# Mixdown memory problems



## hollowbody (Jan 15, 2008)

I'm trying to export a project in Sonar to individual .wavs for each track so I can send them to a friend for him to work on some stuff, but I keep running out of memory. I managed to mix down the whole thing to a single .wav previously, but now my computer just kinda hangs and Sonar tells me it's out of memory. 

I've tried freezing tracks, bouncing them, bypassing the effects all to no avail. Anybody got any handy solutions to this that I can try? I'm using Sonar 7 on a Vista machine.


----------



## Guest (Oct 27, 2010)

Can you solo each track and bounce the master over and over?


----------



## Vox71 (Mar 25, 2008)

I agree. Can't you just solo each track, and export as a wav file?


----------



## Kenmac (Jan 24, 2007)

What bit rate are you using? Also have you done the usual maintenance routine, defragged, disabled any unnecessary programs, etc?


----------



## hollowbody (Jan 15, 2008)

iaresee said:


> Can you solo each track and bounce the master over and over?





Vox71 said:


> I agree. Can't you just solo each track, and export as a wav file?


I've tried this and it still doesn't work. My only workaround was to copy/paste the individual tracks into a new project and do it that way, but it was really time consuming and I ended up having some glitches with a track or two not synching up perfectly afterwards.

It's weird, it's only this one project that is wonky. I can batch export in other projects no prob. I thought maybe I should just reinstall the software, but since it seems ok with other projects, I ruled that out as an option.

Granted, I AM using a lot of VSTs on this one. I have a track that uses the NI B4, a few guitars running through Guitar Rig and some compression and reverb all around. I wanted to solo and bounce the tracks to audio to save on processing horsepower, but I can't even do that. Even worse, I can't play the project either. Whenever I go to play it, it starts and then has dropout almost immediately. Fortunately, I was able to master the finished mix at one point and still have the mix as a .wav, but whatever happened in between then and now has caused the project to be pretty much unusable.



Kenmac said:


> What bit rate are you using? Also have you done the usual maintenance routine, defragged, disabled any unnecessary programs, etc?


I'm exporting to .wav at 16-bit 44.1khz stereo. My PC is set to auto-defrag once a week and there's still tons of space on the drive, which is a SATA drive, not USB or anything, so that _shouldn't_ be it, but I will try a manual defrag when I get home and maybe disable everything in my startup and reboot to see what's what.

My question at this point is, when it says it's out of memory, are we talking RAM or HD? I can drag and drop the individual tracks one-by-one again and see where that gets me, but I don't want to have that as a solution in case I experience the same thing with future projects. If it's RAM, I can drop some more in there after a quick trip to the store, but if it's HD space, maybe that's a setting I'm not seeing??? Like something similar to Windows' page-file? I've got tons of room, so I could jack that up much higher if need be.

I think maybe I need to start putting my pennies away for a dedicated recording machine.

Thanks for your help, guys! I really appreciate it!


----------



## Guest (Oct 27, 2010)

hollowbody said:


> I've tried this and it still doesn't work.


I just want to make sure I understand the problem:

If you leave your tracks and mix set as normal and then bounce the master to a stereo WAV file it bounces just fine.

But if you if solo a single track and then bounce the master you run out of memory?

Did I capture your problem correctly?



> Granted, I AM using a lot of VSTs on this one.


It shouldn't matter -- if you can bounce a master mix then you should be able to bounce a master mix with one channel solo'd. It should use the same memory and CPU at worst, but more likely it'll use less memory because the s/w should be smart enough to not trigger VSTs that are muted.



> My question at this point is, when it says it's out of memory, are we talking RAM or HD?


RAM. Your hard drive would be reported as out of disk space.



> If it's RAM, I can drop some more in there after a quick trip to the store, but if it's HD space, maybe that's a setting I'm not seeing??? Like something similar to Windows' page-file? I've got tons of room, so I could jack that up much higher if need be.


I would not make the pagefile bigger. If thinks are paging to disk your best bet is to buy more RAM. But: what kind of computer do you have? What version of Windows are you running? How much RAM do you have now? 32-bit Windows can't do anything with more than 4 GB of RAM. But if you're running 64-bit Windows, more RAM is more better.

Have you tried getting in touch with Cakewalk's tech support? It really sounds like you've found a bug in Sonar.

