Playback problem in Cakewalk Pro 9

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RWhite

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I’ve been using Cakewalk Pro 9 for some time now, with very few problems. However in my last session I had a problem with playback which I would like some advise on. I’m using Windows 98SE with a Pentium III 550 processor, 512 megs RAM. ASUS motherboard, VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset.

I record audio files only, 24 bit, 44.1 sample rate. In the past I have been able to record up 8 tracks at once and play back more than 20 without any problem. In this situation I recorded only 4 tracks, and they recorded fine. But on playback I kept getting what I can best describe as a “hiccup”, just a momentary jumble of sounds, lasting less than 1 second. The track itself is unaffected, I can rewind and play back the same passage without problem - but it may hiccup elsewhere. So my data is fine, I can mixdown audio and it comes out great, but it’s a bit annoying and causing me concern since its a new problem. I do not get a “dropout” message, and my CPU and Disk meters never go over 5%.

The only recent change I have made was to replace my 40 gig data drive with an 80 gig (the 40 became my new system drive). Both of these drives are formatted FAT32 32K clusters. The data drive had been defragmented shortly before the session. Both system and data drives have DMA ON.

Right now I have two area of concern:
(1) Should I reformat the new data drive and this time force it to 64K clusters?
(2) What are the recommended setting for disk caching in this situation? I am currently using the default windows settings, except I have the Control Panel / System / File system setting changed to “network Server” which increases both system and disk cacheing (by how much I’m not sure).

Plus is there anything else I have overlooked? I expect to be upgrading the processor to a 933 soon, but this seems more like a disk reading issue to me.
 
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hard disk speed

80G's ey? .. very nice.

compare the RPM on both drives ..

recording at 44KHz/24bits with 4 Tracks may be a killer at 5400RPM compared to a 7200RMP drive.

Also, since you have a new drive, are you sure the BUS Master controller is properly configured for UDMA operation?

Now I don't know what your operating system is so i can't tell you to go to 'control Panel' and guide you through to checking this .. but get to Device Manager somehow and take a look at the "Hard Disk Controller" section .. is the bus master an IDE Busmaster , or a VIA Bus Master .. if it's the regular IDE without mention of VIA, then you should update the drivers and ensure you're using UDMA33 mode in the least.

The difference between the two configurations is tremendous to say the least.

Let me know if i helpped you our confused you ..
 
The new drive is a Western Digital 80 gig ATA-100 7200 RPM drive.
The system drive is a Maxtor 40 gig ATA-66 7200 RPM drive. I'm running Windows 98SE. The motherboard is an ASUS P3V4X, using the VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset with a ATA-66 controller. It has recognised the the VIA controller, and I'm using the latest VIA 4in1 Bus Master driver. DMA is checked "on".

Let me know if I have confused you... :D
 
ah .. fellow techie.

well then ...

ok so you've got everything covered.

doh!

Since you have 98SE, did you try a process viewer to see what exactly is running in your system?

Aside from that, aside from a complete re-install .. i really don't know man.

I'm running .. a much less powerfull system with a VIA chipset as well and I'm doing just fine
-amd k6-2 (no laughing please!
- 448 MB RAM
- 40G 5400 RPM (again, no laughing plesae!)
- midiman audiophile 2496

so having a system like yours and having these problems is nuts.

re-install, dude.
 
oh yeah ...

have you tried messing with the chunk size?


go to analog-x.com and get the 'cache booster', it's free and works very well with SE.
fiddle with your chunk size and see if it helps at all. It's easy to do and doesn't take too much time. I've seen good improvements with that software.. there's more than just 'chunk size' to fart around with too.

then again, with a system like yours .. (i.e. "good system")
i don't know.
I once got a performance gain by swapping my ide cable with a shorter one with only one connector. (at this time you must be saying: "Jesus man .. it's not my damn hard drive .. lay off dude!")

having a piece of s*** PC like mine, i had to squeeze every ounce of juice out of it.

BTW I'm sure you got a laugh when i gave you my CPU type .. I don't put effects in Sonar .. i just mix with it but can still get a good 8 tracks easy.
(24 bit mono, 44.1KHz)
 
No, I'm not laughing. I just retired my MP3 Jukebox system, a K6-2 3d 350mhtz. It always seemed a bit slow but it servered its purpose - the K6 was never any good at floating point math, as you are well aware I'm sure. If you are making it work for you, I salute you!

I'm pretty sure that my problem IS hard drive related since that is the only thing I've changed and the system was fine before. When you say "chunk size" I assume you are talking about memory. What I'm wondering is that if my 80 gig drive formated with 32K disk clusters is just to big, and whether the hassle of reformating with 64K clusters will be worthwhile.

