Sounds like CPU shortage, but it’s not.

[Mark Bastable]

+++Just realised I posted this in the wrong subsection. Mods, please move it, if that’s possible. Or trash it and I’ll post again. ++++

 

I’m getting a lot digital distortion and fluffing.

I’ve only got midi drums and two guitars in the piece I’m working on. CPU and memory are untroubled, each cruising at well under 20%.  It’s a brand new laptop dedicated to Cakewalk, nothing else running but Chrome.

Any ideas what might be causing it?

Thank you.. 

Edited May 16, 2021 by Mark Bastable

[Promidi]

Can you give us some detailed information about your system?

OS,CPU, RAM, HDD (and type)

Audio interface, bit depth, sample rate, buffer size, driver mode?

Latest drivers installed (using manufacturer's websites rather than Windows updates)

What else have you tried so far?

[Mark Bastable]

Thank you for responding.

So what I have is...

A month-old Legion Laptop with 16GB of installed RAM and Intel i7 2.6Ghz CPU, running WIndows 10 Home.

The drive - just one - is a 500GB SSD, 80% empty.

The sound card is an Alesis i02 Express. 

In as far as I understand the other questions....

Sample rate (as set up in Preferences/Driver Settings)  44100

Buffer zsize 11.6msec

Driver mode.....not sure what the mode is, but I'm using ASIO4ALL

The bit depth is 24, but it's greyed-out. 64 Bit Double Precision is unchecked.


All drivers and versions are up-to-date, I believe. I have an Avast utility that deals with that.

As to what I've tried....nothing, as I have no idea what I'm doing, and I've found in the past that pulling levers at random tends to make the problem more difficult to solve when someone competent takes a look.

Edited May 17, 2021 by Mark Bastable

[scook]

Maybe the audio driver buffer is too small.

The driver mode is set in CbB preferences.

The audio driver buffer size for most driver modes is set on a different CbB preference page using the slider under Mixing latency.

WASAPI shared is not adjustable. It is set by the OS.

[Promidi]

4 minutes ago, Mark Bastable said:

So what I have is...

A month-old Legion Laptop with 16GB of installed RAM and Intel i7 2.6Ghz CPU, running WIndows 10 Home

The sound card is an Alesis i02 Express. 

In as far as I understand the other questions....

Sample rate (as set up in Preferences/Driver Settings)  44100

Buffer zsize 11.6msec

Driver mode.....not sure what the mode is, but I'm using ASIO4ALL

The bit depth is 24, but it's greyed-out. 64 Bit Double Precision is unchecked.


All drivers and versions are up-to-date, I believe. I have an Avast utility that deals with that.

As to what I've tried....nothing, as I have no idea what I'm doing, and I've found in the past that pulling levers at random tends to make the problem more difficult to solve when someone competent takes a look.

ASIO4ALL is simply a wrapper for WASAPI.

44.1/24 with 11.6 is fine and your system should handle that.

What you might light to try is uninstall ASIO4ALL and then head to Preferences | Audio | Playback and Recording and set you driver mode to WASAPI Shared

I had a look on the website for the Alesis i02 Express and the driver it offers is ASIO4ALL.

Personally, I would have on my agenda eventually ditching that unit and getting an audio interface that comes with its own native ASIO drivers.

I have my setup as per my signature and I do not get any “digital distortion and fluffing” what so ever.

[Byron Dickens]

7 hours ago, Mark Bastable said:

Driver mode.....not sure what the mode is, but I'm using ASIO4ALL

Known garbage.

[John Vere]

#1 rule when purchasing an Audio interface for a Windows System- Check the manufactures web site before you purchase and make sure there is an up to date ASIO driver for it. Class Compliant drivers work fine on a Mac but rarely on a PC.  And if all they are offering is Asio4all that is actually worse than nothing at all. 

Hopefully the device might work under WASAPI but then why does Alesis tell you to use Asio4all?  It like they didn't even test the device on windows at all.  

Oh @Promidi  Asio4all is actually a WDM wrapper not WASAPI. 

[Promidi]

4 hours ago, John Vere said:

Oh @Promidi  Asio4all is actually a WDM wrapper not WASAPI. 

Details - the relevant thing is that it’s a wrapper, not a driver.

