How do I tweak this?

[guitar ed]

I installed CEP 2.0. I used to use 1.2a awhile back, so I'm pretty good in Cool Edit. However, when I load a couple MIDI tracks (bass and drums) and push 'play', the thing just sits there for at least a minute and a half, then it spits out a bunch of terrible noise, which I've concluded is the first measure or two all at once. I can't find anything that allows me to set a number of MIDI buffers, so I guess I don't know where to go to make an adjustment. I have a PIII 600Mhz, 256 MB RAM, WIN XP, and I use a SB Live soundcard, with soundfonts for MIDI sounds. I can run Sonar just fine, so I don't think my machine is weak. This has to be a buffer setting somewhere.
I got this from a friend of mine who works at a radio station, still in the box and plastic. Never installed, and my name isn't Peter Quistgard! Can anyone help me out here? Thanks

Ed

[Dakota]

Hey Ed, do midi files play correctly with other programs? And does a single midi file play correctly with CEP?

[guitar ed]

Hi, Dakota. Yeah, the files play fine in other applications, and they will also play fine in CEP, once they get going. This can pose a serious problem when it comes to converting all my individual drum tracks to audio. I did discover that my computer was only detecting 128 MB of RAM. So I stuck in a new RAM card, and now I'm back at 256, which seems to have improved the situation a lot. But when I load a MIDI file and press 'play', there's still that moment of hesitation, and the first measure or two are real fast, like it knows it's supposed to be playing, but it has to rush to catch up to where it should be. Does that make sense? I tried a couple of the tweaks in the manual, such as wave cache size, but I run XP, so some of the suggestions don't apply. I'm going to try to record some drum tracks today and see if I have this solved, blaming most of this on the RAM thing, but in the meantime, if you think of anything I might be overlooking, I would appreciate any insight. Thanks very much.

Ed

[Dakota]

Can't think of anything obvious...right...now.... I actually havn't done too much midi work with CEP. I usually export to wav files and go from there. If you have a program that will render midi as wav files, it might provide you with a work-around to this problem untill you are able to figure it out.

[guitar ed]

Well, I went ahead and upgraded to Audition 1.0. So far, so good. I really think the RAM issue was the culprit here, even though MIDI files should use almost none. Thanks for your replies, and I'm gonna buckle down and get re-aquainted with this program.

ed