CWPA 9 - the dropouts that should not be?

[Oysterman]

Hey all,

I'm still a relatively new CWPA 9 user, only having run it for a month or so. It has worked nicely so far, but I bumped into a strange thing recently.

One, and only one, of my .wrk projects seems to get hard drive dropouts every time I try to play it. Since it's only 8 mono 24/48 tracks, I find it strange. My computer should be able to handle up to 50 tracks without even breaking a sweat, as it seems to do on other songs, but not this one. I can get around one or two seconds of playback before the HDD meter goes to 100% (CPU usage is then around 2-3%) and a dropout occurs.
Have anyone else encountered these mysterious dropouts? Why do they happen? And only on this particular song???

 

[rjt]

I have noted that Sonar seems to be a bit of a resource hog. I have had similar problems... I was recording a track 24 bit 44.1khz, playing the midi and recording a synth. All other tracks (about 5 audio and 3 midi were archived... not merely muted). My cpu usage was showing 0 and my disk usage was 2%. I got droppouts and a message saying it could not record the track and my disk may be full. Recorded fine on the next pass.

I have really tweaked the computer for audio (although there are sometimes contradictory suggestions for how to do this). I have a P3 at 800 with 256 ram and scsi drives.... should be able to record one track!

Also, this could be a videocard question (Cakewalk says it is but offers no suggestions about what to do... I have a Matrox Milenium)... but no matter what I am playing... even one track of audio, when I open the mixing view, I get drop outs immediately and can't get it to play at all. Aaaarrrrgggghhhh.

I lean toward problems with Sonar programming because in Vegas, I have run 16 tracks with no problems (havn't needed more).

 

[Oysterman]

Update on my part: I have discovered that the dropouts are random after all, but that doesn't make it any less strange. They don't happen very often, and when they do, restarting Cakewalk is usually enough for me... still annoying though, as I too have configured my PC for optimum performance.

Could it be because the wave data is read from and written to the slave drive and not the master (I have two HDD's)? I think I'll reconnect some wires and try again... if it doesn't help, I think I too will blame my video card (Diamond Stealth S540 III).

 

[Oysterman]

Update on my part: I have discovered that the dropouts are random after all, but that doesn't make it any less strange. They don't happen very often, and when they do, restarting Cakewalk is usually enough for me... still annoying though, as I too have configured my PC for optimum performance (P3 733 / 256).

Could it be because the wave data is read from and written to the slave drive and not the master (I have two HDD's)? I think I'll reconnect some wires and try again... if it doesn't help, I think I too will blame my video card (Diamond Stealth S540 III).