Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 + Windows XP = massive problems?

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mindphaser
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2008 10:46 am

Post by mindphaser » Mon Feb 11, 2008 2:15 pm

Greetings from a new member!

I hope there is someone here in this forum who can help me... I've been using CWPA9 for about 8 years now, it was always working fine but a few weeks ago my old studio PC (running on Win98SE) finally gave up and I had to replace it with a modern, fast machine. And here the problems started...
The audio card I've been using and still want to use is a Terratec EWS88MT (ok, I know that this one is not "officially" supported by Cakewalk software, but I never had a problem with this configuration in about 6 years) and the new PC is running on WinXP (SP2/DirectX 9.0c) and has an Intel Core2 Duo CPU, 2GB memory, 500 GB hard disk drive, Asus motherboard and graphics board (nothing else in there because I just want to use it for recording). The on-board sound device has been deactivated in the BIOS settings.
First of all I encountered the (usual) problem with the CWPA setup popping up on every re-start of the machine, wanting to install DirectShow 5, but that problem disappeared after I've ignored it for some time and installed some other programs. After the first start of CWPA I ran the wave profiler - it found all drivers for the separate channels of the EWS88MT and said that the profiling was successful. Good!
But when I start playing back a song then, everything goes mad after seconds - the audio tracks, one after the other, drift out of sync (sometimes with a kind of "hiccup" and then the track continues playing somewhere else), the midi tracks drift off as well, and the whole thing ends in a mess. I've already tried various buffer length settings (in Cakewalk as well as in the audio card settings), also changed the "trigger/freewheel" options, but I couldn't improve that really. Even if the song plays ok for a minute or so, chaos starts as soon as I change over to the Console, event list or whatever, and plugging a plug-in into just one of the channels even multiplies the problems.
Other issues: The playback of the stereo "system output" on the EWS88MT card itself is always behind the 4 stereo pairs on the separate AD/DA converter box and Cakewalk also seems to make the converter box "disappear" sometimes - the EWS88MT control panel says that it's 'not connected' and after a re-boot it's there again (this is definitely no hardware problem as it only happens when CWPA9 was started).
Strangely, the playback never stops with a "dropout" message and the CPU/disk usage indicators stay at 0% most of the time (maximum was 1%).

So, I really hope that there's somebody here who has an idea how to fix all this! I'd really like to continue working with CWPA9 if at all possible, because it's so easy to work with and has exactly the (very few) functions that I need...

Thanks for reading and (hopefully) for help as well!
Greetings from Hamburg,
Stefan


evadianepug
Posts: 8
Joined: Sat Jul 12, 2008 12:02 am
Location: Phoenix, Az.

Post by evadianepug » Wed Sep 24, 2008 7:53 pm

Well, I get lost on long posts but I can tell you this. I have used XP for a long time with Pro9. I haven't used it for years and recently set it up on my XP(sp2) computer with a Pentium4 (2.60 with 1 gig of ram). I have a Realtek AC97 soundcard and it kept transposing my key down about a half step. I did everything to make it work and no advice got me there. I bought an Edirol UA-1EX interface and the problem went away. i have no idea why. So, maybe you need to look at the sound card. I am only guessing but it fixed it for me. I had no problem with the Realtek playing existing tracks only on new ones. Just a thought, but a long one, huh. Ha!

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