Dropouts have suddenly increased, making Cakewalk unusable! HELP!!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Eurythmic
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Eurythmic

Eurythmic

majordomo plasticomo
Yesterday, I began to have a serious problem with Cakewalk - When I begin to play back even just a single track, after about a second of playing, the hard drive usage meter will suddenly go up to 100% and I'll have a dropout.

I've been using Cakewalk for over a year now without any problems! At first I thought, "Well, I'm just late for a hard drive defrag. Loaded up my defrag software and found that my HDD was only 11% fragmented - hardly enough to render Cakewalk unusable, I thought - but I went through the process anyway. When it was done, I loaded my project again - and once again, I couldn't play it back.

This isn't making any sense at all.

At the begninning of my project, only one track plays. I couldn't even get that one track to play, so I raised the buffer size to the maximum, and tripled the number of buffers to 12. This allowed me to at least play the track, but hard drive usage was being reported at around 80%. This is just NOT right!

Later in the song, I had recorded about ten different vocal takes for a particular section. Recording was absolutely no problem - I did that about four nights ago. I'd pared it down to my three favorite takes, and tonight I thought I'd do a little A/B'ing and pick the best one. Even with the maximum buffer size and 12 buffers, I couldn't play more than a second of audio without the playback stopping.

Keep in mind that I've never had any difficulty working with 15-20 simultaneous tracks, using Cakewalk's default buffer settings!

The one change that I've made, and I'm almost positive that these problems didn't happen until I made the change, was "upgrading" from DirectX 7 to DirectX8, so I could play a game that required it.

I'm running Windows '98. My computer is a self-built machine. The CPU is a Celeron at 466mhz, and I have 128MB of RAM.

Could DirectX8 be causing this problem? Does anyone have ANY ideas for how to fix it? Cakewalk is completely unusable as it is. And you can't just remove DirectX. I have no idea how I can revert to DirectX7.

I'm desperate!
 
Oh...

I should mention that I'm using Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.02. I'm currently downloading the patch to 9.03, but the list of fixes says nothing about DirectX 8 compliance...
 
False alarm, I guess!

Never mind, I got it all sorted out.

Let this be a reference for anyone else who might run into the same problem...

Got Cakewalk 9?

Got DirectX 8?

Get Cakewalk 9.03!

Problem solved. :) Whew! Back to recording...
 
AAAaa-a-a-argh!!!

Well, forget that. Cakewalk worked perfectly for about 20 minutes, and now it doesn't again.

I'll start playing the project, in the section where there are about five tracks going. It'll play about one second, shoing 14% hard drive usage, and then it'll just stop and say "dropout". No explanation.

ANY hints would be appreciated, here.

I'm using no effects. Just playing back the dry tracks.
 
Okay, I think I've finally found the solution. For anyone who may need this in the future, check this out:

http://www.directxbuster.de/index_e.html

It's a third-party uninstaller for DirectX, and there are links to download whichever version of DirectX you want to use. I was able to revert back to DirectX7, and now Cakewalk seems to work just fine.

Whew!
 
RWhite -

Read your other post. You should really look into Sound Forge 5.0. It does have a DirectX combination compressor/limiter in it called Wave Hammer. Most excellent. You can use either the compressor or the limiter - by bypassing one - or you can use both simultaneously. And for $129.00 (great price!), you will also get a pretty damn good mastering and wave editing program.

I mostly use the WaveHammer limiter on my final mixes for boosting the volume. The only other limiter I've seen in its league is the Waves L1 Ultramaximizer. (I don't know who thinks up the names for these things, but they are both tremendous tools.) The Waves products, though, are real resource hogs. Apparently their code has not been optimized for the Windows platform. They are starting to do that now.
 
BTW, to Eurthymic

In addition to defragging your HD, you also might want to occasionally look at compacting your audio data within Cakewalk. Particularly if you have done a lot of takes, as you indicate. This will place all your audio into a single file which CW seems to be able to deal with much easier.

Whenever I find I'm starting to get dropouts in a particular project, compacting the audio usually clears it up.

I think the function is on your Tools menu (at least it is in Sonar).
 
Thanks for the hint. I'd actually tried that too, several times...Tried closing the project and opening it fresh, nothing worked. I'm convinced that DirectX 8 was the issue - I haven't gone back to recording tonight, but I worked with Cakewalk for about a half hour last night after reverting to DX 7 - no problems.

Looks like I'll have to hold off on DX 8 for a while. From the sound of it, if I want full compatibility I'll have to get Sonar, ditch my Voodoo3, and possibly even my AWE64Gold, too. I'm not in a hurry to do all that. :)
 
Or rather, I'd be fine with all those upgrades - it's my wallet that isn't in a hurry!
 
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