Noel Borthwick

>>If you were running X2 it was with the VST2 version. Are you running the VST3 version now? If so it may be related to their VST3 compatibility. NM I see you posted that it was VST2. Do they offer a VST3 version?

You likely are running a very old version of CbB if it prompted you. Periodic online activation is a requirement to use the software (as is the case with most other products). Its a small price to pay to get a full blown DAW with no restrictions. The newest update will give you advance notice when activation is required and won't block you ever while you are in a session, in the unlikely event that the rime rolls over. You also need to periodically update BandLab assistant which is the delivery mechanism. Its also in most users best interests to update the software periodically since we are constantly making the software better.

WASAPI will be more stable than ASIO4All. Its easy enough to try, Just switch the driver mode to WASAPI exclusive or WASAPI shared.

You're on the daily build program. Kidding No, build 70 just had 2 or 3 fixes after the main hotfix release last week. One was to address a regression with the fade selection fade UI that was making it difficult to edit fades. That was the only reason why we did the the extra release. There shouldn't be any more updates now until the next main release.

Plugin's with hybrid mono stereo (eg stereo in/mono out) get set to the minimum supported interleave so would get internally set to mono. I'll look into it for a future update and see if we can improve the handling of this case but its not very simple. This is a bug. We'll fix it.

Its almost surely some optimization case they are not handling in the plugin GUI. Its not something we could investigate on our end. It could be that they are relying on some DAW specific behavior to update their UI its hard to say. After investigating the issue internally if they need any clarifications about Cakewalk behavior they can contact me.

@bitflipper Disclaimer is if you want to run heavy duty plugins on it you need a fast CPU. The Surface book 2 is very capable and has 8 cores. However for simpler projects I think any decent laptop with a robust onboard audio chipset should be ok for lighter work and song idea sketching.

@Ellsworth Hall Can you share that project file so we can take a look at it?

The GUI responsiveness issues you mention would be something the plugin vendor needs to address. We don't have any control of how responsive a plugin is. It sounds like something they need to optimize in their code so I suggest that you contact their support with the issue.

And its not just small projects that work fine. I just loaded up a big project that we're using for AES. Contains Video, Lots of audio tracks and tons of Slate digital plugins. This plays glitch free at 192 samples on the surface book 2 all going through WASAPI shared mode. The I7 Surface book 2 (with graphics acceleration) still hasn't received the 1903 update so unfortunately I can't see if there is a further improvement. It does have the latest Surface firmware updates however.

Clip effects and Clip automation can be very useful esp in this scenario where you have many songs in one project. You may not want the same processing for all songs so adding an effect to the track would apply it to the entire project. (yes you could automate bypass but it gets confusing) There are different ways to do this such as by using bussing but clip effects are a convenient way to do clip specific processing. Like JL says, using too many clip effects can quickly add up the load while processing since they are always active (streaming silence) even when the clip is not playing.

@Ellsworth Hall It should say VST3 on the plugin window toolbar at the top. Post a screenshot of the plug-in window. The vst properties are available from there. SONAR X2 did not have vst3 support so it's possible that you are running into a vst3 incompatibility with that plugin.

Some things to check. Are you running the 32 bit version or 64 bit. Also is it vst2 or vst3.

What I do with working with a multi song live recording is keep the master project and split it up into logical sections with Markers. Then I delete all but the song I want and save as to a new project. Then restart the process until I've saved all the songs as new per project audio files. If you want to save disk space esp if everything is one long audio file is to save as each project file to the same folder without copying the project. audio. Another tip is to save each song as a bundle since that will only pull the exact audio that is referenced.

In the bad project can you capture a dump file when it hangs? Well try and reproduce it as well. Does the plugin that causes the problem on the aux track have delay (lookahead)?

Yes bounce requires some track data before it will activate. The only way you can bounce realtime audio inputs is by using the realtime bounce. There is an alternative however. Route all the tracks or buses that you want to capture to an Aux track and arm and record that aux track. See the description for Record Multiple Tracks to a Single Track in the Aux Track documentation. This will record to an Aux track and you should then be able to drag out that clip to the desktop when you are done.

Code 13 means that the ASIO driver sent us a reset message. Cakewalk responds to this by stopping the engine and reloading the driver. From the notes: Code 13: ASIO subsystem signaled a dropout due to a state change I don't have an iTrack solo to test with. How are you changing the buffer size? Are you doing it outside Cakewalk via the driver control panel or accessing it from our preferences dialog which is the proper way to do it. If you change it externally Cakewalk may gets a message from the driver and will cause a dropout leading to Code 13. Regarding the Nektar it sounds like something environmental on your system.

