Cakewalk 7.0 Vocals lagging behind, Using O1V + Dig Card

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Guest Bev

Post by Guest Bev » Fri Dec 26, 2003 5:13 pm

I have Cakewalk Pro Audio 7.0, a Yamaha O1V Digital Mixer, I have a Terratec Soundcard EWS 88D and a Terratec WordClock.

Firstly, I have no other digital equipment in my home studio, my synths are connected via Midi in and out provided by the the Terratec EWS 88D Sound.

Now, when I decide to loop a section recording vocals and you know they can take time; after say about 10 passes over the same area in a loop or punch in, they loose timing quite considerably. They lag behind.

I'm wondering if my Word Clock is working properly in my setup. It is connected to the EWS 88D via a little cable that my brother (techie type of guy) connected to the Wordclock. However, this word clock's LED's on the back don't light up? to show that it's even connected? Then off course with this digital soundcard signal is pulsing to my O1V via fibre optic cables.

Any idea why the lag is happening? Is it Cakewalk, is it my Yamaha O1V is it the WordClock? They start to lag a few milliseconds, but it's :?: definately noticable.


GretscGuy
Posts: 434
Joined: Sat Oct 18, 2003 1:26 pm
Location: Massachusetts USA

Post by GretscGuy » Sun Dec 28, 2003 6:41 pm

Wordclock is very simple, yet causes problems for many. In your case, you need to have ProAudio, the Yamaha and your soundcard synced togetehr properly. Failure to do so will result in crackles and other weird glithces in playback.

I have a similar setup:
Frontier PCI-822 (soundcard)
Tascam TM-D1000 (mixer)
Sonar 3

In my setup, my TM-D1000 is the master. The clock is carries via a TDIF cable to my PCI-822 (slave) and Sonar is also set to 'Trigger and Flywheel' (on ProAudio 7 this should be under Options/Proiject/Audio if memory serves me correct)

The most important thing to remember is not to have more than one clock sourse or everything goes crazy. It could be that the light on your system is not working becasue it is not set to recieve a clock sourse, but to send one. It really depends on what you are doing with your system to decide what the best device to use as the master is. Experiment and take lots of notes.

It is absolutley important that all drivers be completely 100% up to date in a system like this. I had a huge battle with Tascam over this when they removed drivers from their site and wouldn't email them to me. They were saying something was hooked up wrong, etc... Got the drivers a few weeks later and all was solved. There is a lesson here: save the drivers and do your updates!

Lastley - ProAudio 7 is old. I liked it when it came out, but you should (at the least) get up to v9. You can get a legal copy pretty cheap. Sonar 3 is really good. Remember that V7 is not supported under xp and there could be some wierdness going on.

Could you provide your system specs?

Guest

Post by Guest » Sun Dec 28, 2003 7:58 pm

System specs on computer?

Pentium 4 - 2 GHZ
Asus Motherboard
256 Ram

The silly manuals that I got with my Terratec Soundcard and WordClock seem to have confussion written into them for the simple of time with musical talent. All I wanted to do was make sure that my vocals didn't get out of time. Just to give you a greater scope of what went wrong, I have high hats and other things "playing" in Wav format. They kept perfect timing. However, when I did the vocal track punch ins, I notice on playback in Cakewalk 7.0 that vocals were lagging behind. The hats and all that other stuff still stayed perfectly aligned in sync and perfect time.

2nd question:
Do you think that Cakewalk Plaza is better than 7.0?

RE: upgrading I'm scarred to do that right now due to my timing problems. I was thinking about upgrading the software.

I got my hands on Cakewalk Plazma. I decided to save my 7.0 midi and wavefiles in otherwords my dance tune projects as "Bundled" files and stuffed them into a special directory for later retrieval.

