Bill Phillips

Is "That utility" the Radeon AMD graphic card settings app? If yes, I agree and plan to do as you suggested since I've resolved the system failure notifications.

Having separate speakers probably eliminates competition for the audio interface, but, it does require a second audio driver which is competing for CPU resources which might increase latency.

It's not the RX 580 because I had the same problem with the R7 250. Maybe it's my ASUS X99 DELUXE II motherboard or its chipset. Also, both the RX 580 and motherboard have HD audio interfaces but all are disabled except the Focusrite. Maybe if I left one enabled, which I don't want to do because of associated latency, I wouldn't get the error because there would be an available audio interface. I hadn't thought of this before. Also, when I do use the motherboard HD audio output, I use the SPDIF output to my monitor controller which is also powered down on startup.

If you experience unexplained error notifications from your display adapter software shortly after startup, try powering up your audio interface before you power up your PC. For me if I don't power up my Focusrite 18i8 USB audio interface before restart or power up of my PC, I receive the notification shown in the attached screenshot. To avoid surges and hardware damage, I've always powered up my audio hardware starting with the audio output source and working through to the speakers (PC > Audio Interface > Monitor Controller > Monitors). But, now I power up the Audio Interface before the PC to avoid the Radeon notification shown in the attachment. My display adapter is a AMD RX 580. I had the same problem with my earlier AMD R7 250. I'm posting this thinking that I'm not the only person with this problem and that I've picked a title and tags that will allow others with the same problem to find it.

@Craig Anderton I routinely search through your Cakewalk articles in SoS for ideas/help with Cakewalk. I've been glad to see that continuing.

That's true. I hadn't thought about it in that way. I was thinking that over the last year, the Cakewalk "Bakers" at Bandlab have done a good job of maintaining and incrementally improving one of the best and most comprehensive DAWs available. And it's free.

What does it take to get Sound on Sound to review Cakewalk? I've always put a lot of faith in their reviews and believe that the magazine and website are well respected in the music production industry. The routinely provide detailed technical reviews of DAWs. The last Cakewalk review was for SONAR Platinum in 2015.

Thanks I'd missed that too. Thanks for the reminder. I took a look at the extensive new features section. Makes me wish that I'd saved all the previous versions. Also, now I'm not so interested in bookmarks since I can't transport them from one version to the next.

Jim, The Table Of Contents does have links to listed content. Click on any line to go to that page and content. Having the same in the Glossary would be nice.

For me Bookmarks, Search, ability to go to a page, and both Contents and Index link list are the most important. I just started using free foxit PDF reader because it has those things. I like the idea of going to the open-source EPUB format as long as I can find a, preferably free, reader that has the important features listed above. A quick in the Microsoft Store turned up freda as a possible good fit. Anybody using freda?

I'm mixing in Console View and dragged an Ozone 8 Imager VST3 from the FX rack of a track to the adjacent track and Imager followed by Cakewalk crashed. Both created crash notifications. I've attached screenshots of the notifications. Cakewalk created a recovery project file which I haven't tried because I had a recently saved copy to revert to. The crash is somewhat repeatable. I was able to repeat it once using the same steps as the first time. I've caused what appears to be the same crash randomly opening/closing and moving the plugin. I'm using version 2019.07 Build 65 (Early Access 2). I recently signed up for early access. No other problems with early access 1 or 2. Since this is my first crash report, I'm not sure how/where to post it. Let me know if I need to do anything else.

Thanks Steve. I reported it to iZotope as well and will add a report it on the early access thread.

I'm mixing in Console View and dragged an Ozone 8 Imager VST3 from the FX rack of a track to the adjacent track and Imager followed by Cakewalk crashed. Both created crash notifications. I've attached screenshots of the notifications. Cakewalk created a recovery project file which I haven't tried because I had a recently saved copy to revert to. The crash is somewhat repeatable. I was able to repeat it once using the same steps as the first time. I've caused what appears to be the same crash randomly opening/closing and moving the plugin. I'm using version 2019.07 Build 65 (Early Access 2). I recently signed up for early access. No other problems with early access 1 or 2. Since this is my first crash report, I'm not sure how/where to post it. Let me know if I need to do anything else.

Cakewalk is working fine for me. I've sporadically had problems, which I've fixed with lots of help from this and other forums; but none of my problems since CbB have been caused by CbB. I suspect that you'll be better off finding the problems and fixing them. Bill

Thank you for the tip. I didn't know about the image size restriction, but it makes sense. I will use links to images rather than attaching images. I usually use to OneDrive for image links. Is the only way to create an Aux Track routing an output or send to a "new aux track" which creates a patch point named "Aux n"?