[Mark Bastable]

Thank you all. I'll try these suggestions.

If I were to get a new audio interface, around the £100 mark, what's the view on the Focusrite 2i2?

 

https://www.google.com/shopping/product/9923425868957947960?q=focusrite+scarlett&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB940GB940&biw=1536&bih=827&prds=eto:7379407039502555394_0,rsk:PC_3956569100807070344

[Mark Bastable]

On 5/17/2021 at 10:05 PM, Promidi said:

Details - the relevant thing is that it’s a wrapper, not a driver.

Can you explain what 'wrapper' means in this context? And what the difference is between having one and uninstalling it?

[Promidi]

22 minutes ago, Mark Bastable said:

Thank you all. I'll try these suggestions.

If I were to get a new audio interface, around the £100 mark, what's the view on the Focusrite 2i2?

 

https://www.google.com/shopping/product/9923425868957947960?q=focusrite+scarlett&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB940GB940&biw=1536&bih=827&prds=eto:7379407039502555394_0,rsk:PC_3956569100807070344

This does indeed come with it's own ASIO driver.

I use the 2nd generation variant.  Rock solid here.  If you get a new one, it should be the 3rd generation variant.

One thing to note.  If you do choose this unit, you might want to consider using the BETA drivers as the release notes specifically mention Cakewalk by Bandlab.

Available here: (website’s a bit slow to come up)

http://beta.focusrite.com/

[Promidi]

21 minutes ago, Mark Bastable said:

Can you explain what 'wrapper' means in this context? And what the difference is between having one and uninstalling it?

Some software insists on an ASIO compatible driver to work. 

A driver wrapper takes your existing sound card drivers and puts them into an ASIO environment.  This means that you can use your existing sound card in applications that insist on using ASIO.

Most professional audio interfaces come with their own native ASIO drivers.

The only time you would want to use ASIO4ALL is when software insists on an ASIO compatible driver to work and your audio interface does not come with its own native ASIO drivers.

[Mark Bastable]

Thank you for both replies, Promidi.

[murat k.]

On 5/16/2021 at 6:54 PM, Mark Bastable said:

It’s a brand new laptop dedicated to Cakewalk, nothing else running but Chrome.

Maybe the problem is Chrome?

Just kidding. 

I recommend you to use FL Studio ASIO Driver. It is a WASAPI to ASIO driver. But it is better than WASAPI and ASIO at the same time. 

You can hear audio from any source outside the Cakewalk, and it works with low latency and low CPU usage.

It comes with FL Studio Trial version and works even after the trial ends. Also you can download and install it from here:FL Studio ASIO Driver.zip

I hope Cakewalk will have that kind of driver.

Edited May 19, 2021 by murat k.

[bitflipper]

8 hours ago, Mark Bastable said:

If I were to get a new audio interface, around the £100 mark, what's the view on the Focusrite 2i2?

An excellent choice for the money. Better - and better supported - than your Alesis, and has a native ASIO driver.

That said, your interface probably isn't the problem. There are many reasons for glitchy audio. On laptops, the #1 cause is the high DPC overhead of wi-fi adapters, so make sure you're disabling wi-fi during Cakewalk sessions.

[Mark Bastable]

53 minutes ago, bitflipper said:

.On laptops, the #1 cause is the high DPC overhead of wi-fi adapters, so make sure you're disabling wi-fi during Cakewalk sessions.

 

At the risk of looking like an idiot...."DPC overhead"? Can you explain a bit more, as if to an eager but dim Labrador?

[bitflipper]

OK, good, you didn't ask for the short version. There isn't one. But I'll do my best to give you the medium version.

When a piece of hardware such as a disk controller or network adapter wants the CPU's attention, it's usually critical that it gets heard right away, before the data it wants to share is gone. In order to deal with such unscheduled demands, a mechanism called an "interrupt" forces the CPU to stop what it's doing and take note. In other words, the device interrupts the normal chain of events like a crying child tugging at Mom's pant leg.

Because interrupts can be, um, disruptive to the overall performance of a computer, the system needs to quickly acknowledge the request and get back to business, deferring whatever the controller wants to do until an appropriate time. That's the "D" part of DPC; "deferred". The interrupt handler is a short piece of software that does only the absolute minimum stuff it needs to do so that the CPU can get back to its regularly scheduled program. But the controller is now happy because it knows it's been acknowledged and will be serviced in short order. (Some device drivers are notorious about not adhering to this rule, in particular gaming video adapters, which is why a dedicated DAW build probably won't have a fancy high-end gaming card.)