With Plazma installed, when I tried to open these puppies in Plazma they wouldn't open - kept saying something about exceeding virtual busses "7". Then when I played around with plaza for a little longer, I realized that the signal that pushes a magical signal to trigger my Roland MC505 Groovebox (Found in Cakewalk 7.0 under (Project Options, Midi Out, Midi Output port 2) couldn't couldn't be found anyware. Then I got frustrated and left it alone on the shelf to collect dust. :cry:

GretscGuy
Posts: 434
Joined: Sat Oct 18, 2003 1:26 pm
Location: Massachusetts USA

Post by GretscGuy » Sun Dec 28, 2003 8:28 pm

What OS are you using? Also, goto Options/Project/Audio and make sure 'enable read caching' and 'enabe write caching' are disabled.

I don't know anything about Plazma, sorry. Sounds like you have a great system. Once you get this wordclock problem straightened out you should upgrade.

First thing to do is all your drivers, see what that does. Make sure your master and slaves are set up correctly and then give it a try.

How is your hard drive formatted? Is it FAT32 or NTFS? Hard Drive Speed?
Also, have you tried 'clean audio disk'? Have you tried defragging your disc?

Guest

Post by Guest » Wed Dec 31, 2003 7:26 pm

I'm using Windoze 98.

Cakewalk 7.0 - had this program for years. I guess I should move on up to another version, but I'm not yet using Windoze XP. Heard good things about Sonar. Heard it has some type of virtual synth in it. Sounds cool.

Decided to scrub my harddrive. Reinstalled all software, asked my brother to put the little wire connector from the Souncard (EWS 88D) to another pin on the WordClock, now it says wrong configuration when I boot up Windoze. Anyway, Right now, I'm just playing around with the wave files on Cakewalk (Outbound signal), not tried recording vocals yet (Inbound Signal), but I'll probably try later today. Maybe this card has some type of internal clocker system. Now I kind of wished that I had bought an integrated SoundCard - one with a built in WordClock instead of a separate entity which has to connected (such as in my configuration).

I love all this technical stuff, but sometimes, it can bring on a migraine.
Do you know what I'm Zzzaying?

Bev :lol:

Guest

Post by Guest » Wed Dec 31, 2003 7:32 pm

Last question you had for me, FAT or NTFS, I don't know actually. Brother would probably know.

B

GretscGuy
Posts: 434
Joined: Sat Oct 18, 2003 1:26 pm
Location: Massachusetts USA

Post by GretscGuy » Fri Jan 02, 2004 11:34 pm

Well, if your running 98, you are also running fat. This has been known to casue some lag in some systems.

If you're running a 2Ghz processor on Windows 98, that would be a really odd setup. There's a good chance your os is holding back your cpu. This happened to me running 98 with an Athlon 900 a few years back. You should really upgrade to xp and format those drives as ntfs!

Guest

Post by Guest » Thu Mar 24, 2005 7:09 am

GretscGuy wrote:Wordclock is very simple, yet causes problems for many. In your case, you need to have ProAudio, the Yamaha and your soundcard synced togetehr properly. Failure to do so will result in crackles and other weird glithces in playback.

I have a similar setup:
Frontier PCI-822 (soundcard)
Tascam TM-D1000 (mixer)
Sonar 3

In my setup, my TM-D1000 is the master. The clock is carries via a TDIF cable to my PCI-822 (slave) and Sonar is also set to 'Trigger and Flywheel' (on ProAudio 7 this should be under Options/Proiject/Audio if memory serves me correct)

The most important thing to remember is not to have more than one clock sourse or everything goes crazy. It could be that the light on your system is not working becasue it is not set to recieve a clock sourse, but to send one. It really depends on what you are doing with your system to decide what the best device to use as the master is. Experiment and take lots of notes.

It is absolutley important that all drivers be completely 100% up to date in a system like this. I had a huge battle with Tascam over this when they removed drivers from their site and wouldn't email them to me. They were saying something was hooked up wrong, etc... Got the drivers a few weeks later and all was solved. There is a lesson here: save the drivers and do your updates!

Lastley - ProAudio 7 is old. I liked it when it came out, but you should (at the least) get up to v9. You can get a legal copy pretty cheap. Sonar 3 is really good. Remember that V7 is not supported under xp and there could be some wierdness going on.

Could you provide your system specs?

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