abacab

I have found that unplugging my audio interface sometimes lets my DAW exit completely following a crash caused by a bad plugin. I assume that is because my audio driver gets hung up when the DAW goes "poof", and isn't shut down clean. Resetting the interface seems to allow the process to exit fully. Good to go again without rebooting the machine.

Conclusion: If you are running Windows 10, you need an SSD.

I am only going to comment with my observations and opinions on Windows 10 disk usage vs. earlier versions. DAW and audio tuning are already well covered here, but I suspect there may be a difference in the way Windows uses hard disk for internal processes. I also agree with earlier comments about clean OS installing vs. upgrading, as that is the biggest way to avoid carrying over any pre-existing issues from an earlier installation. Plus you get to start with a clean slate. If that is practical for your situation, I would say go for it. I have a desktop that I use for my main DAW with Windows 10 Pro. This system uses a Samsung SSD for the OS drive, and the overall performance of Windows and other applications, including DAW software and plugins is very responsive. My secondary PC is a laptop that came with Windows 8.1 Home, but only a spinning HDD. It is not intended to be a DAW, but I load my DAW and virtual instruments on it to play with when traveling. Since I upgraded it to Windows 10, everything, not just audio performance seems sluggish. I only use the integrated Intel HD graphics on both machines, which are adequate for non gaming use. I am familiar with Process Explorer, Autoruns, and the Windows Task Scheduler, and I have tried weed whacking my way through Windows 10, but every time I start noticing slow performance on the laptop I see my HDD pegging at 100% usage. Windows 10 seems to have a mind of it's own, and I did not notice this behavior under Windows 8.1. Just the expected slower performance of a spinning drive. I have been mulling over whether to clean install, or upgrade the existing HDD to SSD. The advantage to swapping drives is that wouldn't require a complete rebuild of the OS and applications in the laptop. One thing I can observe is that Windows 10 service and task related disk activity that may only take seconds to complete on my desktop with SSD, may take minutes to complete on the laptop with an HDD. Would a clean install change that? I dunno, but my bet would probably be on a new SSD. Bottom line, have Windows developers started assuming that the average baseline PC is now sporting a SSD for the OS drive, and developing the OS accordingly? If so that would seem to follow along the evolutionary path of system requirements for multi-core CPU's, RAM capacity, etc.

Archiving your projects on an external drive is an excellent idea, as that will free up space on your internal drive. However, if you are going to be working with any of those projects again, you should first copy it back to an internal drive. The reason is that external drives are generally slow 5400 RPM USB drives, that are OK for backups but not audio production. For audio drives always use at least an internal 7200 RPM SATA HDD for good audio track throughput.

I make daily images with an automatic schedule, to an attached USB3 drive. Then weekly I take another image to an external drive that gets stored elsewhere. No problems with out of date software that way. If I do major software updates, then I run a new image directly afterwards. And if I update important documents I zip up a copy of them into a folder and sync just that folder, not my entire system, to Dropbox. If I ever run into serious problems, I just drop back to the last known good image. I never have to worry about backups that way.

I installed ASIO4ALL on my laptop for use with my Realtek audio chip. It gives me acceptable latency with virtual instruments using any DAW I wish to use. https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/installing-and-using-asio4all-for-windows/ My laptop is a low end unit not intended for serious audio use, but I find it a handy to have scratchpad for playing virtual instruments when I am traveling. Note: using the Realtek audio chip gives acceptable audio playback over headphones or external speakers, but I would never intend to record external instruments with this. I would say that use would definitely require an external audio interface.

I have never had any success with trying this method. As far as I can tell, Cakewalk and Sonar do not provide for any audio input to a virtual instrument. I can get it to work in Reaper.

I guess you could always delete the unwanted items, then save a copy of the file, while preserving the original file.

That could be an issue with any synth that loads samples. You are basically stuck with the way that the sample was recorded, and as scook says, there is a limit to what an envelope can do with that. It cannot add sound where there is none in the recording.

