George D

16 hours ago, David Baay said:

Yes, the FX button also operates as a bypass/override. There has been a lot of virtual ink spilled over the arguably unintuitive and inconsistent labeling/lighting/functionality of these and other buttons in the Mix module. If we're lucky, the new Sonar will revise the iconography at least.

But you said that the PDC isn't working the same way. When the light is off then pdc is on and working. Did I understant it right?

4 hours ago, reginaldStjohn said:

I believe that the PDC button is in its normal, non-highlighted, state when it is not disabling latency compensation for live input channels. If it is highlighted it is disabling latency compensation.

But the FX are also off when the light of the button is on....

When PDC is enabled the latency is compensated according to the manual.

As you can see in the picture is the PDC enabled or disabled? 

1 hour ago, sjoens said:

Right! Thanks a lot!

3 minutes ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

The answer is you can't and those are the tools you have available

Ah, ok! I thought that there will be some way.

Thank you again.

2 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

 

Thanks but this video is not answering to my question.

How can I automate the velocity of a midi clip?

Can't find an option in automation lanes.

On 11/7/2021 at 5:18 PM, jackson white said:

@scook  thx, have had that setting in place since the initial release and make a point to send mini dumps if I have enough useful specifics leading up to it.

@George D  have you tried monitoring playback in console view to see if your  problem shows up as spikes on specific channels? I managed to track mine down to very repeatable events on specific channels with the existing project, but yet to "fix" it. Digging into MIDI events, patch/preset issues in the VST and VST channel routing in CxB.  Managed to eliminate most of the other potential suspects (Win update setting 'adjustments', clip boundaries, Izotope plugins, Korg M1, etc. and updated to the latest release 2021.11)

I have wondered about the engine as well, as I seem to recall being able to play "fast & loose" with editing during playback w/o much in the way of hiccups but finding this is no longer the case with MIDI sync dropping immediately and audio dropouts a close second. Tried changing the playback buffer settings, but nothing meaningful noted. fwiw, my problems seem to be limited to older projects getting revisited, newer ones seem to be running just fine.

@jackson white no. I haven't spikes on specifc channels. The load engine goes above 100% and then the spikes on sound appearing. Same time the cpu usage is at 55%....

On 10/15/2021 at 4:43 AM, jackson white said:

@George D fwiw, I've been working through what sounds like a similar problem. I've always built my own PCs and am very comfortable with all aspects of fine tuning for audio performance. My current cfg had been running flawlessly for years but starting "acting up" around Mar 2021.  This particular project was an older one that a client wanted to revisit and used to run just fine with absolutely no problems. 

The symptom was a serious degradation/smearing of sound quality on playback, like running the audio through a meat grinder (or putting your thumb on the reel for a tape machine). It would only happen for 10-30 secs and then somehow "recover'. Not sure how this compares to your "clicks and pops" but the performance monitor would go crazy when this happened, super erratic, cores jumping/spiking all over the place.  This would also happen when opening a VST or the browser (i.e. to open a user manual, not to check on sports scores...)  something that -never- used to happen.  The project isn't super large, only a drum VST and a few amp sims in addition to std audio tracks with FX. I don't generally freeze these as I've never had to before SO... not thinking the project/VSTs itself is the problem. Additionally, the ability to run at low latency has been significantly compromised. Used to track just fine on the very same project down to 64 samples. Then only way I could get reasonable playback now was to raise it to 512, which is pretty useless for tracking. 

The major areas of focus were;

1. WIN 10 updates

- Running WIN 10 Pro with updates disabled except for security updates. Always an issue, but I've got a good checklist and always managed to restore the changed settings quickly and easily when they happened, which was not often. Decided to update to the latest version (last update was over a year ago) to solve the problem.

= Didn't help. 

2. VST updates

? Possibly some update to an existing VST?

- Couldn't pin it down on any in the project. They're all by reputable proven devs and run fine in other projects (and DAWs) with no issues reported for any of them.

= no obvious suspects

3. Other SW updates (like other applications phoning home)

- rechecked / reinstalled the native A/I drivers (they were always the latest update, but...)

