Noel Borthwick

Correct, it uses pipeline parallelism to split the buffers and process them in parallel to achieve greater parallel processing even though the DSP pipeline itself has serial dependencies. I have a known limitation in the implementation that I hope to improve this year that may help improve performance when using it.

Good points. A few driver vendors create dependencies that cause unpredictable realtime behavior. Ive had this discussion even with Roland who claimed that background processing was the proper setup. Its completely counter intuitive to me since its now allowing any background process on the system to be given take priority over the DAW which means that audio processing could get less resources in theory! I’ve even discussed this with a systems engineer at Microsoft many years ago who said it was not a good idea to do this in general. Maybe @Pete Brown could verify this. Your theory that they have a (bad) dependency on some background process is possible. I’ve definitely seen drivers start to glitch when there is excessive activity on the UI thread - in theory this should NOT happen since the UI thread is running at much lower priority than the engine. Cakewalk’s UI is on the heavy side and I’ve been chipping away at reducing its footprint all of last year so it has helped but in an ideal world this should not be an issue. Regarding drivers that share this is likely because they are internally synchronizing to block processing until all clients have processed audio, similar to what WASAPI shared mode does because they have to mix all streams and potentially do SRC as well. Its not surprising that this scenario would cause some glitching. I wonder if the ASIO drivers that support multiclient access are running their mixing code in a different process. If so I could see how having background priority set could potentially change things there.

Can you clarify whether you were seeking on the timeline AFTER making changes or if you were stopping and restarting playback. As mentioned until you stop and restart playback it will not read the currently recorded automation. If its a BREVERB issue it would be up to Overloud to address it. However the version of BREVERB that Cakewalk had distributed is an older one so I'm not sure if they would update that.

I agree. It was a very good solution at the time and with some minimal decent driver support it would have been fully functional even today. Its a shame that Roland has this approach discontinuing stopping support for hardware devices prematurely.

Kurt, BREVERB has known bugs with its rendering of automation so most likely you are running into one of those. That is not an issue that can be solved from the Cakewalk side. Please retest with a different plugin and you should not see the same issue. Also something to note. In Cakewalk recorded automation is only applied when you stop playback so if you seek on the timeline to an earlier point where you had recorded automation, it will not render until you stop and restart playback. I don't think this is the issue you are encountering but I thought I would clarify it.

It's rarely useful to set track outputs directly to hardware outputs because now you lose control of the master mix. Good practice is to always output to a bus and or send to an aux bus.

Has nothing to do with newer CPU's its how parallel processing of audio workloads is handled. But as I said I cannot comment until we have your project. If your project file plays ok on a different PC then you would need to troubleshoot at the PC level.

Where do you have these instances? In different tracks, stacked up or in buses. Best thing is to post the cwp file so others can see the layout of the plugins and the exact routing.

Its impossible to offer suggestions without knowing the setup of the project. Load is not distributed equally because of serial dependencies for audio processing. If you have one plugin in a track that takes a long time to process, it will become a bottleneck even though other tracks have low load, because the engine has to wait for the track to finish before it can be mixed. If you post your project file it may become more clear where the bottlenecks lie in your case.

It had nothing to do with Cakewalk not wanting to support it. Roland stopped supporting their hardware. If they still supported it we would have continued. We put a lot of effort into the VS700 and even extended our control surface SDK to do all sorts of editing stuff. This is all open source on Github if someone wants to utilize it for a different product.

Some drivers don’t terminate and hold the app captive. I’ve not seen this in many years but the some of the old Roland Drivers did this.

It only causes the behavior in cbb because it's corrupting the right chunk of memory to trigger the crash The app vanishing without a crash is almost surely caused by the plugin corrupting the heap. Heap corruption is like Russian roulette. It may or may not occur even from one version to another of the app because it is random. heap corruption issues are best diagnosed in a debugger using appverifier but even there it can be tricky to find.

You could say that you have an affinity for hard cores

How do you set this?

Can you zip and upload a version of the project that has the issue? You can pm me the link.

Which build are you running? This issue was fixed in the last update.

Hi @Scott Wheeler, Thanks for the message. I'm not familiar with Sitala so I should check it out. I assume that the plugin is a multi-out VST instrument? Both VST2 and VST3 have multi-out support. What is the purpose of the custom API? Feel free to PM me and we can discuss further.

I have forwarded the issue with Air Riser to the InMusic team. They solved a problem with the MPC plugin recently so perhaps they may have some insight.

@Fabio I had not seen your message. Please mention (@) if you need to draw a specific persons attention to a message. I looked at the dump file and the crash is not Waves related so it will be useless to them. The crash is in air riser so you should send it to the vendor for that plugin. Version info from the dump file is below. Unhandled exception at 0x0000000037DD975D (theRiser_x64.dll) in Untitled_12052020_110141.dmp: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0xFFFFFFFE39480214. theRiser_x64.dll theRiser_x64.dll *c:\program files\Cakewalk\vstplugins\AIR Riser\theRiser_x64.dll 1.00.7.19000 10/28/2015 6:11 AM 0000000037D70000-0000000039A6C000 Untitled_12052020_110141.dmp This is not a cakewalk crash so only the vendor can analyze it. If you have a different dump file with a crash in OVox you can attach that.

@Darcy

We've been close to Microsoft for over 20 years

There is no processor architecture specific coding in Cbb for multiprocessing and I would wager most other apps as well. It would be dangerous to do that since performance would vary across different CPU models. To Cbb all threads are equal. My guess is that with threads on virtual cores you are at the mercy of the OS implementation, system load and the hyperthreading implementation, since these threads are not truly running on a dedicated core. This old post kind of sums up this behavior. My guess is that when the primary core is really busy due to a heavy load, the virtual core doesnt get a lot of time to run. In a mixing workload with multiple tracks the full cycle cannot complete until all channels are complete so if some cores are starved I can see it having a detrimental effect to simply running without hyperthreading. I could try and add an experimental mode where we filter out processing workloads on threads assigned to virtual cores. Or perhaps do this dynamically based on the actual CPU workload. i.e. if the workload is lower, then utilize hyperthreaded cores but as it gets closer to 80% or some value dial back to physical cores only. Who knows if that will help

Please read this article. Plug in specific crashes should first be reported to the vendor since they are able to best investigate the problem. If you send us a dump file AND the project file we can forward it to Waves as well.

Ben or anyone else still having issues with iRig HD 2 i let us know if this is ok in the latest build. The folks at IK multimedia have validated the build and it works ok for them so if you have issues please contact IK directly and they can help troubleshoot it.

There are differences between logical and physical cores because the OS handles them differently. Esp in the case of hyperthreading or in the case of AMD simultaneous multithreading (SMT). There are API's to identify whether a core is logical or physical. See GetLogicalProcessorInformation See this benchmark that has more details on how hyperthreaded cores can effect performance.