You can buy breakout cables like this. I've used them occasionally.

There were a bunch of recent Surface firmware updates. I'm not sure if they had anything to do with it but my surface 4 definitely seems to run better and I couldn't run with 88 samples before. You should try it if you haven't upgraded it yet. Let us know how WASAPI shared mode works there. I did all my original WASAPI dev work on the Surface pro 4. The surface devices are completely usable as mobile recording rigs. At NAMM this year we did all the demos with a SB2 (the full I7 version) and all the live multitrack recordings there were done with a Surface Pro (with a FocusRite)

Haha, she mainly plays on an acoustic grand, so was playing air piano with the left hand for a bit when she started because of the limited range. Playing on these controllers is a challenge for most pianists.

Zero. That was the the purpose of the experiment. I just wanted to see how an old machine that someone might have lying around would work in CbB with the new version of Windows. That PC is no longer used as a DAW and is in fact is quite slow because it has a bunch of other cruft on it. It is a very old I7 950 with just 6GB of RAM and the HD is also really old and sluggish. I don't even have an audio interface hooked up to it.

Are you using source category set to clips? If yes then today they are not exported in the visible sequential track order. If I remember we add a performance to the name to make it unique but nothing more. We can consider improving export naming in the future.

Equally impressive. Here is a surface Pro 4 running 12 tracks at 88 samples through onboard audio. This time in WASAPI shared mode using the Windows 10 low latency audio support via the onboard High Definition Audio driver. I can play the project completely glitch free.

I still think USB mic's are limited because they are single endpoint devices. Yes you can use the headphone out to defeat low latency but at that point you are losing the one of the main advantages of using a DAW because you can't track while monitoring with effects. They are a perfect solution for podcasters but not so great for musicians who want to use them to track in a DAW. I'm surprised why no USB mic vendors implement a simple single stereo output in addition to the input. All that would be needed is for them to implement a cheap onboard chipset and provide an ASIO driver for it. This would be the perfect standalone solution for vocalists. You could plug in to your PC and route the output to the mic's onboard audio device which now allows you to do everything in the box. Hell even WASAPI would work fine with it as long as they provided sub 10 ms latency.

I recently upgraded some of my home PC's to Windows 10 build 1903 and was curious what audio performance would be like in a worst case under optimized scenario. I was pleasantly surprised!This is a very rough demonstration showing low latency audio using Cakewalk with Windows 10 build 1903 and nothing more than an on-board audio chipset and a really old PC (built in 2008). Audio is low-fi in the video since the sound is going through some ancient desktop speakers and recorded through my phone. This is intentional The machine is a very old Core I7 PC built in 2007 that I recently upgraded to windows 10 build 1903. I was curious about audio performance so I did a quick test in Cakewalk to check audio and was pleasantly surprised when I was able to use WASAPI at the lowest latency setting (144 samples) with no audio glitches whatsoever, using just the onboard RealTek audio chipset. The test showed live playback with a virtual instrument, but it also worked well with standard audio track playback. For this test I used WASAPI exclusive mode with the onboard Realtek audio device, since Windows 10 shared mode low latency only works with the Microsoft inbox HDAudio driver presently. I haven't come across any other on-board devices which support Windows 10 low latency with shared mode. This test shows that WASAPI is finally able to live up to it's promise of low latency audio in Windows with even basic vanilla on-board audio devices! I don't recall this old PC every being able to do low latency playback on prior versions of Windows, so I attribute this to some combo of improvements to Cakewalks optimized low latency WASAPI support, or Windows 10 build 1903 itself. Either way this is impressive on multiple levels. Its great that Windows can do completely acceptable low latency audio support out of the box today. And the fact that Window's 10 works better on an an ancient PC like this is an accomplishment. Microsoft has been getting a lot of flak these days, but after the fiasco with Apple's Catalina breaking music apps, Microsoft deserves some kudos for their support of legacy systems. Its not surprising that some things go wrong with such a massive base of hardware but the fact that a 11 year old PC can perform decently with low latency on a current OS is quite an achievement. Now if Microsoft Surface team can get their act together and release 1903 on their own first party hardware that would be even better lol. I think @Pete Brown might be happy to learn this ? PS: I'm curious to hear what other users performance is like with 1903 and just using on-board audio devices with WASAPI in CbB.