BOBONA

2 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

I'll echo what everyone else is saying. A good interface with solid ASIO drivers will sidestep almost every issue you have, and this goes for any DAW too.

Failing that, Cakewalk definitely does use WASAPI Exclusive and depending on the interface, you can get some pretty impressive latency out of it (there are some caveats if you use it to record audio).

ASIO4ALL uses a windows native driver (WDM) to make it appear like a ASIO driver, but it's not. Cakewalk natively supports every driver model, so it doesn't need this intermediate step in between like some hosts do. In fact, this "driver" can actually cause issues just by being installed and it's definitely recommended not to use it.

MME will usually always work but will give you by far the worst performance out of every driver model and isn't recommended at all for DAW usage.

If you're getting bad performance from WASAPI Shared, and Exclusive isn't working at all, this is telling me there's something not optimised in your machine for audio. This is separate to CPU or RAM performance in general. Even if your computer can run high end games or a million browser tabs, it still doesn't make a difference if there's some issue preventing low latency audio. The link to LatencyMon earlier is a good place to start.

But bottom line is a lot of these issues will be solved for a fraction of the price of your computer (or the cost of a fairly dull night out in the city) just by getting a real interface. You can buy a Ferrari but you can't expect it to win races if you fill the tank with paint thinner...

Ok, for now I did get ASIO4All working (yes, I do understand it's not recommended). I realized I was also using it on my old setup for a few months and it seemed to work fine enough for my needs. LatencyMon did not have anything to report on the issue. Fyi when I said that WASAPI Exclusive isn't working, I meant it seems to actually not be supported by my drivers (when Cakewalk does the channel loading thing, all the channels say unavailable). There might be a driver issue that I can fix but for now I'm happy to use ASIO4All if it works. If I run into more issues in the future, I will likely just invest a bit in an audio interface like you all said. Thanks for the help!

24 minutes ago, scook said:

It is impossible to say with the information provided

Even a purpose-built audio interface with an excellent ASIO driver may not be able to overcome a poorly setup computer. 

Laptop manufacturers make this even harder by restricting the ability to adjust the BIOS.

That said, removing unnecessary software and checking DPC are good starts.

Cakewalk does not write drivers for audio hardware.

 

Ok thanks for the advice. I can say CPU/RAM usage is almost certainly not the problem, this is a pretty powerful laptop running with just a few tabs open. I'll check out that tool and see if it reports anything. Also I'll try asio4all again and verify if that doesn't work.

That's really not answering my question. Yes, I can spend over a hundred dollars for another piece of equipment to lug around whenever I want to produce on my laptop. But honestly, I'd rather spend the hundred dollars on another DAW that can produce music without crackling. And really, I'd rather just fix the problem with Cakewalk. Is this an unsolvable problem? What even causes the crackling? Why don't I have Wasapi Exclusive and is there a way I can install that on my system? I'm just looking to understand more about this, since there isn't much info I could find online.

Hi. I'm trying to set up Cakewalk on a new laptop and can't seem to get the audio drivers configured right. MME does work however the input latency with my MIDI controller is prohibitive. Wasapi Shared has loud crackling whenever any sound is playing. Wasapi Exclusive seems to not be supported. And I'm worried about using Asio4All, since last time I tried it, my Cakewalk installation broke completely.