Starship Krupa

I so hate to say it, but as much as I love magazines, and have had so much enjoyment from them over the years, it's probably a format that won't survive in its current form. For hobbyist and professional topics, there's just so much information on the web, it's like drinking from a firehose. As far as current events....big can o'worms.

That is one awesome fscking shirt. John Aaron's immortal command that saved Apollo 12. I first heard the phrase in Apollo 13, the bit where they figure out how to adapt the Grumman Lunar Module's CO2 scrubbers for use in the North American-built Command Module. I don't think the character is named, but he has the classic NASA look of the era. I do remember talking with my computer BBS science nerd buddies about how that guy was at least as much of a mission hero as Jim Lovell. I learned later about "set SCE to AUX" and its sheer awesomeness. John Aaron did also flash his steely peepers for Apollo 13, Wikipedia says he was the one who devised the soft power-up sequence that we see Gary Sinise's "Ken Mattingly" repeat multiple times in the film. Wearing his short sleeve button down shirt and tie of course. If there's ever a movie where John Aaron appears as a character (and there really should be), he could be played by geek icon Rami Malek: He'd have to lose that laconic Elliot Alderson drawl. "Set....SCE. To....AUX." One of my favorite geek culture (mid 90's, when it was a culture, before we pwnd the world and it became the culture) artifacts was a Valentine's Day t-shirt that read "Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, All My Base Are Belong To You." I thought that was the sweetest thing. Also, if you consider multiple definitions of the word "base," pretty good geek smut.

This guy is the real steely-eyed computer man. He was the one who figured it out and then posted it for the Dell world to enjoy: I found out that Dell Optiplexes are kind of a cult item. There are so many of them out there that, like mine, were given early retirement from a corporate environment when the guy in the next cubicle got a newer system. Hey, why would you go to all this trouble just to get a decade-old tower to boot from an NVMe if you weren't expecting to keep it for a while? The Optiplex 7010 was a top of the line office box in 2012, and I was given mine in 2016. It's been a flawless workhorse DAW and NLE rig for 6 years. You can get them very cheaply, as low as $100 with the i7-3770 and maybe a little more with 4G and a spinner. Toss in a hand-me-down graphics card, an SSD, a 500W power supply, and voila, it'll run any game prior to about 2016, and later ones if you drop resolution. Depends on the GPU. Total build price would be in the range of $200 depending on how much RAM you want. If your friend's parents won't buy them a swoopy gaming rig, they can save their lawn mowing money for a month or two and they're ready to go. The cases are solid, good metalwork, they have front panel USB3, they'll take generic power supplies, what's not to love? Mine is still a fine DAW/NLE rig. Runs Obduction (2016) lickety-split in high resolution. The Radeon 5770 is getting to be kind of a hound (I so much prefer nVidia), but it will get the GTX 550 Ti when that gets upgraded on the ASUS. I may even buy one of those retired Pro licenses you can get for $25, because I'm really getting used to Remote Desktop. Remote Desktop has been GREAT for checking what plug-ins I've been using on the laptop (which runs Pro). Maybe I'll start a thread for my fellow "low end hardware" users. I built the newer box kind of out of fun. I hadn't partsed up a PC in 20 years. Turns out I still have it. 😎😄

I think it's the very definition of "undocumented feature." 😊 I have some other corrections/addenda, so I will mention it.

You are referring to Magic Switch?

I built a new DAW system (from used parts), and in reinstalling all my audio software, came to some realizations and conclusions. It's the other side of the post I wrote about giving ourselves a break about those small purchases adding up. If you're interested in what might await someone who upgrades to a new(er) system, check it out:

I suspect that all V14 has going for it is native M1 support. True? Whatever, I updated the ones that were still within the support window and saw no differences whatsoever.

