Matthew Carr

My advice would be to avoid Dell laptops - I recently bought a Dell Latitude 5480 with an i7 7820HQ thinking it'd be just the job. It's a lovely laptop, but useless for music production. DPC latency is terrible, and nothing I change in the config will make it usable for music production. Researching it, it seemed pretty much all newish dell laptops have the same problem. Dell promised to fix the DPC on the the XPS 15, but as far as i know they never released any updates that truly made it better - the newest incarnation may be better, but I'd be ultra cautious buying dell unless you can get a reliable DPC result before buying.

D'oh... that was the link to last years poll, despite it been top of the most popular articles.... looks like this years poll yet to be announced.. Let's hope for higher than no 7!

Looks Like CbB made the No 7 spot in a survey of their readers for best DAW... I'd hope this is higher than last year! https://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/the-20-best-daw-software-apps-in-the-world-today-238905 Still seems the product naming has caused some confusion though..

Fantastic work on this release Bakers, great effort! I tried out the new Playlist functionality, and this has really improved. The ability to discard project changes during playback is great, and loading the next song at the end of the current song gets rid of audio glitches and other problems that used to happen when loading the next song whilst the current song starts. I think there's still room for improvement though, to make this really useable in a live environment Possible Bugs When loading a project from the playlist, the now time is always set to the start of a project, rather than respecting where the now time has been set to when saving the file. Perhaps this is by design, if so there needs to be an option to respect the saved now time in projects. When a song is manually loaded by double clicking on an entry, any existing projects are left open - manually jumping to a new point in the playlist should close any open projects (and respect the option to discard any changes made) Enhancements I'd like to be able to control the playlist from my master keyboard transport controls - having to press keys on the laptop isn't so practical, and reminds the audience that a computer is involved. There are a few changes that would help in this regard In the delay dialog, add an option along the lines of 'Just Load Song', which will mean The project is loaded, but not started. The project transport obeys the standard transport controls, so can be started, stopped, rewound etc using the transport controls When the project plays past the end, the next project is loaded as per normal No MsgBox dialogs are shown when the project starts. E,g right now if I press play on my master keyboard, the project doesn't start, instead it displays a dialog which I then have to accept on the laptop in order to start the song - Useless if I'm trying to cue backing to a live band member! Allow the playlist to be toggled between minimised / maximised via a learned midi command. When using a laptop, the playlist obscures too much of cakewalk when always on top, but we need a way to quickly bring up and then hide the setlist during a show Add midi learnable commands to Scroll up the list Scroll down the list Manually load the currently selected project (the same as pressing enter, or double clicking a file name) Consider an additional 'Live' view of the setlist, which just displays the Status, File Name , BPM and Key in a larger font. The extra columns are needed for setting up the playlist, but not during the show - a larger font would be far more use!

Agreed, the amount of time and effort being spent in quashing bugs, fine tuning features based on feedback, and adding genuinely useful enhancements is really making Cakewalk shine... the current development approach rocks! Great work all at Cakewalk and Bandlab (I too would really like to see the staff view get an upgrade.... that probably sounds a bit needy given all the efforts to date, sorry!)

Any updates on the winners?

What would be a really helpful addition is to allow Cakewalk to open a file in a read-only mode, perhaps via a command argument e.g. sonar.exe -readonly "C:\songs\my very bad song.cwp" In read only mode, the save changes dialog would never appear, and changes would never be saved. Of course this could be dangerous without understanding it's meaning, but I doubt anyone would set this switch unless they knew what it did. Would be fantastic when using other programs to manage a setlist though.. (Maybe some element of the UI could change colour in read only mode, to make it obvious) I tried using the playlist app again the other day - wasn't very successful. I send midi data to control outboard gear when I load a backing track, and having two projects open at once seems to foul this up..