So when the CPU finally gets around to handling the controller's request, it runs a more involved piece of code called a Deferred Procedure Call. You can look at DPC activity using a tool such as LatencyMon, and you'll be shocked at how much time the CPU spends dealing with them. 

If the DPCs are well-written and efficient, they won't interfere with your most important task, which of course is audio. Problem is, systems make assumptions about what's important to you and they may not always be right. A good example is network traffic, especially wireless networks. Your network card assumes nothing is more important than network stuff. But of course if you're trying to record or process audio, that would be an incorrect assumption. If a network driver hogs the CPU for too long, your audio interface may not get its own interrupts serviced fast enough. When that happens, your audio interface's data buffers can get starved for data, the interface cannot guarantee continuous audio, and you get dropouts. Brief dropouts sound like clicks or pops; longer dropouts can actually make Cakewalk give up altogether and stop the audio engine - leaving you fuming at Cakewalk even though none of this is your DAW's fault.

Since you and I have almost no control over how interrupts and deferred procedure calls are handled, the best we can do is avoid or disable those devices that are the most egregious perpetrators of CPU cycle theft. Top of that list is wi-fi adapters, but they're not the only offenders. Download the tool I linked above and give it a go. It will give you way more information than any musician could reasonably be expected to process, but there is some good advice on the Resplendence website to help you sort it all out. Bottom line is to identify which process is monopolizing the CPU with inefficient DPCs and kill it.

 

 

[Starship Krupa]

I'll chime in and concur with Bitflipper that the issue is probably not that your audio interface (gasp) has no native ASIO driver. It should work in WASAPI mode or even with ASIO4ALL, both of which I have used successfully with Cakewalk in my aging Dell notebook to drive the onboard hardware CODEC. I'm not as anti-ASIO4ALL as some, but if your interface can do WASAPI, it's needless overhead. It's also sort of a sign that the company that makes the interface isn't serious about it being used for high-end work on Windows  if it can't be bothered to write an ASIO driver for it. But WASAPI works just fine, almost as well as ASIO.

One of the programs that can't do WASAPI and wants ASIO is Ableton Live. They also recommend ASIO4ALL for interfaces that don't have native ASIO drivers.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think that one of the things that makes ASIO superior for DAW work is that it bypasses the operating system's processes to talk more directly to the hardware. Microsoft doesn't officially recognize ASIO as a standard, Microsoft technical documents refer only to WASAPI.

If your complaint was that you want to get your latency down around 6mS because it's messing with your vocal tracking, I'd say heck yeah, you need to drop a hundy on a better interface. But your system isn't functioning poorly, it's not functioning at all.

To use a forum truism, if the Alesis just plain wasn't suitable for audio work, this fact would be well known.

Yes, ultimately for the best performance, lowest latency, etc., you want something with a native ASIO driver, especially if you're recording audio. The Scarlett 2i2 is a standard for small studio work.

 

I'm also with Bitflipper that it's probably another process that's eating up interrupts. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a piece of hardware. That Avast utility, for instance, does it stay running all the time, going around checking drivers to make sure they're up to date? It's not out of the question that a program that does that could have an effect on realtime operations like audio recording and playback.

Run that latency-checking program and see what it says. Also, run the Sound applet in Control Panel and make sure that the sampling rate settings there are set to 44.1 and not 48, I've seen mismatched sample rates causing problems.

[Mark Bastable]

13 hours ago, bitflipper said:

OK, good, you didn't ask for the short version. There isn't one. But I'll do my best to give you the medium version.

 

 

 

Superbly explained. Thank you. I'll download the utility and take a look.

Krupa. I think you might be right about Avast being the culprit - I shall check that out.

More hapless questions coming soon. I may have found my niche.

Edited May 21, 2021 by Mark Bastable

[bitflipper]

It's the never-ending questions that make this a never-ending joy of a hobby. With many pastimes you reach a point where you feel like you pretty much know everything you need to know. That won't happen in this space. At least, that's been my experience. After recording music for half a century I still have questions. I love that.