Paul Chan

On 8/10/2022 at 6:41 PM, pwalpwal said:

fwiw it's not a good idea to have two AV services running - -did the 3rd party app get updated recently maybe?

good luck

I normally have WinDefender deactivated as the 3rd party is the primary AV. As of updates, it's all automatic and even if there was a major update, I have not noticed anything different with the behavior of all applications and Windows functions in general. The only thing behaving odd is Cakewalk, specifically the audio import rate, nothing else in Cakewalk is affected, not bouncing rate, not exporting rate, literally just the audio import rate.  

On 8/10/2022 at 4:18 PM, Matthew Simon Fletcher said:

Hmmm that is very weird.

Do you notice issues with other content? Try copying some content to/from that drive and checking the transfer speed and how long it takes to open it in other programs.

Points to a specific disk issue - might be worth running a benchmarking tool and checking if the score you're getting matches the quoted figures for that SSD type (i'm guessing not though given what you're seeing).

Try some of the standard SSD performance troubleshooting:

https://windowsreport.com/fix-slow-ssd-windows-10/

How long have you had the drive - it might be it's on it's last legs.

My main disk (C:\) is Samsung MZVLB1T0HBLR that came with the system from the beginning, purchased around March 2021. However all Cakewalk projects and audio files are in the dedicated Samsung  980 disk (D:\) that was purchased a few weeks after the main system. I have tried copying files from one disk to the other, and vice versa, the results are normal. I also checked the link you sent, #1, #2, #3, #8, #10 have been checked and they are okay.

Just now I was going to have fun working on a project, I imported a 86MB mp4 video (5 minutes long), took some half an hour. I finished eating my meal and did the dishes, and Cakewalk was still not done yet when I came back. I can't explain how sad I feel... 🤕

On 8/7/2022 at 3:50 PM, Matthew Simon Fletcher said:

I just tested importing a 3GB/12min video into Cakewalk and it took 2-3 mins with the sample rate conversion process happening second and taking about 20 seconds of that.

So looks like it might be something specific to your project files and/or setup.
Are these wav/ video files all from the same source? What's the bit rate? Just want to rule out that there could be something odd about the content of these causing it extra work. If they are the same then try importing some known files, such as CD audio.

Not sure whether Cakewalk uses the Windows API or FFMPEG for file conversions, might be there was a change of versions there if it was working fine previously. Can you try reverting to an earlier build?

With respect to File Monitor - it works fine on OS past 8 in my experience, it's just not fully tested.
I would load up filemon and then do your import and see what activities are going on - if there's loads of non-Cakewalk activity on the same disk at the same time, it would suggest their might be contention for disk utilisation which might reduce your performance.

Hi,

As a comparison, I can imagine that a 3GB video would possibly take a couple hours to fully import on my system nowadays as the progress bar would inch forward so slowly. (knowing that I regularly import 400-500MB video that would take close to an hour to complete which nowadays I left running while having my lunch or dinner)

I work with different sources of audio files, but they are in either 48 or 96 kHz while having bit depth of 24 (my audio interface runs at 32 natively, I don't know if it makes any difference or not).

Regarding monitoring disks while importing, I just tried importing a 50MB audio file (96kHz/24bit) into my 48kHz/24bit cakewalk project setting, it took 67 seconds according to Filemon. The audio files are all on a dedicated disk and filemon says that there is nothing else running on the dedicated audio disk. However, it says that my C:\ is super busy with an average of about 10 entries per second (lowest number is 1/second while going up to whooping 20 entries/second), about 90-95% dominated by 4 things:
"chrome\user_data\default\network" ,
"chrome\user_data\default\local_storage\leveldb" ,
"asus\armoury_crate_service"  ,
"asus\armoury_crate_diagnosis"  
(I'm on an ASUS system with armoury crate running monitoring duty along with HWinfo).

However, doesn't it make not much difference as the project audio is handled by a dedicated D:\ disk separate from all the hassle of windows operational work?

Hi,

Unfortunately, I'm under NDA and can't provide links to the audio/video material I'm working on. However, most audio files (.wav) would trigger this slow import.

I do notice that the status bar says either "sample rate conversion" or "loading audio data" and the process is very slow. However, these processes used to be quick back a few months ago. It's such a mystery that audio importing (even with sample rate conversion) has become super sluggish since then.

Thank you for the File Monitor suggestion, could you please share what I need to watch for in the app? (I noticed the software says that it only supports up to Window 8?)

Thank you, I renamed it and now it's running normally. 

To Lord Tim, I just followed the instructions on another thread here in the forum. Someone else was asking about Arturia Keylab and Cakewalk regarding the integration issues since Arturia does not support Cakewalk (or is it the other way around??? I'm not so sure..) so when I did all the steps, I clicked OK, then voila Cakewalk left me in the dust. 😒

By any chance, msmcleod, do you have any suggestions regarding the slow import rate? ("very slow" rate)

Thank you for both your replies, problem has been solved by renaming it with .old!

I greatly appreciate the pointer! Thank you!

Could anyone help me please? Cakewalk just won't start. It gets up to startup page, but right before the start screen shows up, it just simply quits.

Here is the dump file after adding "ExceptionHandlingSeverity=7" under the [WinCake] in "%appdata%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core" as suggested somewhere else in this forum.

 MiniDump file.zip

Please help as I have a coming project deadline and prefer not to lose time re-installing Cakewalk and all plugins.

Thank you in advance!

Actually, despite whether converting sample rate being the culprit or not, I still think it is an odd behavior as the problem only started about a couple months ago. This had never happened previously and I never changed any settings at all. I am genuinely curious of what may have caused such a slow import.

Anyhow, I ran into another trouble as now Cakewalk refuses to even start. 😞 (I tried to hook an Arturia Keylab into Cakewalk and used a suggestion that was mentioned somewhere in the forum about using Cubase setting, and suddenly it stopped responding and has now refused to start)

Any suggestions that might help me survive these series of unfortunate events?

Thank you.

Thank you for your suggestion. I tried it out, disabling both the 3rd party app and windows defender, importing was still slow. Just now I tried to import a 22MB wav file, it took about 35 seconds to complete. I tried copying regular file in windows explorer, it was normally fast (SSD speed), so I don't think it's my drive.

I started thinking, would sample rate conversion be an issue here? What do you think? Any suggestions?

Thank you!

Since about a couple months ago, I noticed that importing audio started becoming very slow. For example, a mere 10-second audio (wav) takes almost 30 seconds to import. A video of 500MB (about 20mins long) takes about an hour with the progress bar saying "import audio" the whole time. So, I am assuming that there is something not quite right with the audio importing process.

Cakewalk and all the project/audio files are running on a dedicated internal SSD (Samsung SSD 980 1TB) with 200+ GB empty space running good temperature and in good health (only 1.6TB written on it so far during a year of usage). 

System specs: Windows 10 (up-to-date), AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, 24GB RAM, MOTU M2 audio interface.

Could anyone please share your knowledge and help me troubleshoot & fix this issue as it is severely slowing down my work?

Thank you in advance!