Audio engine performance

[Steven de Jong]

My bandmate and I have been trying to see why our most recent (synth heavy) projects aren't properly played (without cracks/pops) in CW.

After trying everything in terms of PC configuration, drivers, audio interfaces, latency, et cetera (and failing), we decided to try another DAW (Ableton) and rebuilt a multilayered section of one of our songs in it. Out of the box, Ableton was able to play the music without a single crack or pop, and even without fully loading the CPU.

Unfortunately, this experiment shows that the CW audio engine performs pretty badly.

I've been a Pro Audio / SONAR / CW user for as long as I can remember, so my workflow is very much tied to this software. I'm not happy to have to admit that the software is now causing us limits in our work.

[Glenn Stanton]

hmmm. are the audio latency set as high as possible? this will help ease CPU impact from the synths. if you're trying to run soft synths, versus freezing them, those will be very high resource consumers. presumably you're stacking all the same soft synths in Ableton with the same latency settings?

[Noel Borthwick]

I'd be curious to take a look at the project files for both the Cbb and Ableton project. We're always trying to improve performance so if there are obvious issues we can investigate further. Its very difficult to compare two vastly different applications because there are millions of variables.
Its not just the audio engine that gates performance, there are many factors such that can impact workload. User interface is one of the main areas that can cause glitches for example.

[Bassfaceus]

Hi Noel..can you expand on your comment "User interface is one of the main areas that can cause glitches"

if thats the case how do we streamline the interface to have less impact on performance?

[Noel Borthwick]

I'm saying that the the user interface load (drawing clips, scrolling, etc) can also have an impact on streaming because it consumes CPU resources and in some cases can also affect DPC latency. Some applications have less going on in the user interface than Cakewalk and so performance can be affected because of that as well.  Additionally plugins can have load that can impact different DAW's differently such as plugins that do OpenGL graphics.

My point was without investigation you can't easily draw an assumption that the issue is directly related to the audio engine. There are many moving parts in a DAW besides the engine itself. We can investigate it further if you send us the sessions. As part of our ongoing efforts, we continue to try to improve performance in various areas of the DAW.

[Xoo]

There's also differences and "differences": I don't think anyone would expect 2 DAWs to perform identically, so, say a 1% difference might be well within expected differences, and there will therefore inevitably be projects which are on the border, which would run OK in one and not in the other; a 50% difference, however, is a different matter and shows that *something* is up in at least one of the DAWs.

[Jeff Bowman]

Don't know how relevant this is but, having used Cakewalk as my DAW since 1995, I recently built a new PC and for the first time in decades installed an Nvidia GPU.

I then spent a year battling to get rid of pops, crackles, dropouts and crashes. Watched every video, read every article and tried every setting.

The only thing that solved the problem was replacing the GPU with an AMD.

Discuss?

[Xoo]

I've used nVidia since Windows 2000 (before AMD bought ATi, when ATi AGP cards were the spawn of the devil) and never had this issue.

[Jeff Bowman]

1 hour ago, Kevin Perry said:

I've used nVidia since Windows 2000 (before AMD bought ATi, when ATi AGP cards were the spawn of the devil) and never had this issue.

Good for you.

[jackson white]

9 hours ago, Jeff Bowman said:

The only thing that solved the problem was replacing the GPU with an AMD.

Spent cycles exploring this aspect as well. The High Definition Audio Bus was a persistent factor which required deleting the related services. Merely disabling them in the Device Manager was not sufficient.

Currently using an ATI AMD Radeon HD 5450, but experiencing "digital ripping noise" when opening the browser (i.e. a VST manual) during playback which never used to happen. Increasing the latency for the A/I ASIO drivers (and reinstalled them after the latest WIN10 update) helps, but can't shake the sense there is still some other factor. 

@Jeff Bowman  What were the specs/model numbers for the video cards in your case?

 

[Jeff Bowman]

39 minutes ago, jackson white said:

@Jeff Bowman  What were the specs/model numbers for the video cards in your case?

All low end stuff GPU wise, I don't do any gaming, so started with a  GT710 then a GT1030 then a GT(X?)1050. All no joy.

I ended up with an RX550, equally low end, but it's usable now.

There are still some ponderables though. VU meters on Waves NLS are a bit sluggish, opening a plugin GUI whilst playback is going causes some "zipper noise".

Those are tolerable though. Before the swap I couldn't touch the mouse without pops, clicks and crackles plus recording was hit and miss, sometimes OK, sometimes sounded like someone frying bacon in the background and sometimes just the odd pop or click.

Curiously though turning off one of my displays or reducing the resolution on both of them seemed to improve things. Also having no meters showing in Cakewalk seemed to help.

Definitely seems to be something funky in the graphics engine?

 

 

 

Edited April 15, 2021 by Jeff Bowman
Formatting

[Steven de Jong]

Just came back to say thanks for the replies and the discussion.

We found that the culprit is CPU-intensive synthesis (granular) in Omnisphere. The Omnisphere UI is also really slow when opened from CW and very responsive in standalone or Ableton.

And indeed, Ableton is programmed to continue whatever happens and therefore probably is reducing rendering quality (etc.) behind the scenes.

[Noel Borthwick]

@Steven de Jong Thanks for your report. Its likely sub optimal UI in Omnisphere. Many plugins do very inefficient drawing and depending on the video drivers this can lead to glitches in audio. This is why in my original message I mentioned UI performance.

Ableton has a vastly different architecture for its application UI (a cross platform framework) so its not surprising that some problems you see here may not appear in that app. We have observed very similar behavior in another application we are developing. Unfortunately Windows is a crapshoot when it comes to balancing realtime workloads with a busy user interface, esp with all the variances in graphics API's and drivers.

So if you remove Omnisphere (or close the UI) does the problem get significantly better?

[Steven de Jong]

18 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

@Steven de Jong

So if you remove Omnisphere (or close the UI) does the problem get significantly better?

Thus far, the only performance issues we've had are with Omnisphere, but it's my main synth. (I'm also using Pianoteq and some others.)

There aren't less pops and crackles if I close the Omnisphere GUI though.

Edited May 3, 2021 by Steven de Jong