Bruce Wahler

Thanks for the confirmation. How does one set it up, though? I looked in CW, and I only see one audio interface, my Focusrite 4i4. I know that the laptop has its own interface, because I can play my standalones for VSTIs through the laptop's speakers (with dreadful sound). How do I get CW to recognize it?

I'm using ASIO to run VSTIs in Cakewalk in a live rig. I also play wave files in some cases. Right now, I'm using a Focusrite 4i4. It has 4 audio outs, which is OK but not ideal. I'd like to have 6 dedicated analog outs for flexibility, but the only USB audio interfaces with that many outputs also have 8+ audio inputs. I don't need the cost, size, or weight of such an interface in my gigging rig. Is there any way to run one ASIO interface, and another one with a standard Windows driver? I'm OK if the second interface isn't synced to the first one. I'm even OK if it has poor latency, as I can simply move the wave files a few (or many) ticks earlier in the song to compensate. Anyone have a solution? I considered ASIO Link, but it's been discontinued.

Thanks for the replies. @abacab: The laptop already has an NVMe SSD, which really helps. I bought it 'semi-custom,' where an authorized dealer had taken a plain laptop, and upgraded the disk drive and memory. It probably makes more improvement than any other difference between the new and old laptops! @Starship Krupa: Actually, I 'only' have 16GB, which is probably half of what the laptop can address. I'm not looking for 15.9GB use or anything; it was just surprising that CW + the OS never used more than about 5GB, even with SampleTank running a 6-piece brass section, plus two more VSTIs. I do a lot of 2- and 3-song medleys, and I'd rather use individual song files, rather than dedicated CW files with all the songs loaded in a set order, but the lag time between songs on the old laptop was borderline embarrassing on certain songs, even using the 'preload next file' setting in the Set List. FWIW, I played around and found some use for the extra RAM: I now have a 7GB RAM drive, which stores ~5GB of audio files that I use during performance, plus all the VSTs/VSTIs now run out of that drive. It speeds things up another ~10%, making loading a song almost instantaneous.

I use Cakewalk mostly in live performance as a solo artist, rather than as a recording tool. It works great, way more flexible than something like Garage Band, IMHO. I've recently added several VSTIs to the mix, and everything is working well. Now I'm trying to add Cherry Audio's Stardust 201 tape echo and 'play' the echo old-school in real time -- i.e., play a few notes, then twiddle the feedback and speed controls to get wild effects. Of course, one can do this from the VST directly in the DAW using a mouse, but it's a lot more usable when linked to real wheels and knobs on a keyboard (or control surface). Stardust has a MIDI Learn mode to map knobs to MIDI CCs, and one can even edit the min/max value settings and the response curve of the incoming MIDI. The problem is, the MIDI CC data doesn't seem to be getting to the VST. It's reaching my VST *instruments* -- including ones from Cherry Audio -- but it doesn't seem to pass to a VST *effect*: I turn on MIDI Learn in Stardust, select a knob, it turns purple to indicate that it's been selected, and that's it. I can move the Mod Wheel or a knob all day, and the data doesn't reach Stardust. I've tried changing the VST settings to "configure as synth," but that didn't help. What am I doing wrong? Has anyone got this kind of setup to work?

Yeah, I get that. But I wish that one could tell Cakewalk, "Use as much RAM as you can to speed things up. If you can pre-load the next song in RAM, do it. If you can't load all of a VSTi in memory, but you can load the samples that were used in this patch, do it. If you can run multiple instances of an instrument faster by treating each one as a separate item, do it." Etc., etc., etc. I've debated installing a RAM drive but I'm not sure what it will buy me. The old laptop used to take 2-3 sec. to load another song in Set List mode (beyond whatever delay I had programmed). The new laptop takes less than a second. So, loading all the .cwp files on a RAM drive no longer makes sense: a lot of work at each startup, and there's always the risk of corruption if the laptop crashes. Maybe load the sound clips that I use sometimes, but even that is questionable.

Hi All, I just updated my gigging laptop from a *very* old Dell Vostro to a new HP. On paper, it's pretty much the same laptop, but there is a huge increase in performance! One disappointment, though: I can't seem to get Cakewalk to use the ~12GB of RAM that's just sitting around doing nothing. I'm actually surprised at how little RAM the app uses, even when I have 3-4 VSTi's running. I've thought of loading things in a RAM drive, but a) songs load very quickly on the new laptop; and b) the worst 'slowpoke' is SampleTank 4, but I don't have anywhere near enough RAM to load its entire 190GB library, so I would have to go through an effort to figure out which sample files are needed for each song and copy those files to a RAM bank. Too much trouble! What are others doing with their spare RAM? Does BitBridge do anything for 64-bit VST2 or VST3?

Hi All, I've been trying to figure out a workaround for this ... I play in a MIDI-based duo. We often start songs a capella, or with just piano or guitar. I've set up several songs with just a drum count-in, then a 1-bar loop with nothing in the measure. We play the intro with the empty loop running in the background; then I kill the loop, and the 'real' song starts. I'm finding that SampleTank 4 won't play its parts after the loop. This does NOT happen if the SampleTank parts don't start up for say, 16 bars, but it always does if the first note happens within 3-4 bars. If I stop the song and start again, everything comes back fine. So, it seems that the problem is cured by resetting (flushing?) the sound engine. Does anyone know of a way to force Cakewalk to reset the VSTi at the end of the loop? Any other workarounds? An obvious one would be to just stop the song after the count-in, but a 1-bar loop is more forgiving of when it's triggered -- especially since adding SampleTank seems to increase the startup time by 50-100 ms. Plus, this new wrinkle is preventing using the loop feature in other songs to extend a solo or an ending. Regards, -BW

I've been having problems with SampleTank 4 crashing in CW. Sometimes, it just stops the audio engine. Other times, it closes CW with a request to save a backup. I've learned to work around it by a few things: Simplifying parts -- if there are a lot of notes changing on an instrument with large samples, it seems to happen a lot. In particular, I've had problems with some of the larger acoustic guitar instruments, and with the really nice sounding Brazilian choir. Change a 4-part harmony to a 3-part -- it often gets much better. How much RAM do you have in your system? Switching from 8GB to 16GB helped. I find that SampleTank is much more stable with the UI closed, and the VSTi running in the Synth Rack. This is a bit unfortunate, because it precludes balancing and panning sounds in real time, but it's clear demonstrable on my system. Regards, -BW