Drivers and Settings Snapshots

[david40]

All the pro interfaces are ASIO and the Cakewalk DAW ASIO driver allows the use of only one interface at a time.  I use three different interfaces and every time I need to switch between them I am forced to reconfigure the Audio Driver Device  Ins and Outs in the Cakewalk Preferences. I think it would be great to have a Driver Snapshot feature where one can take a snapshot of each driver configuration so Cakewalk remembers those settings and be able to load them at the the press of a button.

Of course, even better, would be a complete overhaul of the Cakewalk ASIO Driver to allow multiple interfaces to be used simultaneously.

Edited January 12, 2023 by david40
Improvement

[scook]

11 minutes ago, david40 said:

All the pro interfaces are ASIO and this driver format allows the use of only one interface at a time. 

This is not true. DAWs typically limit ASIO to one driver at a time.

What a driver supports is up to the manufacturer.

There are a few manufacturers that support connected multiple interfaces using the same driver.

 

[david40]

Sorry,  I assumed that since this is the Cakewalk forum that I was making reference to the limitations of the Cakewalk DAW, I'll edit that

[scook]

30 minutes ago, david40 said:

the Cakewalk DAW ASIO driver allows the use of only one interface at a time.

Cakewalk does not write or furnish ASIO drivers.

Good manufacturers supply quality ASIO drivers.

Some even provide drivers that support multiple interfaces.

That said, I am unaware of a hardware manufacturer that supplies a driver to use with their competitor's hardware.

 

[msmcleod]

The ASIO driver spec was devised by Steinberg, which places a limit of one ASIO driver per process (e.g. an application such as a DAW) in Windows.

Some ASIO drivers allow more than one process to open the same ASIO driver, but no process can open more than one ASIO driver in Windows.

Some ASIO drivers also allow more than one ASIO device to be seen by a single driver - RME is an example of this.  However as @scook says, there aren't any manufacturer's ASIO drivers that will talk to different ASIO devices by different manufacturers.

The only way around this is by having separate processes each open a different ASIO device, then having an aggregate ASIO driver "talk" to those processes to mix the audio. The DAW then opens the single aggregate ASIO driver. The only one I've seen that does this is ASIOLink, which is unfortunately no longer maintained as the original developer passed away.  It does work, but it's extremely complicated to set up and use.

However, even if you do manage to get several ASIO devices being shared, you still need the word-clocks of each device to be synced up.  If this isn't done, then the audio playing on one device will start at a different time from another.  This involves one of the devices being a word-clock master, and the rest being slaved to it.  This is usually done by connecting the ADAT, SPDIF or BNC word-clock output of the master device to the corresponding input on the slave, and telling the slave to sync via that connection.

Such a setup is so ridiculously complicated that it's really not worth the effort.  I had a setup like this for a while, and it took 20 mins to get it stable every time I switched everything on.

There are a bunch of audio interfaces that will give you 16 input channels (using an additional 8 channel ADAT mic-pre for 8 of the inputs).

If you need more than that, the Tascam Model 24 or Soundcraft Signature 22MTK will give you 22 channels.

Personally I opted for the RME Digiface USB, which has 32 inputs and 34 outputs via four ADAT ins, four ADAT outs, and a stereo analog out.  At the time it was a bargain at around £300. Of course I had to buy pre-amps / ADAT converters to plug into it, but you can start off with cheaper ones (e.g. Behringer ADA8200, ADA8000 or Fostex VC-8) and upgrade as needed.
 

[Glenn Stanton]

it would be nice to adjust the # of samples under WASAPI Shared...

[SirWillyDS12]

On 1/13/2023 at 5:42 PM, msmcleod said:

The ASIO driver spec was devised by Steinberg, which places a limit of one ASIO driver per process (e.g. an application such as a DAW) in Windows.
 

OBS Studio got around this limitation by using a re-written Asio SDK... The ASIO plugin for OBS-Studio is capable of using multiple Asio devices at the same time, as well as using WASAPI or WDM\KS...

But OBS is open source and I don't think they really care much about Steinberg's licensing...

[Michael Sanders]

I'd like to bring this post back to it's original purpose and second it.

I have a Rednet card for tracking live performances as well as sending out from Cakewalk to a Yamaha TF console.

I also have that Yamaha TF console connected via USB as an interface in order to do in-studio recordings.

To switch over I have to uncheck 64 boxes from the RedNet and check 66 boxes for the Yamaha. Incredibly annoying.

With other DAWs (Ableton, Reaper) I can just change the device and it will load the inputs/outputs how they were most recently set for that device.

[msmcleod]

19 minutes ago, Michael Sanders said:

I'd like to bring this post back to it's original purpose and second it.

I have a Rednet card for tracking live performances as well as sending out from Cakewalk to a Yamaha TF console.

I also have that Yamaha TF console connected via USB as an interface in order to do in-studio recordings.

To switch over I have to uncheck 64 boxes from the RedNet and check 66 boxes for the Yamaha. Incredibly annoying.

With other DAWs (Ableton, Reaper) I can just change the device and it will load the inputs/outputs how they were most recently set for that device.

One of the things in the roadmap is "configuration presets", to allow you to easily swap between configurations.  No ETA on this at present I'm afraid tho.

In the meantime, something I've done for a number of years now (I've got 3 different audio device setups):

1. Set up your system for your first device
2. Copy TTSSeq.ini, Aud.ini, Cakewalk.ini & ctrlsurface.dat from %APPDATA%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core   and put it in a "System A" backup directory.
3. Set up your system for your second device
4. Copy TTSSeq.ini, Aud.ini, Cakewalk.ini & ctrlsurface.dat from %APPDATA%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core   and put it in a "System B" backup directory.

Whenever you need to swap configurations, just copy those files from the relevant backup directory to %APPDATA%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core.

I've got a batch file on my desktop for each configuration, so I just double click that before starting Cakewalk.