cakewalk Sound Centre not working

Hi - It has been a week or two since I last used CSC and it is not giving up any sounds. TTS1 is working in Music Creator 6 but CSC does not want to play. Has anyone any idea why this might be so i.e. is there a setting somewhere i may have checked/unchecked by accident? I am using asio4all driver and this worked fine last time.
 
I have also noticed that Studio Instruments aren't working either. And t oadd to this, TTS1 only works when i put it into solo mode - is that consistent with what others find?
 
Thanks.

ASIO4ALL shouldn't be a problem.

are you using ASIO4ALL because you're using your onboard soundcard?

when you say the softsynths aren't working except for TTS-1, that says it's likely a problem with the "library" since TTS-1 doesn't need to load a library.

soundcenter and studio instruments need to have libraries loaded before they'll play anything.  did you load libraries into them?

With CSC, when I load it, it loads a default sound by default so I can load it, and without doing a single additional thing, press a key on the Yamaha synth and I hear the same default sound every time....

Of course I can then simply click through the menu to the sound I want and proceed with my tracking.

Point being..... you should not have to specifically load a sample to get sound. 

NOW: last night, while working on a re-do of an older song.... I found it was necessary to restart my computer and my interface to get things synced back up... it lost the ability to grab incoming audio and print it to the track. I have also had this happen more often with MIDI based instruments.  A complete shutdown and restart from cold boot solved it. 

I am always s u s p i c i o u s when people talk about this kind of thing happening with a factory card..... 

that was my thought as well.... if one works, and the others don't,  it's likely the signal path has something shut off or misdirected. 

When I open the stand alone versions of SIs the output is stated to be 'not connected' but there does not seem to be an option to 'connect' it.

what operating system are you using?  and are you running MC in Admin mode?

When you click on the Icon to open MC.... RIGHT click it and a window opens with a list of things...one of those is "Run as Administrator"..... click it and run it. 

It does something... I forget exactly what.... but I do know it does something...... 


Try it,,, what's the worst that could happen....right? 

Hi - just tried that - it opened as administrator but not sure what else it did. It didn't correct any of the faults though.
 
One thing I have noticed. If I open csc twice i.e. two simple instrument tracks it zeros one of the volumes whenever i stop and start playing the song. Quite annoying. I am sure there is an explantion but it is not as simple as i first thought. 

I'm not convinced of that - I completely disagree.  I don't think ASIO4ALL has anything to do with this.  I use ASIO4ALL on my secondary DAW with a soundblaster!  it works flawlessly.   ASIO4ALL is simply a wrapper to wrap WDM drivers into ASIO driver mode in the host.  it cannot affect the volume or automation of one softsynth without affecting the volume of the entire soundcard. it is not possible.

Brandon - that sounds to me like an automation problem.  do you know where to find the automation?  on the CSC track which isn't working correctly, click on it to highlight it, then click on your middle mouse button.  that brings up the menu for the cursors.  click on the pull down that currently has CLIPS selected and choose AUTOMATION>VOLUME or AUTOMATION>MUTE

each one of those will bring up a different automation line.  is it set to -inf on either of those?

the next thing I'd do is insert a NEW INSTRUMENT track and then just copy the MIDI data from the first one to the new one and see if that works.

the next thing I'd check is the MIDI data itself.  you can go to VIEWS>MIDI DATA
that will bring up another window and it shows the MIDI data.  look for VOLUME entries in the MIDI DATA that show a value of 0.

Hi I clicked on autonation volume and mute but i haave no idea what the automation line is you refer to. When I click on either of them the mute places a yellow square next to it and the volume places a green square next to it but nothing else. No sign of -inf anywhere.
 
Also when i go to 'views' i do not get an option to look at 'midi data'.
 
I am using MC6 so there shouldn't be any differnce in our respective menus but it seems there is?
 
 

One oddity is that when i open studio instruments as a stand alone app i dont get any sounds from it and i did a couple of weeks ago - so there may be an issue outside of MC.

Brandon de Ashe


Strange things such as volume changes (drops mainly or insturments just being zero'd) also occur if I stop start the play. It isnt the midi tracks as these play ok individually. I am wondering if i need to reload everything as it may be a virus has crept in somewhere and interfering with the sound elements on my pc.

This doesn't make sense.  when you stop the play all instruments should stop playing - so I don't understand what you mean by this.
 
I am 99.9% sure it's not a virus causing MC to behave this way and I'm 99.9% sure reinstalling will not help.

Hi Beagle - no Studio Instruments is not working in MC either.

When i said the volume goes to zzero when i click stop i meant when i click start again some of the Csc instruments volumes levels have dropped to zero and I have to manually add the volume levels again.

Brandon -  

I’ve checked out your project and I see exactly what you see – the volume on CSC goes to –inf and the pan goes all the way left at beat 3 of measure 1 when the project is played.   so this is definitely not an issue with ASIO4ALL or the onboard soundcard.
 
I cannot find any reason for this to happen.  I’ve looked at the MIDI data including all of the controllers and the SYSX data; nothing should make the CSC’s do that.
 
This appears to be a bug but I don’t know what the reason behind the bug is.
 
I have deleted your Simple Instrument Tracks and CSC’s and set them up as separate MIDI/OUTPUT tracks with new CSC’s and this seems to work this way.  I’ve uploaded the changes back into the dropbox folder for you.
 
So my advice is to not use the simple instrument tracks – but just insert the synth with the FIRST SYNTH OUPTUT check box enabled when you insert them and also check the SYTNH TRACK FOLDER so you can put the MIDI track and the output track into a folder of its own and keep it together that way.
 
Let me know if you have trouble doing it that way.