- I've added some new VSTs/suppliers with various means of authorization. Tried freezing those and disabling any service that looked like it might be trying to do something. 

- tried running the project completely off-line (Internet disconnected, actually boot cfg is off-line, have to manually go online)

= no improvement

4. Checked my system services again. Ran Latency Mon and for the first time on this system, it would show some issue when running the project but w/o much of a clue as to a specific cause. The highest DPC counts were for the Kernel Mode Driver Framework Runtime. The second highest  were for LatMon iteself... Multiple sessions were rather uneven and hard to pin down. FYI, no BT, WiFi, etc, active, only Window Defender running for when online, never been a problem in the past. 

? Not sure where to go with this, still looking into it with no idea what changed, so the challenge is to hunt down what might have made it worse.

5. CxB changes/updates. 

- CxB has never been the problem (despite the number of outraged posters in this forum 🙂), but there have been a -lot- of changes and had me considering the possibility of some newer potential stability issues. Not that I have any insight into the development, but it is a very feature rich (=complex) program. 

NB  This project has since crashed several times and flagged an issue with Cakewalk core. Doesn't mean it wasn't caused by some VST issue, but despite the best efforts of the Support team (they've been super responsive), no clear cause has been noted.

> Worked through a matrix of Record/Playback IO buffer sizes, A/I buffer sizes and was able to confirm a few settings which helped, but mostly raising the A/I buffer. Changing the Record/Playback IO buffer sizes generally made it worse.

= All changes were correlated with Performance Monitor specs during playback but they generally behaved as expected...

> Tried various settings in the Initialization file.

= Back to the original settings as none of the changes made much sense and generally only made things worse.

...

In the course of working through this, it's started to behave a bit better, which makes it sound like a moving target, or maybe it just takes a few reboots for everything to settle down? I still have a problem project with repeatable symptoms at a specific spot in the playback, trying different states/cfgs to see what might expose the culprit. And also noting the issues are only with older projects so far (like 3-5 years old) being opened in this years version of CxB. FWIW, all of my newer projects are running fine atm, so I'm considering the possibility of some project specific corruption or as yet undiscovered backwards compatibility issue? 

Don't know that this does you any good but just hearing about something similar might help. I don't expect to find any answers here as I'm assuming it's something specific to my system, but stuff like this comes with the territory (infinite cfg possibilities + ongoing dev) I'll come back if something useful gets figured out. 

 

I've checked like you all the above list!

The difference in my case is that I had the same problem from the beginning and with all the projects. The problem/or the answer is that in ProTools the same tracks with the same VSTs work much much better. Maybe the problem is the sound engine of the Cakewalk.

@David Baay @bvideo @Robert Bone do you think that Audio processing (30-32%)  is normally according the Engine Load (95-102%)? What's the numbers in your projects? 

5 hours ago, bvideo said:

What did you mean by 'peaks'

clicks

2 hours ago, bvideo said:

Back there you said "peaks, clicks, etc.". Clicks could be a performance issue, but what did you mean by 'peaks'; also 'etc.'? Is there some audio distortion happening that could be independent of performance issues?

No,no distortion from other issues.

10 hours ago, Robert Bone said:

What audio interface are you using, and what Driver Mode are you using in Cakewalk? (ASIO? )  Please also detail the nature of your project - how many tracks, how many soft synths, which ones, how many effects plugins, the nature of them (such as convultion reverb, linear phase, etc.).

And, just for a test - what happens to render time when you temporarily first Bypass All Audio Effects processing?  (just click on the FX button to the right of the metronome icon, and it will toggle Off/On the bypassing of all audio effects - once your test is complete, clicking again on the FX button will engage all audio effects again).  Some effects require huge ASIO Buffer Size settings, and some are just CPU hogs - some soft synths are also CPU hogs.