I will check out that web site later today...
 
chunk size

chunk size is the number of byteswritten/read from the hard disk each time.

Say you load up a 2k notepad doc and the chunk size is 32k , the drive will read 32k of contiguous data from yor drive even though you asked for 2k only.

it's good in the sense that if you then want the data that resides in the rest of the chunk, you wouldn't need to physically access the disk since the data is already in ram.

consequently, loading a 10M wave file from a configuration that's set with a 1k chunk size would result in many many reads and would be really slow.

by default i beleive SE is set to 8k chunks.
 
I believe what you are refering to to is disk cluster size. I've never heard it call chunk size, although that may well be a valid term for it.

In Fat32 I think the default cluster sizes are

8K - Partitions up to 8 gig
16K - between 8 & 16 gig
32K - anything over 16

I'm wondering 32K cluster on a 80 gig drive just might be too many disk clusters, like I said going from a 40gig to an 80 gig drive is the only change I made.

It will be a pain, but I guess I'll just have to back up all the data, reformat, and this time force it to 64K. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.... So nobody out there has had a similar situation?
 
nope.

although you should perhaps reformat ..

I was refering to the unit of data read/written by the operating system each time a read/write occures. It's controlled by the OS.

It's part of the caching mechanism. The OS only lets you tweak the SWAP file. Using the CacheBooster app from analog-x.com (you can do this in the registry as well), you can tweak the size of each I/O operation .. i.e. chunk size.

nevertheless .. i wonder how long it would take to format an 80G drive.
 
ARRRRRRRRRUUUGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!

Now I'm getting PISSED.....

I had a recording sessions last night, and just when I thought I had reached an understanding with my DAW, the motherf***er decides to get cranky again. I'm playing back just a miserable 4 tracks of audio, letting the singer do a overdub, and the playback starts breaking up. My cpu meter had been reading about 10% but when the breakup starts it actually drops to 0%. The disk meter remains steady at about 2-3%.

Of course the playback problem throws the singer off, so he can't sing his part in time, and I wind up looking like an idiot. The hard drive had been freshly defragged, so now I'm starting to dismiss the idea that it is disk I/O, and I'm thinking its a software or cpu issue.

Maybe its time to retire software plug-ins and go back to all hardware.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaa......
 
rwhite,

while you're sorting the problem out, why don't you submix your tracks to a mono or stereo track, just to keep the sessions going?
just a thought.

adriano
 
If I was talking about 15 or 20 tracks I might do just that. But 4 stinking audio tracks and it's yaking on playback? And for months I was having no playback problems at all.

I think taking a blow torch to the PC will make me feel much better.
 
is it happening to every project you're working on? or just a specific one?
there's one certain project i'm always getting stutter when i work on, but other's don't cause any problems. what you could do is save that project as a .bun file, and use the clean audio disk function, and then try working with it again. you can also save again as a normal file.

adriano
 
Unfortunately it's happening on a bunch of projects, including some old one's that used to play back fine.

Saturday morning I'm going to decend into my basement to do battle with the PC, and only one of us is going to emerge alive...
 
playback probs cake pro 9

I can't believe it! when I saw your post I went nuts! I have been having the same problems EXACTLY!, here is a copy of my post on audio forums.com:

Edit freezes and playback problems using Cakewalk Pro 9.

I have been using Cakewalk Pro 9 ever since it first came out with very few problems, until this last year when I upgraded my system. During the last 2 album projects I had some very frustrating moments when during some long editing sessions when I was editing with my mouse I had a screen freeze / illegal op and got booted out of Cakewalk. Upon rebooting the song files were corrupted at the exact place I was editing always stopping and giving me "the blues" and Fatal O E exception at mem loc etc.I had to export each track 1 at a time to a new project and start editing from scratch!

A second problem I have encountered is as follows:
I only record audio, 24 bit 44.1. In the past I routinely have been able to record 8 tracks at a pop and play back 20 plus tracks without a glitch. Lately even when playing back 4 - 6 tracks with minimal processing, I keep getting a momentary yodel or hiccup during playback where the sounds jumble for a split second almost like Antares auto tune going beserk. Upon playback of the same song it may happen randomly at a different location so I can tell the song data is unaffected. My CPU and Disk meters never register over 3 - 4 % usage nor do I get a dropout message. It is very disconcerting to have clients sitting over your shoulder with your computer yodeling their music. My Cakewalk settings are the same as before the upgrade when I had no problems (3 buffers,etc.)
My original setup was a 266 P II with Intel chipset Fujitsu 6 gig 5400rpm system drive and a 6 gig western dig 5400rpm data drive..Win 95 op sys. Gadget labs 824 ad / da card.

