Kevin Walsh

Something to look at, certainly. On the other hand I was using a PCIE Firewire card for my MOTU 8 pre along with a GPU and two PCIE4 m2 drives with no problem on my 3950x. The firewire card might well be less hungry for lanes than the OP's UAD card though,

Yeah man, it's a plugin on the bus that doesn't do stereo I'll bet. I run into this all the time. Be nice if the DAW could indicate the offender somehow.

I've not run into any problems with interfaces with the Ryzen system at all, sorry to hear about your UAD device. I assume you have updated your BIOS, chipset drivers and obtained the latest UAD device drivers? I've tested a rather long-in-the-tooth MOTU 8pre connected to a PCIE Firewire card with great results. I recently moved an Audient ID22 to the primary interface role, also with very good results.

You won't regret having purchased it.

The build experience was smooth as silk. I've had absolutely no problems with any of the components I used. I've always built my own PC's. (My first build was as part of a computer club project in the 70's, an Altair S100 bus 8080 computer, lol) My most recent build prior to this was centered around an Intel i7/970 CPU and an X58 motherboard from EVGA. By comparison, that build was complex and fraught with challenges and while it ran well for over ten years, it had it's quirks. The DIY world for high-end PC's has come a long way and the parts I used were all well-thought out, well documented and extremely easy to assemble. I felt like I was cheating. Event the liquid cooler was easy as pie and the temperatures are nice and stable. The build is very quiet. You can hear the fans ramp up a bit when I'm stressing things and I wouldn't call this an absolutely silent build, but I'm pretty sure if I monkeyed with the fan heat profiles I could get it pretty darned close. I'm using the Ryzen Balanced Power Profile in the Windows power options control panel settings. That comes with the chipset drivers and sets up the memory speed profiles and CPU configurations. I haven't felt the need to use any more extreme settings. Here's the parts list: Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 AORUS Master Memory: 2 G.Skill Trident Z Neo Series 32GB sticks SSD's: 2 Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 Internal SSD's (I mistyped earlier, these are 1TB drives, not 2.) Power Supply: Corsair AX1000 Cooling: Corsair Hydro H150i 360mm liquid cooler Graphics Adapter: Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX580 Case: Phanteks Eclipse P600S Firewire card: Ableconn PEX-FW107 1394b & 1394a (TI XIO2213 Chipset)

I'm running a Ryzen 9 3950X with 64GB of ram and 2 2TB PCIE 4.0 drives. I built this powerhouse machine for my daily work as a software developer but it's a fantastic audio workstation as well. I use an Audient ID22 USB 2 interface with it and it just kills. I highly recommend the Ryzen family as a great platform for DAW boxes.

1. Disable integrated audio devices on your motherboard in BIOS (this assumes that you will use your audio interface for DAW and system sounds.) 2. Disable power management for your USB device. 3. Turn off power management for your CPU(s) (speed step, etc.) 4. Turn off the Windows search indexer. This process scans all files on your system and creates a content index to allow fast searching. I'd put step-by-step how-to's here, but in a few weeks time they'd be out of date anyway, so with my apologies, please google it.

I feel the OP's pain. I love Cakewalk but I've always had occasional problems with dropouts and crashes and the latency at which I operate has always been higher than I wanted it to be. I have an old MOTU Firewire 8pre that I bought somewhere around 2005. The performance was such that I was forced to change how I record because input monitoring was a non-starter for me. Since other people didn't seem to have these issues I always assumed it was my machine, an aging but oh-so-reliable X58-based i7/970 system I built in 2011, and I just pressed on. I loved the sounds I got out of that thing though! The MOTU ran okay in Reaper, but I hate using Reaper. I never really solved the latency issue on that system, but I did discover through many Windows updates that Microsoft loves to reset all your carefully tuned system parameters to values they want them set to. Window sometimes (but not always!) likes to re-enable power management for USB and CPUs, and all the built in audio devices you don't use magically turned back on. I also learned that I must uninstall and re-install the MOTU device drivers whenever the Windows runs an update. It was said that MOTU boxes were targeted at Mac's first and foremost and I don't know that for sure but I believe it. I dreaded both Windows and Cakewalk updates. They almost always introduced a new round of crashing and instability. This last January I picked up a Ryzen 9 3950x and a Gigabty x570 AORUS Master and the parts to go with it and built a new system, but I kept my old MOTU. Stability was good out of the box, but the latency issues remained. Maybe I could get a bit more juice out of the old girl, but not much. So I picked up a new Audient ID22 this week and got it yesterday. BLAM. All problems solved! I had never seen the heady heights of sub-64 sample settings before, such a pleasure to have everything work so well. Fast, stable, great sounding. No crashes. We'll see what the next update brings but I'm very happy with things right now. Cakewalk isn't perfect but I've personally discovered that your interface hardware chain (firewire, tb, usb, etc) and the quality of your drivers are an under-appreciated factor in your audio setup's stability and efficiency. I know the OP has ruled out new hardware, and I get that, it took me a long time to justify my recent hardware refreshes, but keep in mind that current software development is done in parallel with current hardware development and both sides of the equation matter.