Also, some plugins, like Native Instruments Kontakt, Battery 4, and I believe some other plugins of theirs, have settings where I could enter how many cores I have in my CPU, and those plugins distribute processing among the available cores, per the values I entered for the cores my CPU has.  Here is a screenshot of the settings for this, in Kontakt.  (The parameter is the 'Multiprocessor Support', etc., under Engine:

 

@Robert Bone Asio drivers. The problem exists in various kind of projects. With or without VI's. With exactly the same plugin or with different plugins.

If I bypass all the fx the render is as expected much much faster.

32 minutes ago, David Baay said:

Maybe try re-naming AUD.INI, and let CW build a new default one.

Do you have any of the old SONAR demo projects and bundled plugins? I'd be curious to know what kind of performance you see with a known baseline.

No luck with the new .ini file. Same results.

No, I don't have any oldbundled demo project.

The only difference I've found is without plugin load balancing  the meters are : Audio processing 13-16%  Engine Load 75-85

                                                                        With plugin load balancing: Audio processing 30-32%  Engine Load 95-102% !!!

20 hours ago, David Baay said:

That DPC latency would be on the high side if you were trying to run a 32-64-sample buffer, but should not be a problem at 1024. In a well-optimized system, I would expect to see consistently under 300us. Mine manages that even with WiFi enabled.

Beyond that, I'd be looking at the project content. It would have to be a pretty heavy-duty project to run a 16-core processor that hard at that buffer size.  Seems likely there are just some individual plugins driving the engine load that be can't load-balanced any further. I would suggest you try selectively disabling plugins, and see if anything is driving the engine load particularly hard. Then search for reports of issues with the efficiency of that particular plugin - may just be the nature of the beast in some cases.

I've tried disabling each plugin at a time but without result too.

The system seems well optimized at pro tools but not in cakewalk in my case.

1 hour ago, David Baay said:

Care to share a screenshot of LatencyMon after letting it run for 10+ minutes?

Also, if you hover your mouse over the Performance  Meter in Cakewalk while you are hearing "peaks, clicks, etc." does it show the empty buffer count increasing?

 

 

The buffer count increasing when the project running and also when the project is stopped.

Audio  processing: 33-35%

Engine Load: 96-106% . 

Same numbers when the project is running or stopped.

(1024 samples Asio buffer size)

I've also attached three images. The 1st is LatencyMon without Cakewalk running. The 3d when Cakewalk running a light project  (both at 256 samples buffer size)

The 2nd image is when running the heavy project with clicks and peaks (at 1024 samples buffer size).

3 minutes ago, David Baay said:

If the issue is clicks/pops/dropouts when streaming audio in real time, you probably have issues with Deferred Procedure Call (DPC) latency spiking. Check it with LatencyMon, and go after the usual suspects: WIFI and Bluetooth drivers:

https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

Also be sure to disable CPU-throttling functions in BIOS like Speedstep and C-States as well as turning off all Windows power-saving measures. 

 

Also did these...

1 minute ago, bitflipper said:

By "problem", do you mean PT exports the same project in less time?

No, the audio when I play the project during mixing or recording has peaks, clicks etc.

6 minutes ago, bitflipper said:

First, it's not up to the user to tell an application how to distribute the workload across cores. That's automatic, and it has to be that way. An explanation as to why that is would fill a book, and has indeed filled several. Parallel processing is a tricky business.

Second, seeing 25% CPU usage at the top of the CW window is not a bad thing. It just means the CPU has had enough time to process the data before having to spit out a buffer-full of data to the interface or to the disk drive. That's what you want to see. The CPU isn't slacking off; it's not a spigot you can open wider to get more work done. (That would be analogous to replacing the CPU with one that runs at a faster clock speed.)

Now, if CW isn't using all the cores (actually, it can't use them all because Windows needs some), that's another matter. Although it is possible for the user to limit the number of cores that a program can use, by default Win10 assumes you want to use every core available, so you have to go out of your way to limit an application to N cores. Consequently, any time you see a core's usage drop, it's because the DAW is doing something at that moment that can't be further divided into separate tasks until that something finishes. That, or the O/S itself has some high-priority task that must take precedence, such as servicing an IRQ.

