A huge shout out to Noel !

[Greg Wynn]

I wanted to do a public shout out to @Noel Borthwickfor some exceptional support.  I’ve had sort of an odd problem and Noel had a Zoom session to sort it out - and what he fixed will be appearing in a future release.

 

unbelievable support  !!

[InstrEd]

Yes Noel and the rest of the developers do an outstanding job.  I'm really looking forward to the update that Jesse Jost was doing a demo on a couple of weeks ago.

[twelvetone]

And now everybody's gonna want a Zoom session with Noel...

Edited October 1, 2020 by twelvetone

[John Bradley]

It sounds dirty when you phrase it that way.

[Greg Wynn]

1 minute ago, John Bradley said:

It sounds dirty when you phrase it that way.

LOLOLOLOL

[Bapu]

ZOOM Pffft I've met him in person (at NAMM) on two different years. Great guy.

This was the last time

Edited October 1, 2020 by Bapu

[InstrEd]

Maybe CbB will put on a virtual show for us all to attend

[Jacques Boileau]

Wouldn't that be cool! ?

 

[Craig Anderton]

Noel is an extremely dedicated individual, to say the least.

What people sometimes overlook is his killer jazz guitar playing. I would prefer that as a Zoom session, I already know how Cakewalk works

[Jacques Boileau]

5 hours ago, Bapu said:

ZOOM Pffft I've met him in person (at NAMM) on two different years. Great guy.

This was the last time

Wow, I am so impressed! I never knew you where so good with Photoshop! Its almost like it really happened! ?

[Greg Wynn]

4 hours ago, Craig Anderton said:

Noel is an extremely dedicated individual, to say the least.

What people sometimes overlook is his killer jazz guitar playing. I would prefer that as a Zoom session, I already know how Cakewalk works

Ummm....I’ve been using some variation of Cakewalk all the way back to Pro Audio back around 2001 so I’m fairly confident I’m adept

Trust me when I say the issue I had was bizarre and Noel changed code in order to squash the bug.  He’s a hell of a nice guy too  !

Edited October 2, 2020 by Greg Wynn

[AB99]

This type of customer service is amazing.  Noel was always great whether with Bandlab or before.  I am very grateful that Cakewalk has continued!   

 

[GreenLight]

10 hours ago, Greg Wynn said:

Ummm....I’ve been using some variation of Cakewalk all the way back to Pro Audio back around 2001 so I’m fairly confident I’m adept

Trust me when I say the issue I had was bizarre and Noel changed code in order to squash the bug.  He’s a hell of a nice guy too  !

Impressive support!

Now I'm getting very curious about what kind of issue you had?

[Craig Anderton]

13 hours ago, Greg Wynn said:

Ummm....I’ve been using some variation of Cakewalk all the way back to Pro Audio back around 2001 so I’m fairly confident I’m adept

Trust me when I say the issue I had was bizarre and Noel changed code in order to squash the bug.  He’s a hell of a nice guy too  !

I wasn't trying to minimize what Noel did with you, just saying I'd love to see a Zoom session with him playing. 

[InstrEd]

2 hours ago, Craig Anderton said:

I'd love to see a Zoom session with him playing. 

That would be time taken away from him working on CbB  ? 

It would be nice to see the staff of Cakewalk and Bandlab do a zoom or youtube live playing event.

[Noel Borthwick]

Thanks for the kind words ?
Often the quickest way to get to the bottom of a problem rather than sending endless messages, is to observe it and do tests directly on the users PC.
In this case Greg had an issue that he had reported here and on facebook where he was getting crackling when moving his mouse only over the bus view.
I had some other customers over the years report issues like this but since this was a more specific report I thought it was worth investigating further.

He has a modern I9 and the project wasn't overly complex although he had a lot of cpu expensive plugins. I was unable to reproduce the issue even with his project file so I did some analysis of the code that is affected by mouse movement on buses and spotted some obvious inefficiencies. I did some optimizations to the hit test logic that makes it use a lot less CPU. After I sent a build to Greg it appeared to completely solve his problem and he is able to run the project at 128 samples now with no artifacts on mouse movement or scrolling.

The strange thing to me is that despite having fixed it, I believe the original issue to be a system specific problem with one of his drivers. MOTU, UAD or the NVIDIA driver. Its hard to say which one caused it, but load on the UI should in general NOT affect audio streaming on a multi-core CPU since the audio engine runs on high priority threads that are not gated by the UI. IOW the UI can be 100% busy and you shouldn't hear artifacts. The only way the audio device would get blocked is if somehow this activity blocked the audio driver at the kernel level.  Whatever the cause is, I'm happy that the improvements addressed his issue and the fixes should improve performance across the board as well!

 

[Greg Wynn]

4 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Thanks for the kind words ?
Often the quickest way to get to the bottom of a problem rather than sending endless messages, is to observe it and do tests directly on the users PC.
In this case Greg had an issue that he had reported here and on facebook where he was getting crackling when moving his mouse only over the bus view.
I had some other customers over the years report issues like this but since this was a more specific report I thought it was worth investigating further.

He has a modern I9 and the project wasn't overly complex although he had a lot of cpu expensive plugins. I was unable to reproduce the issue even with his project file so I did some analysis of the code that is affected by mouse movement on buses and spotted some obvious inefficiencies. I did some optimizations to the hit test logic that makes it use a lot less CPU. After I sent a build to Greg it appeared to completely solve his problem and he is able to run the project at 128 samples now with no artifacts on mouse movement or scrolling.

The strange thing to me is that despite having fixed it, I believe the original issue to be a system specific problem with one of his drivers. MOTU, UAD or the NVIDIA driver. Its hard to say which one caused it, but load on the UI should in general NOT affect audio streaming on a multi-core CPU since the audio engine runs on high priority threads that are not gated by the UI. IOW the UI can be 100% busy and you shouldn't hear artifacts. The only way the audio device would get blocked is if somehow this activity blocked the audio driver at the kernel level.  Whatever the cause is, I'm happy that the improvements addressed his issue and the fixes should improve performance across the board as well!

 

Thanks again, Noel !  It was an absolute pleasure talking and troubleshooting with you !

[Craig Reeves]

Cakewalk's support is excellent. All the developers, including Noel, are amazing, talented and passionate about what they do. I complain about Cakewalk a lot it seems but I believe it is the best DAW in the world!