HELP! Glitchy audio playback after switching to new SSD

[Michael Menser]

A few days I got a new SSD to replace my hard drive that was loading very slow.  I installed Cakewalk and all of my VST's. I used screenshots to make sure all of my settings are identical to how it was set up previously on my HDD (as far as I can tell). I updated drivers. I made sure ASIO is selected as my audio driver in Preferences.  Unfortunately, when I opened a project I found that the audio playback was very choppy and glitchy. It often drops out the audio briefly before resuming. The VST instruments I've tried run terribly even from playing one note. EZ Drummer 3 runs fine, strangely.... The only 2 things that I can tell are different from before are 1) I am now running a slightly newer version of Cakewalk.  2) The version of Windows on the SSD seems to be a little different/newer.

I'm running on Windows 10 using an M Audio Air 192-6 interface.  The amount of power, CPU and RAM usage is identical to when Cakewalk runs on the HDD (i switched between them to find any differences).

Everything else on my PC seems to be running very fast and smooth. I'm not sure if the issue is with Cakewalk specifically or an audio driver.

Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Michael

[Promidi]

Did you clone the drive or did you do a fresh install onto the new SSD?

Did you do a 4K alignment on the SSD?

[Michael Menser]

I did a fresh install to the new SSD. I thought cloning would be better but I eventually gave up because my PC would freeze  on a loading screen for hours at 0%. 

Honestly, I have never heard of 4K alignment. I'm not super knowledgeable about computers 😅.

[John Vere]

I just swapped out all 3 of my music computers SSD drives because the new drives are bigger and faster etc. I always use Samsung drives and they have a Magician app.

I had a 4 year old Evo 860 Data drive that was running real slow and the App showed that drive did have issues. So I ordered the 3  new drives 'cuase they were cheap. . 

 For the C drive is was very simple. The Magician cloned to the new drive using the Data Migration you see at the bottom of the left hand list  in about 20 minutes with no fuss. It's been running perfectly for 2 weeks now. There is a noticeable increase in speed overall.  

The broken data drive eventually came back to life somehow but is on the shelf along with the other older drives. Cost me $160 Can for 3 Samsung Evo 870. So I now have 3 500 GB drives and a increase in overall speed when opening and transferring data. I cannot say enough praise for the Magician app. It certainly seems like a well thought out tool. 

I have no clue about this 4K alignment is too,  I looked it up, it seems way to geaked out for me. What ever it does I can't see would matter if you can replace these puppies every year for the cost of a dinner for 2 in most restaurants.   500GB = $44 can 

 

[Glenn Stanton]

it depends on the drive - 4K sectors are good for small files (like OSes with lots of smaller files) and 8K is also typical (and i've seen systems use 16K and 32K sectors) for larger files like audio etc. the reason for the larger sector sizes is the disk (or SSD which maps likes a disk) has more contiguous spaces for streaming-like access. so, less hopping around addresses to read or write it = generally faster.

[Lord Tim]

Either way, the performance of a SSD drive, even with the worst kind of config, shouldn't be the bottleneck here.

Grab Latency Monitor: https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

See if that tells you anything about the glitching.

[msmcleod]

6 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Either way, the performance of a SSD drive, even with the worst kind of config, shouldn't be the bottleneck here.

Grab Latency Monitor: https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

See if that tells you anything about the glitching.

I was recording 16 simultaneous tracks to an IDE HDD 20 years ago without any issues at all.  A lot of effort was put into Cakewalk to make audio streaming from disk as efficient as possible - it had to be on those slower machines.

From what I've found, using an SSD has generally improved the speed of the OS, and drastically improved sample loading time (e.g. an Omnisphere patch has gone from 45 secs to 2 -3 secs).

If you're not noticing much difference, it just means your bottlenecks are elsewhere... plugin processing I suspect, which is mainly CPU bound.

[Will.]

It is extremely important to have your sample rate in windows exactly the same as in your audio application with SSD (also in general.) 

Then of course theres the obvious noticable setting: Which ever sample setting you had per project that was aaved needs to meet the exact same rate as your asio driver. 

Theres also that annoying Windows Defender. Disable it entire, by Enabling the setting in Local Group Policy Editor - you can do some research on this or watch youtube videos on how to do it. 

Last resort: Reinstall the M-Audio Asio drivers and make sure it is the only driver selected in Windows 10 and your DAW(s)

[Michael Menser]

Thanks for the replies. I still haven't been able to improve the performance of Cakewalk but I tried Presonus Studio One 6 and it works just fine. I have been planning to switch over to Studio One for a while anyway. The only issue is I have a few projects in Cakewalk I still need to finish. I guess for now I'll finish those projects on my old hard drive.

[Michael Menser]

Just in case anyone is interested, Cakewalk is working fine for me now, although I'm not sure what I did to fix it.

I have been using Studio One for the past few months but I opened Cakewalk again recently to export some tracks and, to my surprise, it miraculously works fine now.  

I'm not sure what changed but I suspect it might have had something to do with the  buffer size.  Previously I tried to change it in an effort to fix the playback issues but it would automatically revert back to what it was set to before.  

Whatever the reason. . . I'm just glad it works properly and I now have the ability to use either Cakewalk or Studio One.