Unusual warning

[demodoc]

Had this happen the other day, recording with SS on my laptop. Several tracks armed for record, all inputs properly assigned to input devices, as far as I know, SAW would drop out of record-ready and display the warning "all active tracks are empty" . What does this mean? As I said, all inputs were were properly assigned, so were the outputs. Nothing was different than usual, as far as I could see. Once I actually started recording, all was OK though. Bob, what was going on here?:confused:

[Bob L]

That warning should only occur when playback is started with all assigned tracks having no regions on them... no idea what was going on in your situation.

Can you duplicate the problem and give me a step by step?

Bob L

[demodoc]

If it ever happens again, sure. I had never seen that before and hope to never see it again. Will let you know if I see it again.

[andy cross]

I've had this happen a few times. On every occasion I've accidentally had a track selected in the multitrack with no regions on it. "TRK" appears below the mouse point when you're in this mode - right clicking on any track number will exit it.

Any self-generated glitches are worth the immense usefulness of this mode. Being able, for example, to solo a pre-set selection of tracks with two mouse clicks is a great time-saver.

edit: just checked - selecting a track doesn't seem to affect recording in the way it does playback, so there must be something else going on.

[demodoc]

Well, I recorded with the laptop again yesterday and no problems at all. I do have a theory, though. When I had this happen the other day, I soon realized that I had the computers' wireless modem turned on. Normally, it is off because it can cause small audio glitches while recording. So I stopped recording and disabled it. No problem after that. Maybe that was it...

[andy cross]

Not sure if it's been mentioned here before, but Thesycon's DPC Latency Checker (www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml), is a good way to check what might be hampering performance. Wireless network adapters are notorious in this respect.

[Dave Labrecque]

Not sure if it's been mentioned here before, but Thesycon's DPC Latency Checker (www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml (http://www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml)), is a good way to check what might be hampering performance. Wireless network adapters are notorious in this respect.

Thanks, Andy. I tried it. My system looks good according to its display. But I do have drop-outs when using my UAD-1 plugs, and this program doesn't show a blip when that happens. It occurs to me that maybe it's only monitoring audio streaming that goes through Windows' various layers. I'm not sure how much of that happens when using SAW.

[demodoc]

Yes, I have the latency checker and know that my wireless modem must be off. I just left it on by accident.

[andy cross]

Following a thread a few months ago, I picked up a cheap second-hand laptop which does nothing other than run SAW, having got fed up with the process of disabling various bits of hardware and software on my all-purpose laptop whenever I wanted to use it for recording.