Oof, good price on that i7-12700K. 3 hours in the car and the fuel would kinda nullify it. My Dell i7-3770 with 16G is still able to handle anything I throw at it. I've never felt held back by it in any way. One of the Cakewalk bakers' main DAW system is an i7-3770. There was really no compelling reason for building the new system other than that it could be done cheaply and make use of good parts I had sitting around. I'm not expecting to see any practical benefit other than that the system will feel perkier, load things more quickly, and be quieter. My secondary desktop system, which was my primary one 2 weeks ago, can now handle any level of project. The i7-6700 doesn't meet Microsoft's requirements for Windows 11. That's unfortunate, but I wouldn't have gotten the deal I did otherwise. Windows 10 will be around and well-supported for a long time. I'm a music (and video) hobbyist, not a pro, and I'm usually toward the rear middle of the pack when it comes to PC hardware. Whatever version of Windows I've run, I've always learned how to tune the software and hardware to wring the last drop of performance from them. I also tend to hold the attitude that if there's some plug-in or other that bogs my system down, it's the plug-in that needs to be replaced, not the computer. 😄 As can be seen from my last post, I have a deep bench when it comes to mixing plug-ins. 🙄 One of the reasons that I'm so fond of Meldaproduction processors is that despite having so many features that they frighten people, they run very efficiently. Audio software has matured to the point where plug-ins that sounded fantastic half a dozen years ago (when my new system would have been top of the line spec) still sound fantastic. The Plugin Alliance (elysia, brainworks, SPL, Lindell, Shadow Hills) mixing FX I have usually date back half a dozen years and remain some of the most highly-regarded in their categories. The system that's going out, a Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 8G, can cruise right along running Cakewalk. I did the Windows "refresh" on it and loaded up every bit of good freeware music software I know of and am giving it to a musician friend who wants to get started with recording and mixing low track count stuff. He doesn't own enough mics to tax it! It was my main DAW (and video) rig 6 years ago and it worked fine then. I know he'll love the ProChannel FX, and those were coded back when a system of that spec was a powerhouse. The things that bog Cakewalk down are plug-ins and extremely large numbers of audio takes. Cakewalk reads every audio file in a project that's referenced by a clip, whether that clip (or track) is muted or active. The exception is if the file is only referenced by a clip in an archived track. Good hygiene with this, that is, deleting or archiving unused ones as soon as I decide on the good ones, takes care of it.

Korg M50: http://i.korg.com/uploads/Support/M50_VNL_EFGJ2_633668554563210000.pdf

This is question-begging. Did I "care about" the Juno in the first place, and if I did, do I still? 😁 I think back in the days when I lusted after a polysynth, I was into Sequential Circuits. I thought the Prophet 600 was pretty cool. It had a built-in latchable arpeggiator (arps are still pretty central for me). Then I got into playing bass and guitar and didn't think about owning a synth for another 15 years. When I finally got one, it was the Yamaha CS6x that currently sits before me as my main controller.

As far as sampled instruments and synths go, I know of none that adjust the rate/depth of their internal samples and waveforms based on the ones the DAW is using. Cakewalk has built-in plug-in upsampling, which can be turned on and off for each individual plug-in (the setting is available from the menu in the far upper left corner of the plug-in properties UI, and then enabled and disabled globally in the Mix Module. I usually mix at 44, then render at 88, which has the same effect as 2X oversampling on all the plug-ins, both FX and synths. This is based on multiple experiments I did using various combinations of Cakewalk's upsampling and render rates. The point of steeply diminishing returns (to my ears) is just 2X. So 88 covers that handily. Then for distribution, I use a converter program to generate the lower rate/depth formats. Do some close listening tests, then go with what your ears like best. Remember: few to no listeners are going to listen as critically as you (and any mix engineer buddies). I definitely like to get the highest quality my ears can detect, but I also try to remember that I've spent most of my life training my ears to hear tiny nuances and I might be the only one who can notice them (consciously, at least). As for the "64-bit floating point engine" option in Preferences....Cakewalk were supposedly first with that, and it is widely speculated that it had more to do with a marketing hype point than practical sound considerations. All other DAW's had to follow suit, of course, but notice how in most of them (including Cakewalk), it's turned off by default.

I've not had the experience where they sound different, but I have had it happen that the honeymoon wears off.