There was a time when we'd tell Windows to give the DAW priority in thread scheduling, so that more CPU cycles could be dedicated to our primary application. We don't do that anymore because it's as likely to screw up performance as to improve it. You can, however, take a look at background tasks that might be competing for resources and see if any of them can be disabled during your DAW session.

Cakewalk is set to High Priority and all similar stuff about music producton performance etc. As I said to my previous posts, same PC, same project but Cakewalk suffering but Pro Tools working without any problem.

55 minutes ago, Michael Vogel said:

Audio benefits more from processor clock speed than it does in the number of processing threads/cores. Thats just the way it is and theres no setting to change that.

You maybe referring to the meter that Cakewalk displays showing how the various cores are utilised. You’ll notice that there’s at least one that seems like it is being over utilised at the expense of the others. Thats natural though as audio is a really a single threaded process not spread across a number of cores. It’s just not something that can be manipulated in multiple parallel streams. Just the nature of the beast. While there are numerous processes involved that will be handled by other threads, the bulk of the processing power goes to the audio which will be handled by one thread.

Now I’m just a layman and trying to keep it simple as I understand it. I’m sure that someone may come along and do a much better job of explaining it but that wont make a difference to the bottom line which is as I stated in my opening comment. You’d be much better off with a processor at 5.0 GHz with 8 cores than one at 4.0 GHz with 16 cores. Hope that helps even though its not what you’d like to hear.

No, doesn't happen that also. There is not a peak of one core which causes the problem.  Also the problem remains if I overclock the cores from 3.5 to 4.5 GHz.

But if you read my previous post, the same project in pro tools works perfectly.

2 minutes ago, Teegarden said:

I would anyway select Multiprocessing Engine together with Plug-In Load Balancing:  

"When Use Multiprocessing Engine is enabled, the Plug-In Load Balancing option allows you to distribute plug-in processing across multiple cores".

You also might want to play with the Thread Scheduling Model settings (2 and esp. 3 as a more aggressive setting)

I've got a Threadripper 1950x and all cores are used very well...

If you want more juice, you could consider overclocking (I know it is usually not advised to overclock, but in this case the experts seem to agree, including our Microsoft developer on the forum Pete Brown) your memory. Especially Ryzen benefits from it. Here's some information Ryzen RAM overclocking.

Just staying on the safe side I already managed to get an overall increase of 20% by "mildly" overclocking only memory on a former PC build.
A slight GeForce overclock card can also make your system feel much snappier without making it instable:   

If you want to go really deep, you can also have a look at this guy's YouTube channel: FR33THY Windows Tweaking

There are plenty of good YouTube videos where they explain everything in detail.

Don't forget to use tools like LatencyMon in order to identify possible issues (oh, and of course, all the other standard Windows 10  tweaks, like disabling powermanagement on USB ports, WIFI etc. You can find much about that on the forum).
 

Consider freezing tracks if you still have issues 

Thanks @Teegarden for the analytic answer but I've already tried the plug-in load balancing and thread scheduling model with no result. 

LatencyMon, with no result too..

About the overclocking, the problem here is that Cakewalk doesn't uses all the processing but only 25% of my cores. 

The same project in protools running without any problem.

14 hours ago, Andres Medina said:

May be this is what you are searching for: 

(from Help):

"Use Multiprocessing Engine. This option is grayed out unless you have a multiprocessor computer. If you have a multiprocessor computer, check this option if you want Cakewalk to use both processors at all times. If you do not check this option, Cakewalk still uses the second processor for some tasks."

More info here: http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=0x22B19

 

Unfortunately not.

5 minutes ago, scook said:

Me personally?

I have never really had a problem.

But my DAW use may not mirror yours.

I'm asking if cakewalk use all the cpu power when mixing.

1 minute ago, scook said:

different processor, similar issue

note the replies

Thanks Scook.  Do you have the issue while mixing too?

 

I have an AMD 3950x with 16cores (32 threads). I'm mixing or exporting a track but the cpu usage doesn't go above 25%.

Many projects need more cpu power (I have spikes etc) but Cakewalk doesn't use the remaining cpu power.

Any ideas?