Tuesday 20 January 2009

Cool Edit Pro Vista Mixer Fix

like me, many of you will have grown so used to using the Cool Edit Pro software and enjoy its powerful abilities in your audio mixing and editing.

before the advent of windows Vista, all was well in the CEP camp!

but now, those who have migrated over to vista, are finding it hard to use all the functions of your once trustworthy program.

well having just run into this issue myself, the inability to record and grab the vista audio mixer into CEP, spawning the error: ""Cannot find the mixer program "sndvol32 /r"

i trundled away for many hours trying to find an online solution, played about with UAC control, XP compatibility mode, you name it! - no luck.

i then had a revelation and immediately started doing what i thought would fix this issue once and for all, you dont get many moments like this, but i had followed my nose and was correct! - i had fixed it in a few edits and prompts.

bellisimo!!!!

CEP 2.1 accepting my mic and input levels and the ability to record once more!!

if like me, you were/are searching for this online, you will have come across many many forums and discussion on this very error, all, as far as i can see not able to point out and identify the problem

well this is where that all changes, here is what to do, step by step. i have also provided the .reg file if you want to avoid manually editing your registry, simply download the file and double click it to merge it, and of course ok the admin prompts. its safe it just enters the required syntax change for you now with regards to CEP looking for vistas Mixer!

heres how....
(manually)
  1. go to your start menu
  2. in the live search box (the new 'run' equivalent), type the following: regedit
  3. after a while you should see the regedit program appear at the top of the results
  4. right click on the regedit.exe file
  5. choose 'run as administrator'
  6. press 'continue' when prompted
  7. your registry editor will appear!
  8. navigate to the following path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Syntrillium\CEPro2\Tools
  9. you should see an entry called: Mixer2
  10. its data/value should read: sndvol32 /r
  11. simply double left-click on the word Mixer2, this will bring up the data entry, which we will modify on the next step
  12. what we need for it to be in there is: sndvol /r NOT sndvol32 /r
  13. so either simply delete the '32' portion of the data entry or if you prefer delete the whole entry and retype: sndvol /r
  14. note that there is one space after sndvol
  15. press ok to close and set that new entry in place
  16. then exit the registry editor and the next time you launch CEP you will have mixer functionality!
thats the manual way, which sure does seem long winded when doing it blow by blow.


here is for all you impatient types (like me!)

download the auto registry file HERE (which does all the above for you!)

  1. upon downloading file, unzip with your favourite zipper tool
  2. double left click to merge into your registry
  3. continue at any admin prompt to allow it to write the new mixer syntax
  4. thats it.
  5. launch CEP and enjoy.

please contact me if the file is unavailable to download. and i will get a new copy up.

enjoy!