unable to record at 24-bit

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postalblue

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i formatted my computer's hd, and now that i reinstalled win98, cwpa 9 and my direct pro 2496, i can't playback/record anything when cakewalk's set to 24-bits. what the heck?
even stuff i had (or at least i though i had) recorded at 24 bits is silent when i set cakewalk to 24. i can only hear or record at 16.
i tried reinstalling the whole thing (aardvark hardware and software and cakewalk), but that didn't work.
the aark sound manager is set to 24, btw.

HELP!!

adriano
 
it just depends on the soundcard, as far as i know. it lists bit depth options from 16 to 24, and all the increments inbetween, as well as 44 to 96 in the other tab.

adriano
 
thanks.
i am sure though.
i even emailed cakewalk support, but they're taking to long to reply, and i was hoping to start recording seriously this week. i'm also having trouble with my sblive card, but that's subject for another post altogether, i mean, in case nothing i'm going to try works. :)

adriano
 
Yes. CW PA9 can most certainly record/playback at 24-bits.

However, you mention having an SB Live card. The SB Live is only a 16-bit card. You don't happen to have the playback routed through that do you.

I'm not familiar with your other sound card. I'm assuming that is 24-bit. Why don't you disable the SB Live in CW to see what that does for you. I'm guessing it's either some kind of conflict (or setup issue) with your sound cards, or possibly when you reformatted your HDD the wrong drivers were installed.

Doesn't seem like it should be a major problem to fix. You just need to figure out where the problem is.
 
sblive's driver is disabled in the audio tab in cakewalk's options. by installing sblive, my intention at first was to play only midi sounds, and maybe play softsamplers/music cds through it, since the aardvark won't play any of that. and also because the aardvark won't play the metronome sounds. all i have to guide myself is the pc bleep, which is too low to allow any serious recording to be done, especially with drums involved.
are you sure the sblive won't at least playback 24bit?
anyway, i wasn't able to playback/record 24bit even before i installed the sblive. but i was able to do it before reinstalling win98. maybe i've got the wrong connections made when installing sblive. i might, since i'm new to this, and i have a cd-rom and a cd-recorder, and i kind of got confused as to how to link them and the soundcard. but i can record stuff and playback stuff with the aardvark at 16bit.
i remember seeing somewhere in this bbs that there's someone here who uses cakewalk, the direct pro, and a sblive card, just like me. i think i'll go search the archives, and maybe email this person directly for some hints.

adriano
 
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just to clear this, i installed the latest updated drivers both from aardvark and creative labs yesterday. i hadn't been able to install the sblive before because the cd that came with it is for win2k/me, and i've got win98. i'm not willing to move to win2k, since aardvark hasn't released decent compatible drivers yet, but i might go on to millenium, since both the updated aardvark and the new soundblaster drivers support that.

adriano
 
Hey don't go postal.... You can find the latest Windows 95/98 drivers for your SBLive at the creative web site:

http://www.creative.com/support/files/download.asp

My SoundBlaster live cards (2 at home and one at work) will playback 24 bit files, but they truncate (cut off) everything above 16 bit as they play. My main system is a Gadget Labs card, along with a (old) Soundblaster card, and I run Cakewalk Pro 9 in Windows 98. The cards get along fine, and I have no problems recording / playing back 24 bit with my Gadget Labs card. I think Dach is right, there may just be an incorrect setting somewhere.

I assume you have gone into the Control Panel / Multimedia / Audio and made sure that prefered audio playback / recording card is NOT set to your SoundBlaster?
Alo check in Control Panel / System / Device Manager and make sure you have no yellow flags on your devices. Then change Device Manger view to "by connections", click on your computer, and verify that there are no IRQ sharing conflicts.

Also, do you have any other recording software, like Sound Forge or Goldwave (which you can download free)? If so test with that, if it works then you know it is a Cakewalk cofiguration problem.
 
RWhite said:
Hey don't go postal.... You can find the latest Windows 95/98 drivers for your SBLive at the creative web site:

http://www.creative.com/support/files/download.asp
Click to expand...

i already did that. that's where i got the sblive driver. the one that came with the soundcard is for win2k/me.