My update is:
New 350 watt power supply (AMD approved)
Gigabyte GA-6vx7-4x mobo (VIA Apollo Pro 133a Chipset VT82c694x and VT82cc686a)
700 mhz P III Intel
256 Megs Ram (128 Mushkin /128 PNY)
20 gig Western Dig 7200 rpm system / data drive (has both system ops and wave data )
6 gig Fujitsu 5400 rpm for archiving only
Gadget Labs 824 8 in 8 out 24 bit card (latest driver ver 4.5)
Plextor Plexwriter12-10-32 CDRW
Voodoo 3DFX AGP video card (running in 2D Basic features)
Win 98 SE upgrade Dir-x 8.0
Cakewalk Pro9 / Sonar 1.3.1 Sound Forge 5 / Cd Architect SF XP 4.0
A bunch of plugins from reputable places (Antares etc.)
N-Track / E-Z CD creator 5
System optimizations / Tweaks as best as I know how.

This computer is a "studio only" system Never been on the Internet etc. No background apps working, no auto insert, in 32 bit mode , 256 buffers, Fat 32, DMA enabled etc.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I am not a computer person.
I have seen various postings about upgrading drivers for motherboards etc. Is this what I need? Further System tweaks? I have recently taken the precaution to block upper memory usage but have'nt used the computer much since then. Any posted list of basic system checks would be great just in case I have missed something.


All this happened after doing some upgrades one of which was installing a new western dig 20 gig drive (7200 rpm). I don't really think it is because of the drive I am having probs, but?..
I have been accumulating new drivers / dir-x 8.1 / all kinds of diagnostic apps etc. and am also ready to plow! PLEASE let me know of your results and if you want I'll let you know of mine.

I can be reached at: tmix@bigfoot.com
 
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Well Tmix your second problem does indeed sound exactly like my situation.

As mentioned before, the only hardware change I made prior to the problem starting was changeing out the hard drives, moving from 8 gig System / 40 gig data to 40 gig system / 80 gig data. One of the things I want to try is reformating the 80 gig with 64K clusters rather than the default 32K. But first I have to get enough data off the drive that I can copy & fit the remainder to other locations on my LAN. I'm also going to swap out my PIII 533 cpu with a PIII 933.

I made a few minor software adjustments last night but didn't have time to test them. I'm expecting a long day Saturday, and if it's not working right by Saturday night I'm going to a computer show Sunday to buy a new Athlon mobo. one way or another I will definately post the results.
 
PC Cage match ends in a draw

Well I had it out with my little silicon buddy, and while I don’t know the exact cause, I have figured a work around. I thought I would post my trouble shooting here in the hopes it might give people in similar situations some hints on what to look for.

The background of the problem is listed previously in this thread so I wont repeat it too much. The bottom line is I get funky stuttering playback, while the data itself is fine. This did not used to happen at all; starting a few weeks ago it would happen on occasion, and then on my newest song project it was happening constantly in a way I could replicate. If all plug-ins are removed from a project I would get no glitches.

Since I’m a long-time PC hardware guru I thought that I would first try a mix of hardware / software changes. In doing this I violated the “Prime Directive” of PC troubleshooting, which is to CHANGE ONE THING AT A TIME AND THEN TEST. However I went for the shotgun approach to start off, doing the following:

* Upgrading the PIII 533 processor to a PIII 933 chip.
* REDUCING the memory from 512 to 256 megs; this sounds strange but remember I’m running Win 98, which can’t really use this much RAM anyway. Plus I had upgraded the memory about the same time the trouble started, adding a 256 meg DIMM to two 128s. Should be no problem, but this is a test after all.
* Reinstalling the video drivers for my Radeon card (which had replaced a Voodoo III a few months earlier). Subsequently I had upgraded from Direct X 8 to 8.1, and I have learned from experience that sometimes video card drivers need to be refreshed after a Direct X upgrade (and the opposite is true at times as well)
* Changed the network card in the machine from an older Adaptec card to a 3COM 3C905 card, as I no longer needed the Coax connection on the old card and 3COM generally does a good job of updating its drivers.
* Modified the BIOS to change boot order of devices, and made sure that the network card was a not a valid boot device.
* Removed the leftovers of some no-longer-used trial plug-ins, like the Ultrasonic compressor demo.
* Last but not least, I disabled the USB ports and disabled the on-motherboard support for NCR SCSI Bios. Its always a good thing to shut off motherboard resources you don't use.

Network cards can cause a fair amount of activity in the system, even if you are not doing anything on the network. I had formerly used two hardware configurations, one which disabled the network card, to eliminate any chance of this being a problem. But recently I’ve been leaving the network card enabled all the time as there seemed no related problem, and I am increasingly loading / saving projects from network drives. For testing though I created a new Hardware profile with the network card disabled.

