Noel Borthwick

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.

One important caveat to bear in mind with USB mics is that you cannot use them in ASIO mode so low latency input monitoring is generally not an option. To use a USB mic you must use WASAPI shared or wasapi exclusive mode. The latter will give you lower latency but it really depends on the audio interface since many pro audio interfaces have abysmal performance in wasapi mode. It's not a deficiency if wasapi but more that driver vendors don't bother properly optimizing for it. In general USB mics are not a good pro audio solution for this reason.

Yes that was the reason. If you download the latest update this issue has been already fixed. Hidden buses will no longer cause preview drawing to stop working.

@mkerl If the smart tool is on you need to click in the LOWER half of the clip for this behavior because this only applies to comp mode. The lower half of the smart tool has the comp tool functionality which implements this behavior. If you want to click anywhere and seek to beginning you will have to select the dedicated comp tool. Also make sure you are clicking on clips in take lanes since this only applies there.

Hi @Jack Stoner I've been doing a bunch of tests here with switching presets a lot while playing and did not see any crashes yet. I tested multiprocessing, 64 bit processing as well as load balancing and everything seemed pretty stable. In fact it was an improvement over prior versions of Ozone.

Thanks for sending the dumps and follow up Dick. A little explanation for others on the thread. I suspect on Dick's system he may need to do a full rescan since for some reason API2500 is stalling the scan. That isn't the source of his issue however. While a background scan is underway the scanner will periodically (ever 50 plugins or so) communicate with Cakewalk and notify it to refresh its cache of plugins. This is done so that you can immediately start using new plugins even while a scan is underway. However if you have lots of plugins installed this notification can be expensive since Cakewalk has to reload the plugin inventory which can take a few seconds. During this process the UI can get blocked. This is the freeze that he was encountering periodically since he has over 1500 plugins on the system. For a subsequent update we'll optimize this so the UI doesn't get blocked by this operation so it wont be an issue anymore. One more mystery solved

I see thank you for clarifying.

No we don't force the theme since it would prevent you from using custom themes and switching lenses.

Hi guys, Yes the Basic lens was updated so if you were using the stock one it would have changed. The theme being forced with the Basic lens was an oversight. That has been fixed in the latest hotfix.

If you download the latest update this has been addressed.

What do you mean by "disabled". Are you bypassing the VST3? Are you getting the crash on loading the project or on saving? @Jonathan Sasor was able to reproduce some crashes with this plugin.

@Zoltan G. Zeisky I'm currently working with EastWest to try and get to the bottom of this issue. Can you verify whether you are using both the VST2 and VST3 versions of the plugin simultaneously in the same project? That is generally not a good idea.

Hello @Florian Cedard thanks for sending the diagnostic dumps. I looked at all your dump files. In all of them there is only a single issue that is actionable by us, The rest are all plugin bugs. Here is the analysis for each file if you are interested. All your crashes are caused by mainly 2 plugins. STL Tonality - Howard Benson.vst3 and Superior Drummer 3 I suggest you contact the respective plugin vendors and report it directly to them. You can send them the dump files associated (as indicated below) for their analysis since there isn't anything we can see on our end that would cause these crashes. The stacks are 100% inside the plugins. In short, many crashes are caused by bugs within plugins themselves and there is nothing the host can do to prevent them. For such issues its in your best interest to contact the plugin developers and notify them about the issue with the dump file of course. Tell them what DAW you were using so that they can validate their products with Cakewalk as well. ---------- Stay Back_10072019_213100 > 00007ffde1da5094() Unknown Non-user code [Frames may be missing, no binary loaded for STL Tonality - Howard Benson.vst3] Annotated Frame STL Tonality - Howard Benson.vst3!00007ffde3a5a811() Unknown Non-user code. No matching binary found. ---------- Stay Back_09282019_175852 [Frames may be missing, no binary loaded for Superior Drummer 3.dll] Annotated Frame > Superior Drummer 3.dll!00007ff9ce65b281() Unknown Non-user code. No matching binary found. ---------- Stay Back_09282019_151247 [Frames may be missing, no binary loaded for Superior Drummer 3.dll] Annotated Frame > Superior Drummer 3.dll!00007ff9ce65b281() Unknown Non-user code. No matching binary found. ---------- Perfect Religion_10082019_184104 > 0000000000000000() Unknown Non-user code [Frames may be missing, no binary loaded for STL Tonality - Howard Benson.vst3] Annotated Frame STL Tonality - Howard Benson.vst3!00007ffde2cba811() Unknown Non-user code. No matching binary found. ---------- Never Look Down II_10012019_223746 Cakewalk crash - fixed ---------- Endless Disease_10092019_163216 Crash in a waves DLL C:\ProgramData\Waves Audio\Modules\AdditionalDLLs_x64\mkl_waves.dll > mkl_waves.dll!00007ffdd3fb50b3() Unknown Non-user code. Binary was not built with debug information. 0000000098768c40() Unknown Non-user code ---------- Compo Intro Concert_10022019_170820 Unhandled exception at 0x00007FF9D3F6B281 (Superior Drummer 3.dll) in Compo Intro Concert_10022019_170820.dmp: 0xC0000005: Access violation writing location 0x0000000000000000 [Frames may be missing, no binary loaded for Superior Drummer 3.dll] Annotated Frame > Superior Drummer 3.dll!00007ff9d3f6b281() Unknown Non-user code. No matching binary found.