Thanks for your help, guys! I really appreciate it![/QUOTE]


----------



## hollowbody (Jan 15, 2008)

iaresee said:


> I just want to make sure I understand the problem:
> 
> If you leave your tracks and mix set as normal and then bounce the master to a stereo WAV file it bounces just fine.
> 
> ...


Not quite. At the moment, I can't do anything at all with the project. A while ago, I was able to play and bounce the master no prob. I don't know what exactly happened to changes things, but at this point I cannot playback the project at all, Sonar immediately reports audio dropout. I also cannot bounce ANYTHING, not a single track, not the whole mix, nada. 

The only workaround is to drag and drop a track individually into a new project, bounce it there and lather, rinse, repeat.

It's possible the project has just become corrupted somehow, since I'm not experiencing this problem in any of my other projects, but I thought maybe since this one has the most tracks and VSTs being used, that that might have something to do with it.




iaresee said:


> I would not make the pagefile bigger. If thinks are paging to disk your best bet is to buy more RAM. But: what kind of computer do you have? What version of Windows are you running? How much RAM do you have now? 32-bit Windows can't do anything with more than 4 GB of RAM. But if you're running 64-bit Windows, more RAM is more better.
> 
> Have you tried getting in touch with Cakewalk's tech support? It really sounds like you've found a bug in Sonar.


I haven't tried yet, but I've browsed a bit through their forum and not really found an answer. I'll probably register there and ask and send Cakewalk an email too.

As for my PC, I'm running Vista 32bit on a quad core machine with 3 GB of RAM. This is part of my problem. I used to have a dedicated recording machine that was an old Athlon 1.3 with 1Gb of RAM and I'd occasionally get dropout on that, but not often, so you'd think this machine would just fly through even a fairly complicated mix. This one has roughly 17 tracks with some effects and VSTs throughout. I'm running audio through my M-Audio 410, so it's not an issue with my onboard sound either.


----------



## hollowbody (Jan 15, 2008)

Good thing it's slow at work today. Some forum crawling netted these solutions:

Turning off the 64-bit double precision engine (I don't know if it's on in the first place, but I'll check)

Checking/altering the BounceBufSizeMsec

The last thing I found is that .wav files can't become larger than 2Gb, for whatever reason. I doubt this is the issue, since I'm doing 16bit 44.1khz stereo stuff not 24/96 surround, but it's nice to know.


----------



## hollowbody (Jan 15, 2008)

K, I've figured it out thanks to some people over on teh Cakewalk forums. Apparently Cakewalk's own VC64 plugin sometimes doesn't like to work properly. Once I'd disabled all instances of it (I was using it everywhere!), the project started playing again. What's weird is that when I was first beginning mixing and mastering this song, the plugin worked fine, and I really, really liked it, but now it doesn't seem to want to work properly, so I have to find another vintage-flavoured compressor.


----------



## Vox71 (Mar 25, 2008)

Hey Hollowbody

I had similar problems once as well. After spending some time on the Cakewalk forum I found out it is, in fact, the VC64 plugins. Apparently, they are for mastering only. If you apply them to a track within the project you will get all sorts of clock and sync issues. Starts out fine (and does sound good), but gives you headaches later


----------



## hollowbody (Jan 15, 2008)

Vox71 said:


> Hey Hollowbody
> 
> I had similar problems once as well. After spending some time on the Cakewalk forum I found out it is, in fact, the VC64 plugins. Apparently, they are for mastering only. If you apply them to a track within the project you will get all sorts of clock and sync issues. Starts out fine (and does sound good), but gives you headaches later


Yeah, I'll definitely be looking for another plug-in for individual tracks. Maybe the PSP Warmer, which I used a couple time before and thought was alright.


----------



## Kenmac (Jan 24, 2007)

hollowbody said:


> K, I've figured it out thanks to some people over on teh Cakewalk forums. Apparently Cakewalk's own VC64 plugin sometimes doesn't like to work properly. Once I'd disabled all instances of it (I was using it everywhere!), the project started playing again. What's weird is that when I was first beginning mixing and mastering this song, the plugin worked fine, and I really, really liked it, but now it doesn't seem to want to work properly, so I have to find another vintage-flavoured compressor.


Glad to hear they've helped you solve the problem. As you say the PSP Warmer would probably be a good choice for that "vintage" type warmth and sound. Take it easy on that VC64. )


----------