After the last of these changes I loaded up my most recent Cakewalk problem project, hit “Play” – and listened to my playback get scrambled as usual.

So now I’m thinking that hardware is probably NOT the root issue here, although I have yet to change the cluster size on my new 80 gig drive. So I decide to try some software time travel.

Every so often I use Symantec Ghost to make a “ghost image” of my system hard drive. I do this on all (6) of my PCs. The data volume gets its contents backed up as individual files, but with the C: drives I write an image of the entire drive split into 650 meg hunks for easy archiving to CDR. It’s a lot like spanning a
Zip files across floppies.

So I first made a new Ghost image of my PC just as it is, writing the files to my D: data volume. Then I went back to a month previous when I had made my most recent backup, and loaded that image. Then I loaded my Cakewalk project (untouched on D: drive) and hit the play button. Same problem.

So next I went back to October of 2001. This was a bit more work, since this was prior to several hardware upgrades including my Radeon card. So when I rebooted after writing the image I received the expected PC freakout as it found all the "new" hardware. I loaded the minimum number of drivers to make the system work, then loaded my Cakewalk project. When I did so Cakewalk notified me that it was removing invalid plug-ins, since this software image was made prior to my installing Sound Forge 5 with all of Sonic Foundry’s plug ins. I played my project back without plug-ins and as expected it worked fine. Then I re-installed Sound Forge 5 with all its plug-ins (but skipping the Sound Forge Update on my original image) and re-applied plug-ins. My problem immediately returned.

Now back around this time (Oct 2001) I had been experimenting with several manufactures trial plug-ins (I had a long thread called "Finalists for Compressor Plug-in" on The Rack forum at that time). I noticed that this drive image contained the Waves plug-in 15 day trial which was still active. So I removed all the Sonic Foundry plug-ins from my project and replaced them with Waves plug-ins. On playback my problem did not re-appear, despite my playing it back 6 times and loading it up with plug-ins. I then removed the Waves plug-ins and replaced them with Sonic Foundry plug-ins. My problem immediately returned again. I tried switching the location and tracks of these plug-ins, and noticed that the sound of the playback “glitch” would vary slightly in response.

SO… in conclusion, the issue seems to be Sonic Foundry plug-ins. As to why these plug-ins (which have worked flawlessly for several months) are now causing a playback problem, that is the remaining mystery. It occurred to me afterwards that the project file I was having the most trouble with may be a bad example to be using. This is because unlike all of my projects , which are always 24 bit, this project was started by my base player working in Cubase 16 bit, and then later exported to my system. So I was applying plug-ins to a 24 bit vocal part playing alongside 16 bit background parts, with their own different plug-ins. Possibly this explains why this one particular project would skip every time on playback while with other projects it’s random.

My very last step was to restore my system back to its new image. I also tried doing some mix downs of my stuttering project and verified again that it mixes down flawlessly, the problem only occurs in audio playback.

I guess this is a endorsement of sorts for the Waves plug-ins, since they behaved fine on the project that “broke” the Sonic Foundry plug-ins. It caused me to go to the Waves web site & check prices, but with their cheapest plug-in package being $500 they will remain out of my reach for the time being.

The next step will be to create a new all 24 bit test project and try to narrow down the circumstances in which playback stutters. The worst case scenario is to drop plug-ins completely and go back to all hardware effects, which I formerly did for years without any problems.

I hope this info is useful to somebody…. If I find out more details I will post again!
 
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rwhite,

i'm running win98 with 512ram. so am i only using 256? should i upgrade to ME? would that improve things?
as for the stuttering, i'm experiencing that on ocasion, but very lightly, with something like 20 tracks playing back with something like 10-12 plugins. dropouts are happening, but rarely so. stuttering isn't that bad either, and only like after 3 minutes or in some parts of a song where the plugins probably have to work harder or something like that.
btw, i'm using sound forge plugins. maybe they're the cause. i don't use waves though, they're good but way too expensive. there are less expensive options that are just as good, like sonic timeworks, tc or ultrafunk.
so what compressor plugin did you choose anyway?
i'm using compressorX and tc's native X.

adriano
 
I have been sticking with Sonic Foundry plug-ins, although I don't like their Reverb plug-in much. 12 plugs-ins thrown in for free with Sound Forge 5.0 for $120 was too good a deal to pass up. For awhile they were working great, but something has changed in the system to cause a problem.

The stuttering will happen after about a minute of playback, if I hit "stop" and then "play" immediately afterward, the track plays fine and the stuttering goes away for about another minute, then comes back. So it's some type of perfomance issue, not data.

Did a recording session this week, didn't want to screw with anything, so I just worked without any plug-ins and everythingwas fine.
 
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