Stone Voices started making new stuff while I wasn't looking. Their newest freebie is a reverb, DReverb. I gave it a short test run and my first impression is favorable. It's a contender for Orilriver's "best all-around freeware reverb" title. They've upped the game in the freeware reverbs arena, which for whatever reason, still lags far behind the payware reverbs arena. If you're getting started, short on funds, this is a good one to start with. But keep an eye open for one of the regular sales of iZotope Phoenix at $10. 😉

Part 3: The Winnowing Okay, so I needed another part before I got to what I think is the most interesting part, which is: how is the software installation going and what am I learning from it. There are some pains in the neck (and other areas) regarding moving presets over. Basically, I need to figure out where they are on the Optiplex and copy them to a similar location on the new system. One plug-in so far is a failure in this regard: Sitala. It won't let me save custom kits on the new system (yes, I tried running CbB as Administrator, checked permissions on the folder, yada yada), and since it links to sample locations rather than copying them, I needed to rebuild some custom kits. No go with their preset system, so I kludged it together using Cakewalk's internal preset system and will be creating all new kits with Speedrum Lite. What this means is that any existing projects that use Sitala for drums are going to need to be somewhat retooled in that department. Pain. I'm going to need to figure out how to export/import Cakewalk's native presets. Fortunately, existing projects store the plug-in settings, so I can get back up and running immediately with those. Installing all the software, especially of course plug-ins, is an ongoing CHORE, and I'm still not done. A lot of the time I don't realize something isn't installed until I need it and don't find it. With the wisdom from past reinstalls, I have all of my iLok licenses on an iLok dongle and all of my Waves licenses on an SD card. No issues at all there. Some plug-ins, notably ones from W.A. Production, had reached their install limit, and when that happens, it's necessary to contact their support to get more activations added. I don't like that, but they make some really cool sound design plug-ins like Venom that I'm not going to eschew just because of the licensing system. Fingers crossed that they're still around when I want to do this in the future. Although iZotope have a similar system, apparently I hadn't reached my limits, so no issues there. Other licensing systems with installation limits such as MAGIX and Plugin Alliance allowed me to decommission the older system I was retiring right from their websites. Nice. A big thing about this build is that when installing plug-ins, I wanted to restrict it to the favorite individual plug-ins and manufacturers I've finally settled on. I no longer have any need for any iZotope Elements except for RX7, so none of those. The zillion free compressors that I tucked away because "I might want to poke around with them someday?" Not in this dojo. Same for the myriad EQ's. For mixing plug-ins, keeping everything from Meldaproduction, Kilohearts, IK Multimedia, Exponential Audio, and most things from Plugin Alliance, and going forward, I'll be doing what I do using those. I realized that at this point, I don't need to explore mixing FX any more. I've learned which ones I like and want to get better at using those. That doesn't include the sound design-y FX, I'm still a 'ho for those, although plenty of them haven't make the cut either. One telling criterion is if I don't recognize the name. 🤣 Kinda means it ain't a go-to. The hardest ones to dump are the ones from "big time" manufacturers with really nice GUI's. How can I dump a Pluginboutique freebie from company X that normally sells for $75? Well, simply, if I'm not using it it's just in the way, and this isn't a museum. Big issue with this strategy: existing projects. A compelling reason for getting rid of those freebie and cheapie plug-ins as soon as you realize that you already have a dozen compressors/delays/EQ's/channel strips/limiters/reverbs/gates/etc. is that you might, while fooling around with them, put them in some project or other. They sit there, then one day "oh, what's that, let me throw it on this one instrument to see how it works," and you have one single project that needs this one plug-in that you tried and forgot about because it wasn't compelling, then deleted from your system weeks or months later. Try them if you must, but get rid of them quickly. Same goes for ones that came in a bundle with other plug-ins I do use, like ReaPlugs. I don't need ReEq or ReaComp sitting in my plug-in list. Most of the ToneBoosters legacy BusTools freebie pack are redundant to other FX I already use. I'm