Stops during playback

[SANDMAN]

my cakewalk6 express stops during playback, I hit play and it will start playing agin but a few sec later it will stop agin. Can anyone help me with this problem?

[cjohn]

You didn't say what operating system you are using. I had the same problem with CW6 and it turned out to be CW6 does not work in Windows98. I had to upgrade to CW8. If you are using Windows95 and having this problem, I might suggest you go to Cakewalk's site. They have an excellent FAQ section there. I've been working with CW for 3 years now and have only had to call tech support twice. I've been able to find the answers to most of the problems I run across in the FAQ section. Hope that helps.

[SANDMAN]

I'm using Win98 but I have been using it for a while and I'm just now having this problem I must have changed something. Well I will soon be getting CW9 so that should solve the problem i hope. Thank for the help

[amonte]

I had a similar problem using Cakewalk (I believe 7) and a SB Awe 64 card. Alhough it's not the best solution, I was able to get Cakewalk to work flawlessly with digital audio by disabling most of the MIDI features on my sound card.

[DropD]

It's called "dropout", at least Cakewalk 9 explains you what just happened, where Cakewalk 6 just stop playing. It's simply because it couldn't receive all the audio data in time, or the cpu was too busy and Cakewalk could go on.

[crosstudio]

how often do you defragment your hard drive? i'm assuming that you compact your audio after you do any substantial audio processing. normally, i compact the audio after any session wherein i've done any processing, and i defrag my disk once a week (well i forget alot, but i do it on sunday nights).

in addition, i keep my executables and my audio on separate drives. my cakewalk, wavecenter, and redroaster software is on the C drive, and the audio is on my SCSI drive.

sean IzReal wright http://www.crosstudio.net
recording@crosstudio.net

[crosstudio]

how often do you defragment your hard drive? i'm assuming that you compact your audio after you do any substantial audio processing. normally, i compact the audio after any session wherein i've done any processing, and i defrag my disk once a week (well i forget alot, but i do it on sunday nights).

in addition, i keep my executables and my audio on separate drives. my cakewalk, wavecenter, and redroaster software is on the C drive, and the audio is on my SCSI drive.

sean IzReal wright http://www.crosstudio.net
recording@crosstudio.net

[Lambo]

Cakewalk 9 gobbles up memory like there is no tomorrow. I never experienced this problem with Cakewalk 8. All things considered I find Version 9 to be superior to 8. The unfortunate trade-off for the improvement is the fact that it eats memory. I have upgraded my system to 256MB of SDRAM and I continue to experience Dropout with as few as six audio tracks despite the recommended corrective actions (i.e., defragment drive, minimize TSR programs, optimal global settings etc.) Santa Claus brought me an additional 128MB which I am glad to report has helped the cause.

[drstawl]

What's the improvement if you're getting dropouts when playing 6 tracks? With 384MB
how far can you push it before getting dropouts? And what CPU are these MBs hooked up to?

[cwillu]

gee, I'm getting 8 tracks with an eq on each channel in CW8 with a lowly P166 and 64 megs!
How fast is your SCSI drive?

[MrLip]

Is it RAM that cake9 is eating? Does it eat alot of CPU as well (compared to cake8)? With cake8 I could play at least 8 audio tracks with no problem. Since upgrading to 9, as little as 4 audio tracks gives me problems. It skips, studders, pops, drops out; it's terrible.

Is adding more RAM to my system the solution? Is cake9 really that resource consuming?

My machine is a PII-333MHz, 64MB RAM, ultra-ata/33 ide hard drive, running win98SE

[This message has been edited by MrLip (edited 12-30-1999).]

[MrLip]

maybe we should all go back to cake 8 =)

[DropD]

It's funny that you say you have problems with 256mb, I only have 64mb on a lowly 166MMX, BUT I have a fast-ATA hard drive that spins at 7200RPM. I do experience drop-outs once in a while, but most of the time I can have 10 audio tracks at the same time with no problem.

[Lambo]

My earlier post with regard to the Version 9 being superior to 8 was tongue in cheek. I have a PII 350 MMX with 256MB (I put the other 128MB in the wife's computer) of SDRAM, hard drive is 10.2G 7200 /Win 98. I have the SoundBlaster Live! audio card. I did experience dropout with Version 9 having two stereo music tracks and four stereo vocal tracks. The meter for the disk pegged in the red prior to dropout. I wrote to Cakewalk Support concerning this problem to which I recieved a timely response with several corrective actions to take. The most improvement was achieved after increasing the buffer size to (8) found in Options-Audio. Having implemented all of the corrective actions I have a project file consisting of six stereo tracks with Cakewalk Fx applied to each yielding a marginal condition (disk meter max's in the yellow). Now here's one for the books! For grins I copied and pasted the two stereo music tracks and the four stereo vocal tracks, Fx and all to arrive at twelve stereo tracks. Based on previous performance you'd a thought the dropout would be simultaneous when I hit the play button. Not so! Now the CPU meter max's at 10% whereas the Disk meter reads 20%. Can anyone explain how doubling the tracks improved audio performance?

[monty]

The wrong software driver for your hard drive may be the problem. Go to the Winmag website and run Wintune to see what your hard drive transfer rate is (uncached). Mine was about 1.5 megs per second until I switched to a different driver. Now it's almost 20 megs per second, eliminating clicks and stops. I found the Windows 95 driver works best for me running under Windows 98 as opposed to the factory driver.

[rex]

My GuitarTracks was skipping during recording. I found some advanced options and bumped up the playback and record buffers to 4 and 6 respectively, and it solved my skipping problem.

[TomInLaksd]

wow... I wish I could have stuck with 4.0. I'm getting tired of all this fancy UI stuff.. I want the old, simple UI that put a maximum of information in a minimum of space..

oh well.

[cwillu]

Lambo (and anyone else interested)

Just got a brainwave (scary):

That sudden increase in performance may be due to the fact Windows stopped trying to cache the audio data as it was being played back, and therefore allowed cakewalk to do things its own (better) way. Just a thought...

William Underwood