Tony Beveridge

I completely empathise with your frustrations. I really enjoy using cakewalk in the main, and have some better than newbie knowledge that I am loathe to throw away.

I toggled between both and it made no difference, especially running cakewalk as the only foreground process. I think it may make a difference for perhaps slightly older processors, but I don't have any proof of that. In reality, it was my naivety in having ozone 9 elements active when trying to record. I'm now experimenting with Bill and Hook's suggestions.

I should have mentioned it is a desktop. C states and performance plans covered off in the focusrite link, as well as a bunch of others. Thanks for the link to the latency monitor, that is well worth a look.

Thank you HOOK and Bill for the comments re separating recording and mixing/mastering projects. I like that idea a lot. Seems I still have a bit to learn with cakewalk!

This may also help. I find that if I deactivate the Izotope Ozone 9 Elements mastering plugin I had on the master bus and one track, the glitches practically disappear when recording. Just means that I need to bump the Focusrite buffers up to 1024 and activate izotope when actually mastering. What do a lot of blogs etc say? Have you installed or used any different plugins? 🙄 Which is obvious when you think about it 😁

I'm hoping someone can help me here. Until recently, I was using Windows 10 with a 3rd gen Focusrite solo, and Cakewalk (latest), on a 16GB memory machine, with i7 quad cores and a fast SSD. I upgraded to Windows 11 recently. For simple projects, Cakewalk and Focusrite work (sort of ) OK. However, any project with more than 4 tracks, and I get all sorts of engine drop outs, pops, crackles when I try and record a new track. On Windows 10, I had a few projects with > 16 tracks, and never experienced any issues at all. If I want to record e.g. bass, guitar, midi, Focusrite gets set down to a buffer size of 64 samples, or else the latency is awful. If I want to mix or master, then I have to set Focusrite up to 1024 samples, or the engine keeps dropping out. I followed a Focusrite 'Optimize audio for Windows 11' (https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/4408057193362-Optimising-your-PC-for-Audio-on-Windows-11) and still have issues. I found a few other Cakewalk and Windows 11 blogs that offered a sub set of what Focusrite suggested. I've run out of ideas at the moment. I am past the 'revert in 10 days' window of Windows 11, so going back to 10 would be awkward. If anybody has any ideas or further links, I'd be most grateful.