not going to try to get into them just because Jeroen Briebaart is a genius, bla bla. Keep the unique psychoacoustic ones, the rest: poof. I'll never miss 'em. Same with the Blue Labs freebie pack. Plenty of unique ones, but also some redundant ones. My aging, medicated head doesn't easily remember things as well as it used to, so of course when reinstalling my plug-ins, I have forgotten a few. As I call up old projects, they tell me which ones are missing and I either install them or replace them in the project. Tedious, perhaps, and I wind up with more cruft on the hard drive but it beats just installing every shiny toy in my plugin downloads folder. At least Cakewalk will allow me to hide it from the Browser while still using it in existing projects. So whereas CbB counts off over 700 plug-ins on the Optiplex, on the new system it's under 500. Just looking at that number seems astonishing, but I do electronic music and have a LOT of sound design-y instruments and FX. Browser shows 73 instruments and (gulp) 320 FX. The extra ones when scanning are DXi ones I've excluded. Vegas ships with a lot of those and I disable them in Cakewalk. I kept the Sonitus collection active but disable the other tiny GUI Cakewalk FX because they are just in the way. There are interesting ramifications to all this. It's already had the effect (no pun) of helping me focus on mixing and not getting distracted by a list of never-used plug-ins, pondering whether I should try them this one time, because maybe they'll really help the mix shine. No, no, for heaven's sake if I can't make a mix "shine" with 80 Meldaproduction FX, a pile of Plugin Alliance compressors and EQ's, a dozen of IK Multimedia's finest, kHs Slice and Carve, and Exponential Nimbus and R4, then I need to acquire skills rather than toys! I had a dozen amp sim plug-ins. Now I have bx_rockrack, MTurboAmp, and the TH3 that comes with Cakewalk (and is actually really great). Although I really liked the Analog Delay, the Presonus-to-VST3 wrappered ones had to go just because of the years they would take off my life at every plug-in scan. Cakewalk starts in a second or two, especially on the new system, but the Presonus loader sits there picking its nose for about 5 seconds. Gone. I have other analog delay emulations, like McDSP's excellent one. Buying a license for Plugin Doctor last time it was on sale has really helped with being able to let go of compressors and EQ's, because it reveals the similarities and differences (which usually ain't all that). It's kind of Shiva the Destroyer of Illusions of compressors and EQ's. I'm down to 10 compressors, and that includes both bus/mastering ones and track ones. More EQ's than that, because I kind of rediscovered Carve and Slice and want to give them a trial. If they don't make my motor run, out, out. Sure, Slice and Carve are highly respected precision EQ's, but do they do anything that T-Racks Equal can't do? (Maybe they do). Carve's sidechain analysis is nice, but MAutoDynamic EQ has that covered. If the functionality is duplicated, then they're just underfoot. iZotope DDLY, your head finally rolled after all these years. Waves SuperTap, you had your chance. TrueVerb, you were the best I could do until Phoenix went on sale for $10, rendering all of my existing reverbs superfluous. MTurboReverble might have done that, but Phoenix got there first. The (way underrated) sound design stuff from W.A. stays, the (nice for hyped quick results that I don't need) mixing stuff I got in $10 bundles with the sound design stuff, nuh-uh. So I paid $5 for something or other. I don't keep every unfinished $5 order of fries around thinking I might eat it someday. It was $5 to satisfy curiosity. Curiosity satisfied, no need to keep it forever. "Enhancers" in general were overrepresented, due to the "maybe it will really make a certain track sparkle" factor. My experience with enhancers in general is "if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is." As far as virtual instruments, there has also been some attrition. Synths that I always thought I should be able to get good sounds from because so many people love them, like the free UVI Digital Synsations bundle of 90's synth sounds that I realized I never liked in their original form. Also Surge and Synth1. I have Hybrid 3, Vacuum Pro, Iris 2 (watch your butt, Iris 2) and Vital. I have numerous Sampletank and KONTAKT retro synth sounds. I have 2 versions of Arturia Analog Lab Lite and 20-some A|A|S soundpacks. I have XPand!2 with its over 2000 patches. That is a LOT of instrument power. If I can't find or create a sound with those....I dunno. It really feels like a load off my back to thin these out. I can get better with the ones I'm keeping rather than putzing around with ones that might have some promise. Venus Theory has a great video about this.