My SoundBlaster live cards (2 at home and one at work) will playback 24 bit files, but they truncate (cut off) everything above 16 bit as they play. My main system is a Gadget Labs card, along with a (old) Soundblaster card, and I run Cakewalk Pro 9 in Windows 98. The cards get along fine, and I have no problems recording / playing back 24 bit with my Gadget Labs card. I think Dach is right, there may just be an incorrect setting somewhere.
Click to expand...

what about playing 24bit audio and playing midi at the same time. i assume that if your card is like mine, you'd have to play audio with one card, and midi with the other, am i right? does it work ok even though one of the cards can't play 24bit?
what about monitoring? how do you go about hooking the whole thing up? i've got my monitors hooked up to the aardvark interface, and i'm beginning to suspect that maybe that's the reason i can't hear the soundblaster, but that shouldn't be it, i hope, otherwise i'll have to find another way to hook up my monitors. i think i'll try hooking a pair of mini computer monitors to the sblive card, and see if anything comes out.

I assume you have gone into the Control Panel / Multimedia / Audio and made sure that prefered audio playback / recording card is NOT set to your SoundBlaster?
Click to expand...

it's set to 'available device' or something like that, but the soundblaster is not even listed there in the dropdown box.

Alo check in Control Panel / System / Device Manager and make sure you have no yellow flags on your devices. Then change Device Manger view to "by connections", click on your computer, and verify that there are no IRQ sharing conflicts.
Click to expand...

i'll do that. what if there is a yellow flag?

Also, do you have any other recording software, like Sound Forge or Goldwave (which you can download free)? If so test with that, if it works then you know it is a Cakewalk cofiguration problem.
Click to expand...

great. will do. thanks a lot.
i'll let you know what happens, but only tomorrow, i'm stuck at work for another 3 hours.:(

adriano
 
Ditto, I'm stuck at work too.

As for your questions about MIDI, I almost never use it but it does work. My second card is an old SoundBlaster 16 ISA fitted with a Roland Sound Canvas daughter card. I can put MIDI playback through that, or I can use an external serial MIDI interface plugged into a Yamaha PSR 510 keyboard. I can switch which MIDI device to use from within Cakewalk. The Gadget Labs card has no MIDI capability of its own.

As for monitoring, I have a Alesis mixer. The Gadget Labs card is fed by 4 submaster outputs + 4 channel direct outs, and feeds back into the tape returns of the first 8 channels. The Sound Blaster card and Keyboard feed into different channel inputs. The control room output feeds a stereo receiver and Yamaha monitors (I should use a real power amp, but this is a stop-gap) while the monitor out feeds a Peavy power amp & big PA monitors for live in-studio jamming.

I assume your monitors are being powered by some sort of amp, fed by the Ardvark?

A yellow flag in Device Manager indicates a problem, if you click on the device there will be a description. Typically it means the device driver is not loaded, or the device itself was disabled by Windows because it was in coinflict with another device.

"Available device" is Windows way of saying "first thing I find gets the playback". This could be part of your problem, any playback device SHOULD be listed there.

Any 24 bit playback (actually any Cakewalk audio playback period) is always pushed through the Gadget Labs card. The Sound Blaster is just for playing the occasional game, plus being the parasitic host for the Sound Canvas card.

Let me know what you find after you dig through the machine...

RW
 
In the Audio Options

goto the Driver Profiles tab and play around with the setting until your 24-bit starts to play:

from the Sonar Help -->

Stream > 16 bit data as
Sound cards that handle audio formats greater than 16 bits have a preferred format for the data, the variations of which you can see by clicking the dropdown arrow in this field. Consult your sound card's documentation to choose the optimum setting.

I had the same problem with my Frontier Design Wavecenter/Tango24 card until i set this to ->

32bit, PCM left justified.
 