The screenshot shows two Aux Tracks, both with Patch Point Inputs. I just created the second, Harp, Aux Track with Patch Point 4 as an input. I did this in a convoluted way. I first assigned one of the Harp track outputs to Patch Point 4 and the other to a new Aux Track. I then reassigned the Harp output assigned to the new Aux Track to Patch Point 4 and reassigned the Aux Track input to Patch Point 4. I don't think I used the same convoluted process for the first, Mix, Aux Track, but I can't think of another way to do it. Is there another way? The screenshot also shows Audio Tracks with Patch Point inputs. That's pretty straight forward because you can simply add an Audio Track, which you can't do with an Aux Track which, as far as I know, must be created by routing an output or send to a new Aux Track. Are there any advantages to using Aux Tracks in lieu of Audio Tracks? Are Audio Tracks more resource intensive or visa versa? It looks like the only difference is that an audio clip can be imported or dragged into an Audio Track. Are there any other differences?

Thanks, John. Yeah, why fix something that's not broken. How long had LatencyMon and Cakewalk been running at the same time when you read that latency? Were you mixing? Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti's are still available used at Newegg!

Jim Roseberry, thank you very much. You've answered all my questions and I really appreciate it.

MediaGary, thanks. I read that article too. By "hogging" the slot do you mean over using it's assigned PCIe lanes? If yes, I don't believe that's a problem for me. My graphics card is in a PCIe 2.0/3.0 x16 slot and I believe that it is the only user and does not need to share of those 16 lanes. My PC has 40 lanes. Most of the others are shared, but not those. There's a newer model RX590 that has a 256-bit memory interface. I wonder how it would compare (DPC latency wise) with the GTX-1660?

Thanks, Jim. All true. My video card is causing DPC Latency of 500+us and I do need for the video card to "get-out-of-the-way." And I understand that the video card can not allow me to run more audio processing and that my video performance is fine. The problem is DPC Latency with my ASIO buffer size set to the highest (1024 samples) value. My ASUS X99-DELUXE II does not have onboard graphics. It supports up to 3 video cards. I didn't want or plan to use multiple video cards but liked its other features such as USB 3.2 and Thunderbolt 3 support. I wonder if the fact that it can support 3 video cards increases DPC latency? Also, I don't do anything with video right now. All I do is record and mix audio. So, based on what I'm learning from you, I want a video card with modest graphics processing capability and the lowest DPC latency possible. And if possible, one that occupies a single slot. Is that out of the question given my desire for low DPC latency? I've also read that AMD video cards have lower DPC latency times than nVidia cards. Is that "old " or "fake" news?

Thanks Jim. That's a lot of useful information. I've been focusing on DirectX driver latency, which for my R7 250 is >0.5 ms because Focusrite tech support thought it was suspiciously high. However, I'm a little confused. At the top of your post you mention that high end video cards won't improve DAW performance; but the AMD cards (Vega-64 & Radeon VII) with the lowest latency are both high performance gaming cards and they cost considerable more than my audio interface. Do you think using one of these would help me? On first look the Radeon VII looks to be the top performer of the two. Also, as you point out they may be pretty noisy. I use the Izotope music production suite which includes three metering plugins that I like. When they're not bypassed, crackling is a lot worse. So at least some of my crackling problems seem to be associated with video processing. Thanks again.

Thanks Chuck E Baby. I upgraded to 2nd gen drivers which made significant improvement. So I think the drivers are as good as they get and LatencyMon shows them down the latency list a way, well below the DirectX video drivers which are at the top at >0.5ms.

I need to replace my existing graphics card and would like to install one with the lowest driver latency possible. According to LatencyMon my existing R7 250 graphics card driver is my highest latency driver at >0.5 ms. I have two displays, one each HDMI and VGA. The VGA monitor is flickering so I'm going to replace it with a second HDMI monitor which requires a graphics card with two HDMI interfaces. I'd like to get a graphics card with the lowest driver latency possible. Currently audio playback during mixing crackles at the highest sample buffer size available for my Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 mainly because of the plugins I use. The CPUs 12 threads hardly ever exceed 10% but the graphics card latency is >0.5 ms. My video card is in the PCIe 2.0/3.0 x16 slot closest to my i7-6850K CPU which has 40 PCIe lanes. My existing graphics card is only x8 but the the slot it's in has 16 dedicated PCIe lanes. I understand that video performance is not important to Cakewalk's performance but driver latency is. So, I'm wondering if using a graphics card that can use all 16 lanes and operate at lower latency would reduce audio crackling during mixing. Any suggestions appreciated.

The USB Device Tree Viewer seems to show a lot more detail.

Bob, thanks. My ASUS X99 Deluxe II motherboard has WiFi capability but I didn't install the software or the antenna and don't see WiFi interface in Device Manager. I did install the Thunderbolt 3 card but have never used it. I want to improve my recording and mixing capabilities before I spend any more on stuff.