Part 2: The Sword Reforged Cuts Pretty Well Okay, so the build was a success. I swapped my GTX 550 Ti and a new EVGA 500W (with allegedly quiet speed controlled fan) in and proceeded to start loading my music and video creation software. The BIOS setup is crazy, after getting used to the "party like it's 1994" Windows 3.1 look of the Dells, the ASUS Extreme BIOS, with all of its settings is like playing MYST or something. I have no idea what most of it does and there's page after page of options. Someday I'll read the manual and tune it all up, but for now it had a button for "tune system" so I went with that, and was also delighted to see that it has a fan control program. Total outlay for all of the new (used) components came to $260, which I think is okay for a quietized i7 6700 with 32G of RAM, and GTX 550 Ti, 500G NVMe and 1TB SATA. The graphics card will be updated as soon as the graphics card boom goes bust and the gamerz start dumping their old stuff in greater quantities. As soon as 1030's get below $50, I pull the trigger. I don't do much gaming, no FPS, only explorer games like Obduction and MYST Online Uru Live. Those are from when the specs on my system were beyond top of the line, and I can run them in ultra graphics quality with no problem, even with the aging graphics card. Even though it's old, it does still have GDDR5 and ample CUDA cores. And regarding having a swoopy graphics card on a system that is mostly doing DAW and NLE work, I find that it does make a difference. I could notice it even between the Radeon and the GTX, and the Radeon isn't that much lower spec than the GTX. You don't need a super duper gamer card, but it still does some time to draw stuff on a second monitor, as well as plug-in UI's that use OpenGL (how I wish ALL of them did). My fantasy card at this point is a fanless 1030. The system is quiet, not that I hadn't gotten the Optiplex pretty quiet, replacing the power supply fan with a Noctua and putting in some of that roofing tape. If I hold my iPhone next to it running the NIOSH sound meter app, it's running at about 32dB, and if I pull back to my monitoring position, ambient sound is about the same, so by my standards, I think I've achieved Quiet PC. As good as it's going to get without a silencing enclosure and/or fancy case. Not bad for a budget build in a flimsy-a55 cheapo case. My strategy as far as disk configuration is to use the lightning-fast NVMe for programs, plug-ins and sample libraries (anything I want to load FAST) and the not exactly slow either 1TB SATA SSD for project files. Software wise, it's been over a week since I built the system, and I'm still installing programs and plug-ins. My workhorses are Cakewalk and Vegas Pro Edit 15. I also dabble with Studio One Artist 4 and Ableton Live! Lite 11, and occasionally fire up the DAW I used prior to Cakewalk, Mixcraft Pro Studio 9. Cakewalk at the moment counts off 484 plug-ins, and that is after thinning them out considerably. More about that later.