RW,

i did find that there was a flagged device in the control panel. i removed it, and it happened to be the direct pro, even though the direct pro was installed and listed right above in the audio devices list. it wouldn't work after that. i reinstalled the direct pro, and the conflict was gone, but the device was still flagged. however much i tried couldn't get windows to install a driver for the flagged device.
however, i managed to route midi in cakewalk to the soundblaster, but it doesn't play anything. audio is still working, but only at 16 bit. midi is assigned to soundblaster, and audio to the direct pro. i chose the direct pro as the preferred device for audio playback and recording, but that didn't work either. i disabled the direct pro for midi, and chose the soundblaster only for midi, but that didn't help. i tried converting midi channels to audio to see if it was only a routing problem, but nothing got recorded. phew! i really did mess around with general settings yesterday. i even tried hooking a couple of computer mini monitors directly to the computer output and the soundblaster outputs, but nothing came out.
as for my monitoring setup, i've got a pair of yamaha msp5 (powered) hooked to the aardvark interface. i was afraid i wasn't hearing the midi sounds because maybe the soundblaster sounds were not being reproduced by the monitors via the aardvark interface, but i think that was not the case, since the mini monitors wouldn't work either.
i'm going to try and get a couple of cables to hook the monitors directly to the soundblaster, and see if anything comes out, but that's probably a desperate attempt.

adriano
 
crosstudio,

i tried every possible combination in the drivers tab, and cakewalk will only play at 16bit depth, even if i set it to 96khz at the same time.

as for the stream option, i don't remember seing it in cake 9, but i'll check it out.

thanks to everyone who's offered any suggestions so far.

adriano
 
Sorry Postal, I was out of the office yesterday (stayed home from the snow storm) and right now I'm actually busy at work. Later today I'll re-read your posts and see if I can come up with any other ideas. - RW
 
Well, I finally had time to come back to this. I'm not sure I have much more to add. If Cakewalk will not record at 24 bit I'm sure its because your SoundBlaster card is listed somewhere as a playback device. Have you tried physically removing the SoundBlaster from the computer, and then recording audio only?
 
rwhite,

thanks a lot for taking the time to reply. i did already solve the problem though.:)
i though i had already done what crosstudio advised, but just to be sure, i decide to give it another try, and it worked.
as for the soundblaster, i had to remove the aardvark card, install the soundblaster and make it work, then i reinstalled the aardvark. they're both working now, but i can't route the midi sounds to my monitors, since they're connected to the direct pro interface, so i'm using one of those crappy computer monitors. i could take the outputs from the interface and the soundblaster, and join them in my mackie, and then send the output to the monitors though.
however, now i'm experiencing a lot of dropouts in cakewalk. what i did so far to reduce them was turning video acceleration down, enabling dma, increasing the buffers and latency options, and changing that other setting i can't remember what it is right now from 64 to 128 bits. it improved it, but i'm still getting dropouts with as little as 5 audio tracks and 5 plugins running.
cakewalk help advises to do all this i've already done, plus trying to move the soundcard to another pci slot, but the aardvark manual claims it won't cause any irq conflicts, so i didn't try doing that. have you experienced any of that?

adriano
 
I re-read your posts but did not see anywhere what sort of CPU you are using. A decent cpu is critical when using any sort of plug-ins.

I'm also assuming that when you say "dropout" you mean exactly that, your playback or recording stops dead and you get the big Cakewalk "Dropout!" error message.

As for me, on my primary system (P3-533, Gadget Labs card) I can't recall ever having a drop out. I record analog only, anywhere from 4 to 20 tracks, 24 bit 44.1 sample rate. Until a few months ago I never used any plug ins. Now I'm running between 1 and 6 plugs typically (Sonic Foundry compressor and reverb) and I've noticed since I started using plugins I get an occasional "burp" during playback. Just a momentary playback stutter, it has nothing to do with the recording (the data is fine).

On the other hand I have a faster system (P3-933 with SBLive) that has dropouts almost every time I try to use a few plug-ins. I have until now attributed it to the SB Live card, but others here at HomeRec have similar setups and have not had similar problems. So I'm not sure what's going on there. I'm getting ready to nuke that system anyways and install Win XP, and see if I can make Cakewalk 9 run under it.
 
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