Alright, previously I was trying to solve two problems. First, general instablity in N-track, second, the fact that imported drum tracks were sped up and distorted. Following advice from you all, I reinstalled all my recording related hardware and software and made sure that the drum track I was making in Drumsite matched the sampling rate in N-track.
Problem solved, or not.
So everything seemed to be working and stable. So I make a drum track (Beatles, Help!) in Drumsite at 44.1 kHz. I export it as a wave and import it into N-track. It works!. I save it. Then I lay down the bass track. Sounds great! I save the two together. Then I shut down n-track to cook some dinner. Later I open the files. They are sped up and distorted, even though they were saved in n-track. Now, in addition N-track has started acting up again, I did not change any settings or anything.
These problems are preventing me from getting anywhere. I would appreciate any adive or input.
Hmm. You went back and checked to make sure all of the relevant settings remained as they were? Sounds to me like something is changing on its own, so to speak. I don’t know enough to suggest any reason for this, however. Anyone?
I did repeat the process several times, checking the sampling rate before and after importing the .wav. Everytime I saved, closed and reopened the n-track file it was sped up and distorted, upon checking the sampling rate it was still 44.1 khz.
Importing waves “may” be dangerous.
Checked 16 vs. 24 bit ? Which format were the original waves ?
I did not import it. I simply opened it. The file sounds right initially. I am not sure if it is 16 or 24 bit.
Ludo what do you mean by dangerous?
Importing waves is one of those things that will cause the memory/resource corruption…whether or not it’s the importing or the recalculations and redrawing of the UI or some other stuff that happens when another track is added to the song that’s causing the corruption is something I haven’t figured out. Cloning a track will do the same thing, but cloning a track wall also add a new track and do about the same thing as importing a track.
Immediately after importing or cloning a track, Save As… to a new song, exit n-Tracks and open the new instance of the song. Doing that helps avoid the corruption.
I haven’t checked out 1751 to see if it’s any better, but that wasn’t in the list of changes so I don’t expect the problem has been found yet.
This I find useful and interesting if not a bit scary because I did have some weird problems when importing wave files I had rendered in Storm 3.
What was happening was that the faders
all of them IE Master fader, and or track faders would crackle
when moved on such an imported waves, I then loaded up the “on a roll” demo track and it’s waves did not crackle or do anything bad, (on a roll has both mono and stereo waves by the way).
This confused me for quite a while, I decided that importing waves was in fact “dangerous” which kind of sux because it is tempting to mix down various sections
especially if one was attempting classical ensembles etc.
(Which I’m maybe going to do).
I was concerned that maybe Storm3 had header info that was different from standard but then I tried other imported waves that did exactly the same thing, IE crackle the faders for no reason.
I did get one wave file to play properly once imported into N-tracks that previously did not! It turned out I’d originally recorded it at 125 bpm, and was trying to play it back in N-track at 120, when I corrected the tempo to 125 in N-track the crackling left…Still, it’s scary.
regards
Alright, so after a weekend of fan dangling I am finding the current things. when I open .wav files generated in n-track or not sometimes they are sped up, sometimes not. If they are sped up, closing the app and reopening often fixes the problem. So I think this is weird quirk, not a setting that I have uncorrectly set.
Another weird thing, if I have two or more tracks playing at once, switching between them (say moving from the drum track to the bass track to apply an effect) while the tracks are playing will cause the program to hang for about 1 sec. Then it continues to play, but the sound is distorted. The distortion is not there when I play the wave track back in other applications. What might be the cause of this?
Basically though, it is working. I can make a drum track in one app. open it in n-track, and as long as I am careful (such as making sure that I am not playing the tracks when I switch between them, and not doing anything too fast) I can record.
Thompsoi;
I have had similar quirky problems with n-Track. I have posted them here and sent email to Flavio with no reply. Regardless of what everyone points the finger at, I DO NOT believe it is a hardware problem - I don’t have these problems with any other software (including other audio software) on my PC.
I can’t get n-Track to be stable on my machine, period. Lockups, shutdowns and just plain flaky. As I posted below, I have had songs working perfectly in n-Track then not open at all a day later. That is EXTREMELY frustrating.
I cannot believe all the posts I read here how no-one else has these problems. Either these folks have been lucky or they are not using the program in any depth.
I really like the look and feel of n-Track but I’m running out of hair to pull. If I can’t get this ironed out soon I’m gonna have to move on. What a shame - nice program, good forum - but can’t use it. Wish I had spent more time testing it before I bought it.
Turn Windows system sounds off, or anything else that might produce a sound or there than n-Tracks and see if there is any difference.
Which OS are you on?
There was an interesting bug in a driver, and a design issue in the OS at one time, where playing two sounds at one would cause them to automatically cause them to the resampled on the fly to insure that they were all playing at the same sample rate. IF you happened to be recording at 44.1k and a Windows system sound happened (email notificiation sound was played for example) and that sound was NOT a 44.1k sample then the recording would take on the sample rate of THAT sound. n-Tracks would keep recording at the new sample rate and place the data a the wave file as 44.1k. During 44.1 k playback the wave would jump pitch. The file was corrupt, but there was no bug in n-Tracks.
So, check you drivers again. I have seen this in many years. I doubt your problem is that.
Don’t use the DirectSound devices either just in case.