As indicated in my signature, I recently leveled up a touch in terms of computer hardware. Although a veteran of much Frankenclone assembly/upgrade in the 90's (my first XT was parts from a BBS' donations pile), I hadn't built a PC from parts in 20 years due to a series of nice Gateway and Dell hand-me-downs. But I just did one and it went really well. I had a computer case containing a friend's bricked system sitting around for about a year. He gave it to me because it would only stay on for about 15 minutes before crashing. i5 system, Intel motherboard, 4G of RAM, I found out that it was waaaaay behind on BIOS updating. Got the newest BIOS and it bricked it. Hard. No recovery, not with jumpers, nothing. Gone. Cheapo case it is, the sides are about the same gauge as a soup can. But it came with a built-in card reader and an optical drive. Thinking I would extract the Ivy Bridge i5 from it and stick it in a new motherboard as an upgrade to my #2 (shop) computer, I started looking on CL and eBay, and as it turns out, Ivy Bridge motherboards without CPU run in the $50+ range, which I thought was too much to spend to end up with a computer with the technology of a decade ago. But every once in a while, there seemed to be a pretty good deal on a later motherboard, usually with processor, sometimes RAM sometimes not. These I guess would be gamers upgrading. So I started to research how many generations further I'd have to go to get some features I wanted, like an NVMe M.2 slot, while still having a PCI slot for my Firewire card. Eventually, a guy listed an ASUS motherboard with i7 6700 and 32G of RAM for $200. Hey-ya, that would be a nice upgrade from my Dell Optiplex with its i7 3770 and 16G of RAM. I had had to get a PCIe-to-NVMe adaptor to be able to use an NVMe SSD with the Dell, and then had to install a bootloader on a USB stick to allow booting from it. This was eventually cured with a BIOS hack I found on the web (yeah, I'm a tough guy, I hacked my BIOS with a hex editor to add a feature Dell had left out). A 3-generation jump in Intel technology, and a move from Dell's notoriously locked-down BIOS to an ASUS extreme gaming platform seemed worth the effort and relatively nominal cost. About that, I sent the seller email and he didn't respond for a week. When he did, he offered to knock $20 off the price. Sold! When I got down to the Starbuck's in Sunnyvale to meet him, he threw in what he said was a 250G NVMe SSD with Windows Pro already installed. Nice! I asked him whether he was selling any other old components, and he offered up a 1TB SanDisk Ultra II for $40. When I got the board home, I inspected the NVMe SSD and found that he had instead installed a 500G one! Oboy, this made things a lot easier. I could just build an entirely new system using this board and the case, plus an extra power supply I had around. With no downtime of getting plug-in licenses off of the Dell, etc. Cool. Speaking of cool, one goal of this build was to get it as quiet as possible using better fans (if necessary) and sound-deadening treatment in the case. I had some roofing tar tape left over from giving my car the silent treatment, so why not apply it to this flimsy case? Here are some of the components prior to assembly/installation: I put the roofing tape on the sides, top, and bottom, basically anywhere I could fit it. This was a cheap case, but it was small in height and the panels slid off and on securely, and balky covers is usually the most annoying thing about cheap PC cases. The fans turned out to be of surprisingly decent quality and pedigree. Not a bad build. I think the brand was SuperMicro's house brand. Too bad it died of something as silly as getting too far behind on BIOS updates. Everything went in just fine, I attached all the wires to the fans, card reader, case wiring harness, got it all snug. Figured I could just use the onboard HDMI output for first boot and checking the OS installation. Contrary to my superstition, I firmly attached both case sides before the first boot. I just had a hunch and went with it, and lo and behold, I plugged it in and turned it on and: Well whaddaya know. This is the first time this has ever happened. A clone build booting on the first try, no weird beeps or anything. It enumerated all the hardware and went straight into the Windows welcome. Turns out it was a not-yet-licensed installation of Win 10 Pro, and the guy had gone through and removed all installed Microsoft software, including Microsoft Store, making it impossible to download and install store apps. Not everything Microsoft installs is cruft like crappy games, for heaven's sake. So a Windows 10 DVD was made, and, oh, did I mention that the old case had a product sticker for Vista Pro? Indeed it did, and when I gave the Windows 10 installer the product key, it accepted it, and now I'm running Windows 10 Pro. Another goodie salvaged from the old system. Make note of that: the current Windows 10 installer will accept product keys from earlier versions of Windows, even though this was originally an OEM build and I used a newer motherboard. Whatever, I'm certainly fine with that. I know how to enable several Windows features that are by default disabled in Home, but there are others, like Remote Access, which turned out to be very handy indeed, as we shall see in Part 2 (The Winnowing of the plug-ins) of this tale, which is really the part that should be interesting to DAW users. That will be the tale of how things went (and are going) with moving my main production from one system to another. It's the software side of the story.

There really isn't future proof when it comes to performance-sensitive computer components, is there? From my perspective, it's usually just nudging my computer system(s) further away from obsolescence. I'm about to post a thread about my "new" build.

