Intermittent Recording Issue – Tracks Appear to Record but Disappear After Stopping

[Adam]

@Noel Borthwick Hi Noel,

I thought I'd move this topic to the correct forum now that I'm using the latest version of Cakewalk Sonar.  I've attached a short screen capture where you can see this problem occuring. Trying to record a guitar line and a mic'ed up amp, and, you can see the guitar line just disappears once I hit stop.  Anyway, issue pasted below. 

Hi all,

I've been experiencing a frustrating and increasingly frequent issue in Cakewalk Sonar where record-enabled tracks seem to be tracking during recording but disappear once I hit stop. The issue isn't consistent across all tracks—sometimes, I’ll record multiple tracks simultaneously, and while some tracks capture properly, others fail to record at all.

A few key details:

The issue occurs intermittently but has become more frequent over the last six months.

There are no punch-in points set elsewhere in the project that could be interfering.

The waveform appears while recording, as if the take is being captured, but as soon as I stop recording, the affected track(s) are empty.  There is no record of the track in the recording folder when I checked afterwards.

It happens across different projects and isn’t tied to a specific template or setup.

I'm working in a professional studio environment, so this is becoming a serious problem for sessions.

Has anyone else encountered this? Are there any known fixes or workarounds? I’d appreciate any insights or troubleshooting steps you can recommend.

Thanks!

Adam

2025-02-17 10-55-22.mkv

Edited Monday at 02:45 AM by Adam

[Sock Monkey]

Ya A lot of people don’t know what happened in Cakewalk Land over the last few years. They seem to be keeping it a big secret. 🤫 

This seems like it could be possibly equipment related? 
What audio interface are you using? 

[Adam]

It's not equipment related: I use multiple DAWs and Cakewalk is the only DAW that behaves like this.  I have an RME Madi FX PCIe interface which connects to three individual Orion32 interfaces via MADI.

Edited Monday at 08:26 AM by Adam

[Adam]

http://forum.cakewalk.com/Recording-Disappears-m3776475.aspx - Here's an older post where a lot of people were having the same problem.  @Noel Borthwick

[Noel Borthwick]

On 2/16/2025 at 9:47 PM, Adam said:

It's not equipment related: I use multiple DAWs and Cakewalk is the only DAW that behaves like this.  I have an RME Madi FX PCIe interface which connects to three individual Orion32 interfaces via MADI.

You can't assume that necessarily. Its not that abnormal to have an issue which is driver or system related that only shows up with one DAW.
Not saying that that is the case here but there is some environmental issue that triggers this that obviously most users never see.

So you stop recording, the recording appears and then spontaneously disappears shortly afterwards?
If you watch the wave data folder in file explorer while recording, do you see the file get created and then removed shortly after?

Another thing to check is your recording drive. Check for disk errors and also check if you have any software (such as one drive) monitoring the folder where audio is recorded. If a program locks the file it can fail recording. Most of the times where people have encountered such issues it has been related to problems like this. 

[David Baay]

On 2/16/2025 at 7:47 PM, Adam said:

It's not equipment related: I use multiple DAWs and Cakewalk is the only DAW that behaves like this.  I have an RME Madi FX PCIe interface which connects to three individual Orion32 interfaces via MADI.

I notice the transport module in your video is showing the record bit depth is 32...? A quick Google confirms the RME is  24-bit. Any particular reason you have it set to 32? Whatever the reason, I would suggest changing it to 24 to eliminate that as a possible cause.

Edited Tuesday at 09:43 PM by David Baay

[Sock Monkey]

1 hour ago, David Baay said:

I notice the transport module in your video is showing the record bit depth is 32...? A quick Google confirms the RME is  24-bit. Any particular reason you have it set to 32? Whatever the reason, I would suggest changing it to 24 to eliminate that as a possible cause.

That’s interesting. I wonder what happens if you mismatch the bit depth for live recording ? Unlike Clock rate  bit depth doesn’t necessarily matter much and Sonar can have multiple bit depth files. As in you can import a 16 , 24 or a 32  all in the same project. The clock rate will be converted if you say drag a 44.1 into a 48 project. But the bit rate stays the same. 

24 is pretty much what all interfaces use and it’s a setting that can’t  be changed in the Driver settings tab. Normally it is greyed out and shows as 24.
But interestingly enough you can set it up in the  audio Data tab to as high as 64. 
It seems to me this would still work but obviously creates unnecessary huge files that are not of better quality because it is still a 24 bit input. 
My Zoom interface does record at 32. But the experts say that it’s a pointless feature. 

[Noel Borthwick]

Recording at a higher depth that the interfaces provides is just padding silence.