Yes we can repro it. Its a bug in the UI. We'll fix it.

Thanks @Pete Brown As Pete says indicates that device isn't really designed to be used inside DAW's. Its mainly for playing back MIDI files in Windows and such. Also the GS synth and WASAPI don't play together well when the DAW is using WASAPI mode (thats why I asked) According to the dump file the user is running 10.0.14393 I don't think Johnbee58 was running with the GS synth. He just commented that it wasnt hanging for him lol.

Hi @Marcos Kleine, Firstly, thanks for sending your dump file, it makes it easy to locate the source of the problem. I looked at it and the issue is not related to this Cakewalk update. Its appears to be a hang in the Microsoft GS WaveTable synth which you have selected as the MIDI output device. I have tried that device recently and found it to be very unstable. I ran into that exact same hang after stopping and starting playback multiple times. The hang occurs when Cakewalk is sending a MIDI message to the device as indicated below. The device goes unresponsive and hangs the application. To solve your problem, don't use the GS WaveTable synth. You can try using TTS1 which is a GS synth as well. Also one clarification. Are you using WASAPI or ASIO? I will forward this information to Microsoft in case its something on their radar. ntdll.dll!NtWaitForAlertByThreadId() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. ntdll.dll!RtlpWaitOnAddressWithTimeout() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. ntdll.dll!RtlpWaitOnAddress() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. ntdll.dll!RtlpWaitOnCriticalSection() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. ntdll.dll!RtlpEnterCriticalSectionContended() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. ntdll.dll!RtlEnterCriticalSection() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. wdmaud.drv!CWasapiRenderer::GetCursors(__int64 *,unsigned __int64 *,__int64 *,unsigned __int64 *) Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. wdmaud.drv!CMicrosoftGSWavetableSynth::GetTimeNow(__int64 *) Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. wdmaud.drv!CMicrosoftGSWavetableSynth::SendMIDIEvent(struct MIDI_TIMESTAMP *,unsigned int,struct MIDI_TIMESTAMP *) Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. wdmaud.drv!SwModMessage() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. wdmaud.drv!dspsL() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. WINMMBASE.dll!midiMessage() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. WINMMBASE.dll!midiOutShortMsg() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. > Cakewalk.exe!CMidiOutHardware::Send(unsigned long dwMsg, int nEventBus) Line 224 C++ Symbols loaded. [Inline Frame] Cakewalk.exe!CMidiOutDev::Send(int) Line 217 C++ Symbols loaded. Cakewalk.exe!sendResets(CMidiOutDev & dev, int nPort, int bResetOnlyBasic) Line 4265 C++ Symbols loaded. Cakewalk.exe!CTransport::zeroControllers() Line 4302 C++ Symbols loaded.

@Dick Kloosterman could you please capture a dump file while the app appears frozen? I may be able to see what is taking long. To do that follow the instructions in this FAQ and zip and upload the dump file to any file sharing service. Then send me the link please. Do not upload the file to this forum since it will be too large.

Hi @Florian Cedard unfortunately the dump file is corrupted when I download it. Please don't directly upload to the forum since it may not work properly. Instead upload the file to something like DropBox, Google Drive or OneDrive and then send me the link please.

@Florian Cedard this article has simpler and more up to date information on capturing a dump. Please use this instead.