I think he was attempting to be fair, but tough and honest in his stated opinions. These could be taken as constructive suggestions for enhancements by the development team. As a 20 year user of Cakewalk products, I cannot argue with some of his conclusions: Cakewalk is littered with half-finished features. Luckily, the core features necessary for basic music making are in tact. For simple recording and mixing, Cakewalk is excellent. I can understand why people enjoy the software. There’s no shame (or anything negative at all!) about having basic needs. Cakewalk gets the basics right for the most part. As a free product Cakewalk is fantastic. If I was paying $50 a month for it, I’d be quite unhappy for the value. I know that the paid version came with a lot of bonus plugins/addons, but the core functionality is behind the competitors. I can say that Cakewalk is worth the price you paid, possibly a bit more. Hopefully bandlab can do something with the software to shore up the half-finished features and enhance the core workflows. I don’t even care about the features that aren’t there. If Bandlab just took what’s already there and fixed it, it would be a great product.

The "Dude" abides... [/fify]

New Year Resolution: I will resist the GAS!!!

Windows 10 really whips the llama's butt on an SSD. But not so much on my laptop with a spinning drive. Highly recommend running Win 10 on an SSD.

Beyond All Potential Unbelievable.

Windows 7 is nearing end of life and end of support from Microsoft. So best to prepare for that eventuality, just like with Win XP and Vista. In addition to my Win 10 DAW, I still have a laptop that runs Windows XP and Sonar 8.5. They work well together because that release of Sonar was currently supported on XP. Consider that if you prefer to run an older OS, that it's best to stick with DAW software that was developed on that OS. It would be ideal if things just worked forever, but the realities of the OS internals affect application function and performance as the OS evolves over time. Developers likely switched to Win 10 as their main development platform a couple of years ago. So if you want to run the latest applications, you are in a better position for testing and support if you also run the latest OS.

Just checked that out. Looks good, and it is cross platform!

CbB probably needs to be Mac friendly in order to be fully assimilated by the educational market.

Yep, I got that hardware angle figured out. No intentional misleading data. Wasn't actually trying to do an apples to apples (no pun) software vs. hardware revenue comparison, rather just to point out the deep, deep pockets that Apple Corp has. They could probably give away Logic Pro without making a dent in their corporate bottom line. They probably won't do that if folks are willing to pay, though.

I'm afraid that might be the bottom line. You might be able to give away a CbB for Mac, but I doubt you could sell against Logic Pro X, which at $199 is sort of a no-brainer if you have a Mac. Just for reference, Apple owns Logic, and Apple is currently the most valuable company in the world, with a market cap of $926 billion USD. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-the-world-by-market-value/ I'm sure that this discussion will continue until @Meng says, "(a) no way Jose", "(b) maybe, we should look into it further", or "(c) we'll definitely give it a shot"!

I think I have heard it explained by Noel that there was a long standing partnership with Microsoft developers that allowed Cakewalk to leverage many of the higher performance audio features of Windows first, as they became available. Cakewalk has been around for over 30 years, and had its roots in DOS as a MIDI sequencer. That would have been important as Cakewalk evolved into a very strong audio/MIDI DAW for Windows, and then as it matured into what we have today.

I think that's a cool idea, but the bakers already tried that and decided that it was a major, major, re-write. The strength of Cakewalk and Sonar on the Windows platform is also its Achilles heel as far as being ported to another platform. It is very tightly wrapped with Windows code libraries and much would have to be coded from scratch in another universe to get the same functionality. A complex DAW app would need to be designed from the ground up for cross platform compatibility in order to avoid the re-coding necessary to make it work after the fact. I agree that a cross platform DAW app would have wider appeal, but the technical issues involved with achieving that goal are not insignificant.

Well when Bapu created the "Beyond Cakewalk" forum he imported our post counts from the Cakewalk forum. The man!!!

That's a good suggestion. But if they are just trying to keep the avatar section clean, maybe add location to sig.

+1