if you change the bus colors those colors don't get saved in the template - the track colors do, bus colors don't, but of course that's the least of the problems. 

Edited November 4, 2019 by Christian Jones

[Robert Bone]

I wasn't recommending one method over the other - sorry I wasn't clear about that.  I was just indicating that I always use buses, rather than aux tracks, SO, i do not know if there are any issues or things to look out for, etc., when dealing with using aux tracks instead of buses.

I will do some digging into this, because I did want to look at the pros and cons of potentially using aux tracks - so being as how it is already on my loooooong list of things to learn about, might as well be today. 

Bob Bone

 

[David Baay]

2 hours ago, Christian Jones said:

For future reference how would I share a copy of the template?

Track templates are saved as .cwx files in this default location:

C:\Cakewalk Content\Cakewalk Core\Track Templates

[Robert Bone]

I am just beginning to take a deeper dive into using Aux Tracks, versus Buses, and started with a quick Google and YouTube search on the matter, having recalled that Craig Anderton had written up some guidance on using Aux Tracks.

I will circle back after I learn some more about the whole thing, but thought maybe some info in some of the following might be of value to you, in the meantime:
 

Here are some links to pages and videos that have a lot of good info on Aux Tracks and Patch Points, and I threw in a couple additional ones that might be useful just to take a spin through:

Here are some links to pages and videos that have a lot of good info on Aux Tracks and Patch Points, and I threw in a couple additional ones that might be useful just to take a spin through:

Aux Tracks and Patch Points SONAR Platinum and Professional

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCAlFThGvH8 

Parallel Compression Using Aux Tracks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzZD-Cj_X1g&t=11s

NoelBorthwick Best Practices Page 2 - there is some guidance on Aux Tracks here, along with some other great guidance

http://www.noelborthwick.com/cakewalk/category/daw-best-practices/page/2/ 

This next one is just the 1st page of Noel's best practices guidance - not related to Aux Tracks, but might as well get both pages

http://www.noelborthwick.com/cakewalk/category/daw-best-practices/page/1/ 

Videos on YouTube:

What are Aux Tracks 7:20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umXC0z-Nc70

Using Aux Tracks in Sonar 7:03

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyyx76v9DSE

Routing Busing Tracks in Cakewalk Sonar 14:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKROW94UuA

How to set up project and track templates in Cakewalk Sonar 19:48

https://youtu.be/_GrACEsZOCs

 

 

Even if you just take a quick peek at the pages - and maybe watch a tiny bit of any of the videos, hopefully you will find some useful info, I will be doing the same, and am QUITE sure I will learn a lot in the process, 

Bob Bone

[Christian Jones]

4 hours ago, Robert Bone said:

Here are some links to pages and videos that have a lot of good info on Aux Tracks and Patch Points, and I threw in a couple additional ones that might be useful just to take a spin through:

Thanks for digging that stuff up Bob, some great references for anyone for this thread. Did you learn anything good? I'll check them out tomorrow, I was busy af today.

[Christian Jones]

So I did some testing today and recreated my Bass Buzz Fuzz dual amp rig template. Here's what it consists of (I've attached the .cwx template too for anyone interested):

One audio track which is the Bass DI track and I use that track as a splitter and send it pre-fader to two aux tracks: Aux Track 1 is the clean amp and Aux Track 2 is the fuzz amp. The Bass DI track's fader is all the way down, but input monitoring is enabled so it's signal can be sent to the aux tracks (hence how I use the Bass DI track as a virtual splitter). The Bass DI and the two aux tracks are sent to a third aux called "Bass FX" and its function is for when I want to add effects like chorus etc - currently the Bass FX's fader is all the way down and input monitoring is off; its just there in case. The Bass DI audio track and the three aux tracks are kept in a track folder. And the Bass DI, the clean amp aux and the fuzz amp aux are each sent to their own stereo bus, and those buses are sent to a Bass Master bus. That's the basic template sans the plugins...

Here's the plugins that get used on the tracks:
Bass DI (audio): nothing
Bass Clean (aux): Brainworx Ampeg VR
Bass Fuzz (aux): Brainworx Ampeg VR and Brainworx bx_blackdist2 after the amp (Rat 2 distortion pedal)
Bass FX (aux): nothing currently

So on the blank template (no plugins), after it's been saved as a template and loaded into a clean session I'm able to play, record and play back just fine.. BUT, incidentally, I found that the Aux input settings do not get saved properly in the template; I had the clean amp and fuzz amp aux tracks each set to mono input when saving the template, but the template loads w/ the aux inputs set to stereo, and I re-saved the template a few times to verify that, so that sucks.

So in a clean session I re-built the template piece by piece and saved versions of it each time I added another element of the whole template, and each version of the template I made I would start over w/ fresh tracks etc, not previous template tracks... First I just did the tracks and buses then saved. Next version I added the orange color to the tracks. Next version I added the track folder. Next three versions I added one of the three plugins at a time. Last version I added the bass guitar icons... After each template version I tested record and playback several times and everything was working fine.

I don't know why it worked out fine today but I don't think this is over. This Bass Buzz Fuzz template I made today worked, but the previous one that I built the same way was glitching bad and acting all crazy - not just this template, but another one like it also went haywire. I've had various track templates cause Cakewalk to freeze before, like MIDI track templates which I verified previously, which would cause my Now Time line to glitch and hang for a few seconds upon stopping playback before it finally obeyed the initial command and rewound. I'm wondering if these templates somehow get corrupted. I'll test more tomorrow, I'm not convinced everything is ok.

There's the template down there if interested.

Bass Buzz Fuzz Rig template.cwx

[David Baay]

Looked at it briefly last night. Didn't see anything particularly unusual about the set, except for the mono inputs to Aux tracks getting set to stereo as you mentioned. It could be related to how the template is structured when all the components are already in the project on the first save. Possibly your progressive build-up bypassed a bug. That'll be difficult to track down. Maybe best to let the Baker look one of the broken templates alongside the working one.