trouble?

[malgovert]

Currently working on 3 songs in CWPA8 - all of them almost completed - hundreds of hours gone into them (I'm a perfectionist) - tried to open one yesterday and got a message 'Unable to restore realtime effects. All effects loops and inserts have been cleared'. Never happened before. Happening now on every file I open. Also soundfonts have disappeared, although I can reattach them so that may not be a problem. Finally - and most mysterious of all - my guitar solo is full of crackles and pops. Took me hours to get that take right. But it's only one solo. The other is fine. Both are audio files. Opened up the backup and it has all the same problems - so it's something in the program obviously... The question is, what? I would be very grateful for any help - as I am now reluctant to open anything for fear of causing more damage. (BTW even though I get that message the effects are still there inside the console view - so I'm not sure what it means exactly).

Thanks

Malg.

 

[malgovert]

Somebody... please?

 

[heinz]

wild speculation

Has anything changed in your h/w or s/w environment lately, i.e. installed new version of DirectX for a game, moved or otherwise changed hardware configuration, updated your O/S with service packs or new version, upgraded your soundcard drivers, run Cakewalk's hardware detect routine, or otherwise done something out-of-the-ordinary lately?

regarding the noise in the tracks... is this crackling/popping only happening in Cakewalk? Can you export a .wav from just that track and analyze it another program to see if the noise is actually part of the waveform?

And now really stretching it... did you accidentally delete some directories or files on your hard drive?

 

[malgovert]

The only thing that happened - and the computer did go a bit weird afterwards , like the 'illegal operation' box came up every time I tried to open the browser, and some MSWord folders wouldn't open when I clicked on them - was that I pulled the phone plug out of the wall (accidentally, I might add) while I was connected to the Internet. I wouldn't have thought that could be damaging but like I say it did start acting up. CWPA could have been open at the time, I'm not sure.

I don't know if I deleted anything on the hard drive but now you mention it when it started acting up I think it did keep saying it wasn't able find something or other... Could have been a .dll or something - didn't take much notice at the time but now I'm beginning to wonder. Oh - and I noticed last ngiht a lot of the regular little icons (like the internet connection icon for example) had disappeared from the taskbar. Something weird going on anyway...

Anyway it's a good idea to try exporting a .wav of the solo - I'll go home right now and give it a go.

So then - where from here???

Malg.

 

[heinz]

Wow that definitely sounds like an unstable environment.

My inclination would be to uninstall/reinstall Cakewalk, simple way of ensuring that you have a solid install. If that doesn't clean up the problem, it may be a larger scale issue. By the descriptions you've given of things disappearing and missing .dll errors you may want to consider wiping the system clean and reinstalling your o/s and applications fresh.

Another possibility is that you've contracted a computer virus and it is wreaking havoc within your system. Do you have a recent virus scanner you can use to check that? Also run your systems Disk Check utility on your hard drive to ensure that it's not crashing or something.

 

[malgovert]

I might reinstall - things don't seem as bad as they were - and the good news is my solo is saved! the graphic dynamics in the console had gone freaky so I just deleted the effect. I cleaned up the hard drives and defragged, then turned it off for a while to give it a rest. I don't think there is a virus. If I reinstall, do I have to back up the CWPA files elsewhere first or can they just sit there on the hard drives while I remove and re-add the program?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Malg.