BOBONA

Ok, for now I did get ASIO4All working (yes, I do understand it's not recommended). I realized I was also using it on my old setup for a few months and it seemed to work fine enough for my needs. LatencyMon did not have anything to report on the issue. Fyi when I said that WASAPI Exclusive isn't working, I meant it seems to actually not be supported by my drivers (when Cakewalk does the channel loading thing, all the channels say unavailable). There might be a driver issue that I can fix but for now I'm happy to use ASIO4All if it works. If I run into more issues in the future, I will likely just invest a bit in an audio interface like you all said. Thanks for the help!

Ok thanks for the advice. I can say CPU/RAM usage is almost certainly not the problem, this is a pretty powerful laptop running with just a few tabs open. I'll check out that tool and see if it reports anything. Also I'll try asio4all again and verify if that doesn't work.

That's really not answering my question. Yes, I can spend over a hundred dollars for another piece of equipment to lug around whenever I want to produce on my laptop. But honestly, I'd rather spend the hundred dollars on another DAW that can produce music without crackling. And really, I'd rather just fix the problem with Cakewalk. Is this an unsolvable problem? What even causes the crackling? Why don't I have Wasapi Exclusive and is there a way I can install that on my system? I'm just looking to understand more about this, since there isn't much info I could find online.

Hi. I'm trying to set up Cakewalk on a new laptop and can't seem to get the audio drivers configured right. MME does work however the input latency with my MIDI controller is prohibitive. Wasapi Shared has loud crackling whenever any sound is playing. Wasapi Exclusive seems to not be supported. And I'm worried about using Asio4All, since last time I tried it, my Cakewalk installation broke completely.