No, but I've long been curious about it. Any process that takes the frustration out of gain staging is one I'm interested in. How has it been working out for you?

I believe you're on to something here. Very much dig the song and especially the instrumental break. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Thank you, David! Wow, thanks Lynn! Thanks Bob, that's high praise from the King of Hooks! lol, thanks Nigel, that's a boatload of synths. I know orchestral guys use a lot of instances but that kind of work is beyond me. I'm more of a little ditty kind of a guy. Thank you! Thank you for listening! There is a single acoustic guitar track, a single bass track, a lead vocal track and maybe three harmony tracks. There's reverb in there (Re-Matrix solo, the pro-channel version) and I use Izotope 9 to master. I also slapped in an Izotope imaging plug in to help fill in the holes. I used some pretty agressive settings on the imager. Thanks, Jesse. It's rather liberating. Can't wait to see what you come up with!

Thank you for listening and providing feedback, Gary! I apologize for taking so long to respond, my Dad's been in the hospital for several weeks and it seems that my time is no longer my own. Melodyne is incredibly useful for creating harmonies and I often use it in the writing process, but usually once I have them I set them aside and record the harmonies the old fashioned way. It sounds a lot better to my ear that way.

+1 on the Loggins & Messina comment. Beautifully detailed and well crafted mix with lots of space, not to mention a boatload of great performances. Quite a beautiful song!

Really clean mix, wow! Nice vocals and good song, a pop style that takes me back! Guitars are great and the harmonies are killer.

Thank you! I'm grateful you took the time to listen and comment.

Your mixes are sounding pretty good these days. I always look forward to a new one from you and this one is great!

Thanks for the listen, Mark. It's a real challenge to get a lean mix to sound reasonably full and present. I tried a bazillion things with this one.

Thanks, Steve! I do try. I have a hard drive just full of crap I wouldn't let my dog hear. I figure if I just keep writing them, I'm statistically likely to produce a few good ones before the heat-death of the universe.

Really good song with heartfelt lyrics, a quality mix and great performances, I can see why you keep this one around. Those keys are a perfect background for the laid back vocals. I also think it's pretty cool that you didn't put a chorus in there. Oh, and did I mention the great mix? Yeah, I guess I did. I enjoyed this one quite a lot.

Thanks for taking the time to listen! Your comments did a world of good for this apprentice songwriter to read, Steve!

Great mix, loved the drums! This reminds me of the fevered dream days of my youth in the 70's - a very good thing!

Thanks, Wookie, I appreciate the loan of your ears and your Adams. Beats my ancient KRK Rokit 5's

Tom, thanks for giving it a listen and thanks for your comments. Yes, that's exactly what I mean. I'm currently experimenting with a several songs that try to communicate as much as possible with as little as possible. This is one of them, as are my previous two, "Little Cloud" and "Eyes to the Ground" (also on that reverb nation page.) I'm trying to learn how to write songs that work for me with all my limitations as a musician and this is part of the process I've come up with.

Great song, vocals and lyrics. Melody is catchy and interesting from beginning to end and the chord changes are wonderful, reminds me of Steely Dan. Love the use of synths and drums to drive things along and the musical interlude is sweet. I wish I could mix songs with half the clarity you have achieved here.

Really like this and especially dig the guitar sounds. Pristine mix! I didn't find it to be melancholy at all. I would call the feeling cautiously assertive.