Matthew Carr

Hi All, afraid I need some technical help. I (unfortunately) just bought a dell laptop (Lattitude 5480) for use with cakewalk. On paper, this thing is a beast : i7-7820HQ processor, 16 Gb Ram, Pcie(4x) SSD. It's a great laptop, very fast and capable, but turns out it's completely unusable with any audio program due to DPC latency LatencyMon shows the culprit as ACPI.sys - I'm getting latency readings of over 2500uS, which results in lots of audible clicks and pops with reasonable ASIO buffers (256) I've done all the usual: disabled c states, turned off speed-step and turbo-boost in Bios; Set all power plan settings to max performance; Disabled network, on board audio, camera, microphone array etc in device manager - but nothing works. The only thing I can think of now is to try and set processor affinity so cakewalk only runs on cores 2,3 & 4 - the DPC spikes seem only to occur on core 1. Is this possible, and does anyone have any experience or knowledge of doing this? I did attempt creating a shortcut that set the processor affinity using this article :https://www.eightforums.com/threads/cpu-affinity-shortcut-for-a-program-create-in-windows.40339/ but without much success. Is it possible to restrict Cakewalk to only use certain cores, and is it a viable technique to get around DPC Latency issues? Any advice gratefully received, as this is starting to look like an expensive mistake...

This sounds like a great idea, it's a pain when I move my laptop between home and rehearsal room - different interfaces and different master keyboard mean it's easy to get things messed up. Being able to choose between multiple 'hardware configs' from the UI would be awesome!

The tool that I use live is http://midi-automator.com - unfortunately the website explaining it (and with the windows download) doesn't exist anymore, but there are details and some videos on this link. It's free and very useful replacement to the playlist (which I never got on with) - just make sure you set the option in CbB to only allow one file to be opened at once, and you're all set. Also freezing any backing and removing unused VSTs from the project will help with the load times. No Lyric prompting though - it just opens cakewalk projects in order and in response to learned midi messages. If you're interested I can send you the install program - being free & open source I don't think the author would mind.

Maybe try un-checking the "zero controllers when play stops" in preferences screen - sounds like CbB is sending a 0 to a midi CC that controls channel 2 on the mixer?

I'm certainly not advocating a full blown score editor or a way to print/share beautiful scores - just a staff editor that works. If you spend any time with staff editor as is, you'll come across lots of aggravating issues - try entering some lyrics and you'll soon want to throw your PC out the window! Updating the component that the staff view was based on with the new version from Sonic Scores would probably address many of the issues, without Bandlab having to re-work the whole thing and commit a lot of development resource.. .. then again, it's never happened before, despite all the feedback and requests, so maybe there's a reason we don't know about.

I'd definitely like to see the staff view get some love - there seems a fairly pain free way to upgrade it using the offer from Sonic Scores, so why not move forward with it? As well as benefiting existing users, having a decent staff editor has the potential to make CbB great choice in the education sector, being free and all - that would certainly help drive adoption of CbB, and promote BandLab.

I've used Cakewalk in a live scenario before. I found the best approach was to abandon the cakewalk playlist program, set options so that only one project can be loaded at a time in Cakewalk, and use a program called midi automator to to create a setlist which will open a project file for each track in order, in response to a midi signal (or keypress). If you have any backing in your projects, freeze the backing tracks so the VSTs don't need to be loaded when the project is loaded. Search for "Cakewalk Midi Automator" once the cakewalk forum is back up.

So maybe I'm missing something, but the search seems broken on the legacy forum. Enter a search term in the search bar, there are no suggestions, if you hit enter you get zero or very limited results. E.g. a search for midi returns 2 results... surely there's a lot more results than that? No much point in having the old forum available if it's not searchable.. Anyone else have this issue? Windows 10, tried both Chrome and Edge browsers..