I had the opposite experience. Based on reviews and specs that indicated the M40's had a flatter response than the M50's, I bought a pair of them. Then a friend came over with a pair of M50's. I put on one of my favorite downtempo tracks and compared them, and when I was using the M50's, I heard a faint running water sample that the producer had used. It was inaudible on the M40's. So I went for a pair of M50's and have been reasonably happy with them, although I'm open to the idea that other cans might please me more. What's important to me is soundstage and detail. Do I hear a wide stereo image or does it sound confined to the width of the drivers? Can I hear the little details that the producers of my favorite tracks used? Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place" is my favorite test track because 1. It has lots of little ear candy FX, like slight reverse reverb on the vocal and hard panning and a bunch of other stuff, and 2. I love the song and can listen to it over and over. My advice for headphone shoppers is to try to find a way to listen to the cans you're considering using a well-produced track that you're familiar with. If you hear things in it that you never heard before, and it sounds like you can "walk around inside" the image, then you've found some winners.

LOL, of course, we all have multiple licenses for these due to giveaways! Yep, there they are. I got rid of the Presonus shell thing, it was taking years off my life waiting for it to enumerate, and just not worth it for the sake of one good vintage analog delay emulation and a channel strip containing vintage hardware workalikes duplicated elsewhere.

Are you using 32-bit plug-ins on new projects? I kept a few around for a while for legacy projects, but I think I finally got them all weeded.

Thing is, the ASIO driver model is intended for absolute best performance during dedicated use by one single app at a time. Sometimes, with some drivers, it's possible to be able to hear browser audio while you are running an audio program in ASIO, but there are no guarantees. What seems to make it go more smoothly is if I set my Windows sound options to match what I'm using in the DAW. This at least makes it so the interface and its driver don't have to flip a coin to decide what bit rate to use. Another thing is to of course, use WASAPI Shared, which is designed to allow apps to share the audio output device. There's also the trick of enabling your computer's built-in audio hardware and setting Windows sounds to use that while ASIO is driving your studio interface. In the end....I really don't need to have a browser or any other audio-generating program running when I'm recording or mixing. It's better for my focus not to.

Hmm, maybe I missed something....

In the search bar down at the left side of the Windows taskbar, type in "sysinfo" and hit <enter>. Then click on Components, then Display. That should tell you what video display and driver your Windows system is using. The information may be helpful in determining a solution. What version of Windows are you using. 7, 8, 10, 11?

Only Behringer's absolute bottom-of-the-line interfaces use ASIO4ALL. The UMC 1820 is not one of them. The ASIO model is not officially supported by Windows, and there's no guarantee that programs that do use the driver models supported by Windows (WASAPI, WDM, Direct X, etc.) will be able to use an audio device that's already tied up using ASIO. ASIO4ALL, perhaps surprisingly, would allow it, because it's a wrapper that lets WDM drivers report to programs that they are ASIO drivers. But an interface using ASIO4ALL will have no less latency than if it were using WASAPI, and some programs choke on ASIO4ALL. My experience is close to the others': I've usually been able to do things like watch Netflix or YouTube while Cakewalk uses my Presonus or Focusrite interfaces via ASIO. I will say that the Presonus handles it better than the Focusrite Saffire, which can sometimes get put in a state where it loses sync with Windows and I have to power cycle it.

This is an interesting article about IRQ sharing in versions of Windows after 7. You can easily find out which devices are sharing IRQ's using Device Manager: https://maxedtech.com/show-devices-by-irq-in-windows/ You can also change some of them to using message-signaled interrupts, which is a newer modelI've done some playing around with MSI Utility and really, saw no perceptible difference on the system where I tried it. Maybe I'll try it on my new system that is having no problems and see if I can break it: https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/windows-line-based-vs-message-signaled-based-interrupts-msi-tool.378044/ With old-device-on-new-USB port issues, I suspect that it may have something to do with the newer port supplying data at a faster rate than the client device can handle. There may be less engineering attention given to the port's ability to fall back, and of course, USB 2 devices made prior to the adoption of USB 3 might not be as good at communicating that they need the port to fall back. It's just a guess due to having read so many reports of older USB 2.0 devices only starting to work once the person plugged them into an old hub. For audio, I'm a Firewire guy. I like my asynchronous streaming of data for audio streams.