NO DRIVERS WITH MUSIC CREATOR 3

Hello All, I just bought a new mic and Music creator 3 was with it. So I installed it on my Vista based laptop. I started importing a song done with Cakewalk proaudio. The all tracks are there but nothing plays back ! So I have opened the Audio windows and there are NO drivers installed apparently! Empty window! There are no drivers in the output or input window. Where can I get them? Have you ever experienced this? What should I do? Thanks in advance Roland

Hi Greg, Thanks for your help and reply.I will be trying to answer underneath. I am using the internal Sound card of my laptop which is a CompaQ Presario CQ71. I am running Vista.I bought it 2 years ago. I do not know what is Wave profiler so I cannot answer to this and probably do not use it otherwise I will know I guess! I am using a Samson Q1U USB plugged microphone. It does not show inputs or outputs on the mic but I can tell you it records beautifully on Proaudio once it is plugged in ! I was amazed for such a price.

man... you got it all going against you.... 

USB mics are not a good way to record with MC. And version 3 is really old.  Normally you get one of the LE versions with the USB mics. 

best advice I can offer is to go to this thread and read it carefully and follow the instructions...perhaps it will get you up and running..... 

HERE>>>>   http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=1618556

good luck

unfortunately roland, latency is going to be a probelm with your set up.  you're going from a USB mic to your onboard soundcard output, so you're using 2 different soundcards (the usb mic counts as a soundcard) with 2 different clocks.   also, MME is the slowest of all protocols for drivers, but unfortunately it's necessary to use MME with your USB mic because WDM and ASIO won't work.

my BEST advice to you is to ditch the USB mic and get a real interface for about $150 and a traditional condensor mic, for about $100 to $150.  I know that's a lot more than you paid for the USB mic, but the headaches are much less, I promise!  I have soundcard (interface) and mic recommendations on my website.

in the meantime, we can try to "trick" your USB mic and onboard soundcard into thinking it's one device under ASIO (normally ASIO only allows ONE device).  go to www.asio4all.com and download asio4all, unzip it, install it and then go to MC3 OPTIONS>AUDIO>ADVANCED and change the driver mode to ASIO.  you may need to close and restart MC3.

that MIGHT give you lower latency with your current setup.  it might not.  ASIO4ALL is a wrapper to trick the host (MC3) into thinking that the crappy drivers for the USB mic and onboard soundcard are actually good fast drivers, but sometimes tricks don't work.

my best advice is still to get a good USB soundcard and condensor mic when you can afford it even if this does reduce your latency.  you'll be far better off in the end.

Hi Robert, I tried your trick but no... does not work... Could have worked but as you said "MIGHT work". THanks anyway you managed to handle my previous problem VERY nicely, "and" smoothly. My problem is that I am in Cape town for 4 months and I have 2 mics home (XLR) so I am not very keen at buying a third one! I thought this would be easier for me to have a USB mic with my laptop to record here in Cape Town on it but... So I am getting a bit suspicious now about USB mics now. I find them very convenient though, but what do you need to make them work properly with no latency (or so little). An external Soundcard on which you plug the USB mic? Roland

change back to MME driver mode.

USB mics are very hard to get to work properly with MC and Sonar in general.  Not that Sonar or the USB mic is a bad thing.... it's just that they are from two different worlds in how they work and making them work together is nearly impossible.

USB mics are good for podcasting and recording stuff into the computer using it's Microsoft recorder...and that's about the extent of the usefulness of a USB mic.

Cake products were designed to record multitrack music and use ONE sound card which is capable of handling the whole process. When you use a USB mic, you are essentially using TWO sound cards which are NOT synced together with timing signals, so things you record will drift out of time quite often, and the factory card is not capable of delivering a low latency experience. That combination of misadventures is what causes the problems for even the best and most experienced users trying to get a USB mic to work. 

The best option is to return the USB mic, use the store credit to purchase something like a USB based M-Audio, Presonus, or Focusrite music interface with midi & audio in one box, which uses ASIO drivers and then, plug in a "normal" dynamic or condenser mic to the interface...... that is the combination that most people here use, and it works well, with very low latency.