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Unofficial Windows 10 Audio Workstation build and tweak guide


Noel Borthwick

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On 2/27/2021 at 12:25 PM, Colin Nicholls said:

With my beloved Echo Layla3G PCI/ASIO at the heart of my system, I suspect I'm not upgrading past 1803 until the hardware dies. Thank goodness for Winaero Tweaker.

Collin - I am running an older Echo card Original Layla 24/96 No problems with 1909 18363.1379. I would probably get better latency with a newer card LOL!

Thanks to Pete Brown for the great video and tweak guide and for checking in here!

Edited by Max Arwood
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The background/foreground* "tweak" is still out there "officially" (https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207355205-Optimising-your-PC-for-Audio-on-Windows-10) and unofficially (https://www.soundonsound.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=76781)

* From memory, and unless something has changed since XP/Windows 7, this doesn't change the priority of threads, but how long they run for by default - cf. https://medium.com/@dikrek/processor-scheduling-and-quanta-in-windows-and-a-bit-about-unix-linux-fb5ab02828e2 (a few years old, but chimes with my memory).

I do wonder if the "tweak" was , say, Cubase specific originally, since the copy-protection was running in the background?

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Background mode raises the thread quantum which is how long it is allowed to run before being task switched. This could generally be bad for low latency audio performance on multithreaded machines when you have other multithreaded processes running, because another thread could be blocking the engine from processing in time. Its another one of those tweaks that happened to work for some system configuration and gets propagated on the internet as being the truth.

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@Pete Brown I like the way you guide a user through the whole tweaking process!

Just read your power plan switching guide update. It might be easier for most users to just install PowerBuddy. No need to use the command prompt. It installs a little taskbar button which let's you immediately choose any of the Power Plans you have configured in the Windows Power Options menu. I use it all the time when changing between DAW and other PC tasks.

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Update of my post above where it says everything is purring like a kitten. I have intermittent skips. I don't want to steal the thread, but I was so happy with my portable set-up (Thinkpad XI) and Yamaha keyboard or Babyface interfaces. Did all of Pete's tweaks that I could understand and it seemed to run well. Is there a button list somewhere of all the exact tweaks that the kind gentleman took the time to make for us? I want to make sure I didn't miss something because my classy computer is unusable in a professional surrounding right now and that's things that make you wanna go.....

What happened is I was listening a to a one hour piece in Sound Forge and about, gosh, 12 minutes in the sound completely took a dive like the tape snapped, but back on again in time. It happened to me live with my XPS 9350 that I was using for VST's or some songs just a  stereo loop - and it would skip. Random. Intermittent. Once in a song. Some kind of interference. On the live gig I wasn't online so it wasn't that. Is anybody successfully using a Thinkpad for recording.  . Tonight -update, edit, it did it watching YouTube. I will try stuff and get back.Maybe I should try offline as it is wi-fi. (or get a LAN adapter for the Yoga.
Thanks.

Edited by Michael Fogarty
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