Pretty sure you can set 'Midi Automator' up to automatically click on the 'No' button in a confirmation dialog, if it's present, when changing songs... haven't tried it myself though. Agree it'd be good to get an update to the official app though.. as the official app uses the API, it can preload songs in a setlist for quicker changing. Are the details of the API available? I might be interested in creating an open source project for this, if they are. Or maybe Bandlab would consider open sourcing there existing playlist app, so we could add an option to always close dirty projects without saving?

Thanks Chuck, but I'm using an external USB Soundcard via ASIO - the DPC Latency is caused by the laptop, not the interface.

Thanks All, some good advice given - I might be making some progress but need to do more testing. I'd read that the battery system could cause ACPI.sys latency in a laptop, so I disabled the 'Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Method Battery' driver under battery settings. Seems to make it appear to windows there is no battery installed, so easier than physically removing the battery. That did seem to help somewhat, but still was getting spikes (wifi / ethernet was disabled) I then tried setting the processor affinity for Cakewalk.exe to cores 2,3,4 via Task Manager, and even though latency Mon was still reporting high DPC on core 1, audio seemed to be OK with a buffer of 128. Unfortunately, doesn't seem to be a way to set processor affinity for APCI.sys (even using Process Lassoo) and as I want to use this laptop in a live setting, I'd be nervous that ACPI.sys might for some reason move off core 1 and wreck things - although I haven't seen that to date Guess I need to do more testing, to see if I can get ACPI.sys under control, or build my confidence up that setting processor affinity will do the trick. Either that, or I sell the laptop and keep lugging my racked I7 desktop to gigs.. 😫

Thanks Jim, Everything is updated to latest versions, so I'm out of options there. I'm a bit deflated by that. The laptop has 4 cores, and only one core is being impacted by high DPC latency - surely if the audio app only runs on the cores not impacted, it wouldn't be interrupted by the process which takes a takes a long time to complete. Or am I being too simplistic?

Hi All, afraid I need some technical help. I (unfortunately) just bought a dell laptop (Lattitude 5480) for use with cakewalk. On paper, this thing is a beast : i7-7820HQ processor, 16 Gb Ram, Pcie(4x) SSD. It's a great laptop, very fast and capable, but turns out it's completely unusable with any audio program due to DPC latency LatencyMon shows the culprit as ACPI.sys - I'm getting latency readings of over 2500uS, which results in lots of audible clicks and pops with reasonable ASIO buffers (256) I've done all the usual: disabled c states, turned off speed-step and turbo-boost in Bios; Set all power plan settings to max performance; Disabled network, on board audio, camera, microphone array etc in device manager - but nothing works. The only thing I can think of now is to try and set processor affinity so cakewalk only runs on cores 2,3 & 4 - the DPC spikes seem only to occur on core 1. Is this possible, and does anyone have any experience or knowledge of doing this? I did attempt creating a shortcut that set the processor affinity using this article :https://www.eightforums.com/threads/cpu-affinity-shortcut-for-a-program-create-in-windows.40339/ but without much success. Is it possible to restrict Cakewalk to only use certain cores, and is it a viable technique to get around DPC Latency issues? Any advice gratefully received, as this is starting to look like an expensive mistake...

This sounds like a great idea, it's a pain when I move my laptop between home and rehearsal room - different interfaces and different master keyboard mean it's easy to get things messed up. Being able to choose between multiple 'hardware configs' from the UI would be awesome!

The tool that I use live is http://midi-automator.com - unfortunately the website explaining it (and with the windows download) doesn't exist anymore, but there are details and some videos on this link. It's free and very useful replacement to the playlist (which I never got on with) - just make sure you set the option in CbB to only allow one file to be opened at once, and you're all set. Also freezing any backing and removing unused VSTs from the project will help with the load times. No Lyric prompting though - it just opens cakewalk projects in order and in response to learned midi messages. If you're interested I can send you the install program - being free & open source I don't think the author would mind.

Maybe try un-checking the "zero controllers when play stops" in preferences screen - sounds like CbB is sending a 0 to a midi CC that controls channel 2 on the mixer?