Jon White

What a thorough and detailed response. Thank you! I'm always at 48KHz/24-bit/128 samples. I use the Lynx ASIO driver that works with my soundcard. I use two of eight stereo outputs and inputs on that interface. All of my drives are SSDs. My system crackles when the Cake resouce meters show the cores bouncing around 25%, and always fails when higher. I did find that my CD/DVD port was causing latency, so I disable that when using Cakewalk (Latency Mon showed me that), but, again, no issues in any other DAWs. I truly think Cake does something different in some ways that ends up being problematic for the audio engine. Just years of experience with it amidst other products. You make great points, though, as do others.

I record upright bass to jazz quite often, and I do it by having my tone "live", as with all my guitar and analog input -- that being the tone that I present to Cakewalk is from a mixer output and already has my commitment to the final voice. Short statement: I don't reamp. Now, if latency didn't exist, I might record tones with live plugins in the channel. For now, no. SO, I have my preamps and analog boxes dialed in, and then my plugins (two ASIO devices can work at the same time if controlled by different applications) doing the rest. Typical guitar for me is BiasFX2 or SGear via my TonePort UX2 (ASIO, 24-bit, 48KHz) and Cakewalk using my Lynx soundcard at the same specs. The TonePort sends its output to my mixer, which sends an analogue signal to the Lynx inputs, and that is the final track sound, overall (but may take on digital/plugin tweaks later). It takes (pun intended) deliberate commitment and tone planning, but I'm used to that. The bottom line, so to speak, is that I'm so bad at playing that I need the tone of my guitar, bass, sax, piano to be inspiring as I play, and to be what I see as the final voice. Anyway, that sets up EQ fashions in the hardware AND the plugins. I would say that the preamps and stuff prior to plugins shape my EQ stance more than a plugin. Message here is, maybe: have the analog voice be the stuff as much as possible. That will be outboard stuff that you would commit to if gigging, right? Your tone as the "you" being presented to recording efforts. I learned this in the studio, as well.

Mr. Anderton, I've enjoyed your engagement and contributions to the recording world for over twenty-five years (Electronic Musician magazines that I still have). It is my privilege to absorb your thoughts and approaches to music production. I truly mean that.

Killer, killer software. Great citation, Bit.

Wow, yes. What insight and wisdom you show here, Craig. Truly. I had a Tascam deck (4-ch), and it was, although a privilege in the early eighties, a challenge. 15-ips was the blessing, I thought! But we innovated and got our art down!

What kind of tone do you want? What does it sound like now that you want to change? That makes pursuit of effects a bit more deliberate. Mr. Anderton's suggestion is super. I use band-based compression most often. Waves has two good ones.

Thank you, John. It's a puzzle. Much of my thoughts on this center on the number of issues with Cake audio when compared to other systems. I use Pro Tools, too, and it skates through this stuff.

Hmm. What does "bitch" mean? If I guess correctly, that's what you're doing regarding my posting, correct?

No, I remembered. Thanks for the response.

Thank you for the tip. I've covered that one prior, hoping for better luck long ago. I appreciate the response.

Lynx audio card. Again, though, what hits me is that other DAWs have no issue.

Created drum track in Superior 3, guitar raw input from mic'd amp, bass same, then sang a track. Three minute song, with a TrueVerb bus, Tony Maserati vocal plugin and Ozone 5 in the master bus. Added VocalSynth and immediate popping and clicking for three of the five types of effect. Rebooted, tried again, same. Setup same song in Sequoia, same add of VocSyn afterwards. Beautiful. Added VocSyn to the guitar track for fun. Smooth as silk. Went back to Cake and added VocSyn to guitar track -- immediate audio dropuout upon hitting play. Won't even play. Please consider that asking me for specifics on my resources and all misses the comparison point. I'm quite sure that Reaper and the wonderful Nuendo would have smiled through this, too. Cakewalk, you must know something about how you are handling audio in detail. What is it? It's got to be fixed before anyone but hobbyists, if even they, would feel comfortable even starting a project with it. Imagine a studio!

Was Sonar stable as an audio engine? See if Cakewalk is the same.

Great ideas, all. It creates "NTOSKernel" (or close, my spelling and caps may be wrong) in the top 3 list of resource burdens in LatMon. The other two are, of course, NVIDIA resources. Wish I had another brand of vid card, frankly.

Although I will say that it was only Cake/Sonar that manifested the problems. Latency Monitor helped show the situation. That situation did not seem to make Sequoia, Nuendo or Reaper fail. Just our baby.

Just one thing I've found in my little corner of the world: disabling my CD/DVD device on two of my music computers has dropped latency and dumb stuff dramaticaly.

No, the point was that these performances are mainly heard directly by the audience.

We have to come to grips with the instability of Cakewalk. Only then can it move forward. Finding a million things that might fix audio glitches while other programs work fine is contrary to wise thinking. All of them work better in terms of audio stabiity.

I grew up listening to every genre you could find at Oberlin College's Finney Chapel. From Dizzy to folks no one here would believe (classical artist prodigies and intelligent rock gods -- although the night a certain complex artist named Patti rocked a deliberate urination out on stage, that was tested). I was privileged with fun at studios once in college and since have loved recording. My first Cakewalk was in DOS, I always joke. I have a conviction. It is that not one performance I've ever seen and relished and absorbed with human being had compression on the stage image. Sure, various artists in rock and fusion may have had pedals and such compressing their stuff, and various house mixes of more modern music may have had something going on like compression, too. But the stage, at least in classical, delivered the instruments without compression and the inclinations behind it. It was open air and truth in conveyance. I'd minimize compression in classical as an imperative, and I challenge it as the future in any music once we humans morph a bit more into nature.

I did a resource monitor after noting some heavy hard disk (non-ssd) loading and droputs in Cake, and saw that it was reading every muted audio track during playback. Each take lane was being read by the drive. Why is that? Isn't that a bit of a waste?

Every convention we have now was once formed on a "new day" in the past. Let your ear bring you new days, and put whatever you like wherever you like, based on the audible result and your personal flair. Heck, compressors across the board can all have different sounds due to varied phasing and frequency responses, so go for what you think sounds great. It could be a new day. (For demonstration of what various compressor plugins do to parameters other than compression, try Plugin Doctor. Load 'em up and see their frequence and phase character, and other things. It's vegetable soup -- potpourri.

C'mon, man, check all of your settings. What software is playing it as a wav file? People come here asking the most unresearched questions.

Try Reaper or something. If no issues, there you have the state of things.

Very cool, Mark. I'm always impressed with what blossoms to be the intelligence here. I'll erase my comment, knowing that you just tilted a bit to the pedantic!

Try another DAW.