buffers

I

icarus

New member
any advice on what i should set me buffers at. the cakewalk manual doesn't help much with this. I know i need to set it in multiples of 3 but do i go high or low. I'm recording in 24/96 from a roland xv-88 to a mia soundcard on a pentium 4 1.3 gig system.

Also, i know this is stupid, but is there a quick way to send a cakewalk file straight to my internal cd burner. cds are so cheap i figure after mixes i can take my song over to my stereo to check how it sounds on normal equipment.
 
You will have to export the wave file from Cakewalk to another location on your hard drive, like My Documents or anywhere thats convient for you. From there, you open your CD burning software and select the file and thats about it.
 
Incarus, I have my # of buffers set to 6, and the size at 325ms (all the way to the right) I don't know if that's what you're supposed to do but that's what I did. :D And since the greater the size and # of buffers will take longer to start up, but it won't dropout as quickly I figure I'll just increase the numbers till I don't get any dropouts and when I do, I add another buffer. But as you can see I'm no buffer expert, so I'll let someone else who knows what their talking about try their hand at this.

You need to export your song as a .wav file and then burn the .wav file to a CD. To do this go to tools > mixdown audio > export to files, and choose a location for it and it will be saved as a .wav file. Then you can burn the .wav file to a CD.

Hope that helps :)

-tkr
 
Icarus -

There is no set answer to your question. It all depends on your sound card, the drivers you are using, and the overall performance level of your computer. So the proper buffer setting will be a bit different on every machine.

The size and number of buffers will determine your latency. In general, the lower the latency the better. The catch is, however, that setting them too low will result in problems (dropouts, pops and clicks, etc.). So what you want to do is experiment.

When you first install Cakewalk, the program sets what it "thinks" is the right latency for your system. Generally this is a good starting point. (If you need to, you can also reestablish the initial settings by simply running the Wave Profiler in the audio setup window.)

If your system is running good with the initial settings - i.e., no dropouts or playback problems - you can try lowering the settings by either reducing the number of buffers or reducing their size by moving the slider to the left. Do this a little at a time until you start to encounter problems - then back off a bit. The goal is to get the settings as low as possible without problems.

(BTW, I have never heard that the buffers need to be set in multiples of 3. Not sure where you got this info., or if it's correct - I've never run across that.)
 
Would by chance the buffers have anything to do with Cakewalk just locking up my computer completely? I am running a AMD K62-500 with 128mb of RAM on a WinME os. I have 2 hard drives (a programs drive that is 10gb @7200rpm and an audio drive that's 40gb @7200rpm). I have a soundblaster platinum with the WinMe drivers. The only program I have installed on my system is cakewalk. Every now and then when I try to bounce 7 or 8 audio tracks to one track I sometimes get a dropout. But other than the fact that sometimes it will just completely freeze my whole system...

Vice
 
Thanks for the repliew. I'm using adaptec cd creator 4.0 and when i export cakewalk projects as audio files into, they show up in the software but when i go to burn the wav file onto a cd it says it can't read from the source. any suggestions?
 
Are you recording in 24-bit? If so, it's likely that you are also exporting 24-bit .wav files. EZ CD Creator can't work with 24-bit files, you need to convert them to 16-bit first.
 
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