distorted audio in cakewalk by bandlab

[Adrian Ramos]

Hello, I'm having trouble using Cakewalk.
The audio often gets distorted—sometimes it's only when monitoring, and other times it happens while recording over a drum track.

I'm using an M-Audio DuoTrack interface just for guitar, and Bose headphones with a cable. My PC is an Asus Vivobook 14 with 24 GB of RAM and a 12th Gen Core i7.

I've tried several things, like using ASIO drivers, changing the latency and buffer size, lowering track volumes, switching cables, and reinstalling both the interface drivers and Cakewalk, also checked the CPU and it doesnt shows full or something, also checked the audio drivers for the PC, 

I'm also using Amped Roots as a VST. I’ve attached an audio clip—distortion starts around second 15. (Please don’t judge my playing, I’m just learning the song!)

Even when I turn off the VST and play clean guitar, it still sounds distorted. I don’t know what else to try, and I’d really appreciate any help. Thanks a lot!

Edited 9 hours ago by Adrian Ramos

[Amberwolf]

I can't tell any distortion from the rest of the audio; it's all heavily distorted to my ears; I could only listen to a few seconds around the 15 mark because it is way too much for me to take (I'm autistic and the rapid pounding distorted noise like that is terrifying to me). 

 

But if you are getting distortion, the usually problem is input levels that are too high.   If your M-Audio is like m Fast Track Duo, it has a clipping light (red) on each channel by the input level knob, and is green when there's signal but no clipping.  Any red light seen means there can be distortion in the resulting audio.  

 

It can also be levels within the tracks or busses that are too high in total.  If you get it primarily when recording along with other existing tracks, and if you mute the other tracks and it goes away, you just have your track levels too high and theere's just too much total audio power for the bus(es) being fed to the master.  You'd need to turn all the track outputs down proportionally, which is easy to do in Offset mode (O on my keyboard in my ancient SONAR), then select all the volume controls in a quick group, and decrease them all by however much you need to until the problem goes away.  

 

When it is not levels that are too high, it is usually driver latency / buffering.   I use the ASIO driver from AVID (since the older M-Audio driver doesn't work in Win10 but the Avid package 1.0.4 one does), and can get as low as 7.3ms using 44100 sample rate and 320sample buffer size in the Fasttrack ASIO control panel, even while running a few dozen FX and multiple instances of Z3TA2+ and other synths, and still record stereo (or dual-mono) audio with input monitoring thru the track and bus FX.   The ancient (decade old+) laptop I use is the Lenovo ideapad 300 with only 16gb ram and a spinny HDD (not ssd, though i have one for backups I don't record to it). 

 

If you have any other ASIO drivers on the system (like ASIO4All, Steinberg ASIO, etc), they may cause problems and not let you use your real ASIO driver (or cause it to behave incorrectly), so I'd remove all of those and scrub the system of them if you can. 

 

 

Edited 5 hours ago by Amberwolf