Sounds like CPU shortage, but it’s not.

[Mark Bastable]

I'm afraid I have another never-ending question.....

I uninstalled ASIO4ALL, and set the mode to WASAPI  (closing down CW and re-starting it a couple of times). 

When I did that CW didn't seem to be able to see either my soundcard or my midi drumpad.

But while I was trying to work that out, I discovered that I had mismatches of sampling rates all over the place. So I set them all to 44100.

Then, on the fine scientific principle of changing only one thing at a time, I thought the best thing to do would be reinstall ASIO4ALL and see if the sampling rate thing had made any difference.

So I reinstalled ASIO4ALL, restarted CW and...the mode is now ASIO (good) but the only input and output drivers listed under DEVICES are the mic and speakers of the laptop (with the name preceded by 'ASIO4ALL',  which means CW knows that ASIO4ALL is back). 

The audio interface - the  i02 Express  - doesn't appear there at all. Which is inconvenient.

However, CW does know the audiocard exists. because it appears (along with the USB drumpad) under the MIDI section in Preferences.

I had this right before. I think it just worked it out itself. but maybe I did something useful that I now can't remember. What the hell was it?

In my defence I'm a singer. I've spent the last forty years slouching on the sofa at studios  saying 'yeah, closer, try again' to the guitarist and swigging down Sauvignon while advising the engineer to stay sober.  Now my daughters want to record their stuff, and they've shifted a sofa and a wine cooler into my study, and they're watching me trying to figure this stuff out.

Just to be clear - no mention of karma will be helpful at this point.

Edited May 21, 2021 by Mark Bastable

[scook]

The audio driver mode, WASAPI or ASIO has nothing to do with MIDI.

When using ASIO4All, the audio  drivers presented to the DAW are defined in the ASIO4All software.

[Mark Bastable]

14 minutes ago, scook said:

The audio driver mode, WASAPI or ASIO has nothing to do with MIDI.

When using ASIO4All, the audio  drivers presented to the DAW are defined in the ASIO4All software.

No, sorry - I understand that. I was simply mentioning the MIDI listing as evidence that CW is communicating with the soundcard. It knows it's there - so it's not a connectivity issue.

 

Edited May 21, 2021 by Mark Bastable

[Starship Krupa]

That's funny about your daughters becoming the wine-fueled spectators.

Do you know how many singers it takes to screw in a lightbulb? Only one, they can just stand on the ladder and hold it while the world revolves around them.

Time to hit Device Manager and check whether the Alesis shows up there. Also, I'll beat bitflipper to this one, it's possible for Cakewalk to lose track of your audio interface if you switch which USB port you have it plugged into. If that happens, and switching it back doesn't help, you'll need to remove all the instances of it in Device Manager and let the OS detect it again. After that, the world of WASAPI should open to you.

Yeah, messing with DAW's and NLE's will keep your neurons plastic!

[Mark Bastable]

16 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

 

Time to hit Device Manager and check whether the Alesis shows up there. Also, I'll beat bitflipper to this one, it's possible for Cakewalk to lose track of your audio interface if you switch which USB port you have it plugged into. If that happens, and switching it back doesn't help, you'll need to remove all the instances of it in Device Manager and let the OS detect it again. After that, the world of WASAPI should open to you.

 

Okay. Deleted the interface from System Devices. Unplugged it. Turned off the laptop. Turned it on again. The audio interface is back as a system device. But it's still not visible to ASIO4ALL in CW, which it used to be.  We know CW is using ASIO4ALL - it sees the laptop mike and speakers as ASIO4ALL input and output. (The only input and output, actually.) We also know CW is aware of the audio interface, because it appears under Preferences as a MIDI device.

Any ideas? I've gone from distorted playback on recorded tracks to not being able to record at all.  This seems to happen a lot with DAWs. Attempting to solve one problem, you create two prior problems.  By which, to be clear, I don't imply anything other than gratitude for the advice I've been offered here. It's a process, this kind of diagnosis.

On the bright side, at least with Cakewalk I understand the issue.  Before discovering CW, I spent a couple of  months  being slowly crushed by the inscrutability of Cubase, unable even to get my head round what the real problem was.

Edited May 22, 2021 by Mark Bastable

[Starship Krupa]

So what do you get if you try switching your driver mode to WASAPI Exclusive? I prefer it over ASIO4ALL when working on my laptop. For troubleshooting especially, it adds a layer of complexity.

If you still want to try to get ASIO4ALL to work, it has its own configuration, which you can access from the ASIO4ALL icon in your system tray. There will be a list of devices. You may enable or disable whichever ones appear. My suspicion at this point is that ASIO4ALL is set to talk to your onboard CODEC instead of the Alesis.

[abacab]

On 5/19/2021 at 3:28 AM, Mark Bastable said:

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

Bulletproof.

[chris.r]

On 5/19/2021 at 8:28 AM, Mark Bastable said:

If I were to get a new audio interface, around the £100 mark...

Or alternatively you can buy just the ASIO driver alone for about 1/2 of that price.

It *should* work with your i02 Express but just in case you can download a demo version there.

https://www.usb-audio.com/download/

I'm using it with my ART dual tube preamp and it's working like a breeze  

[Mark Bastable]

On 5/21/2021 at 1:41 AM, bitflipper said:

@bitflipper inter alia

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. 


Right, following a week's hiatus to deal with real life, I'm back with a more specific request for advice....

Installed LatencyMon and ran it whilst using CW.

The report mentions WLAN, which I turned off. That didn't help. But it did prompt LatencyMon to tell me that there was another possible culprit. I'll attach the screenshot.

It mentions the kernel, which sounds dauntingly fundamental, especially as I ponied up an unjustifiable fortune to get a laptop with loads of CPU and bucketloads of memory to avoid just this situation.  To save you scrolling back up - 16GB of installed RAM and Intel i7 2.6Ghz CPU, running WIndows 10 Home..

I have no idea what CPU throttling is, though it sounds unpleasant.

I'd appreciate any further help here. I'm not the first to become frustrated, I'm sure, by the ratio of time spent on tech problems as opposed to actually making music. But be assured I'm grateful for the help available here. And so is the unkicked cat.



 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 28, 2021 by Mark Bastable

[abacab]

Unfortunately, some laptops have DPC issues no matter what audio interface is connected. But the laptop itself might be OK.

But to avoid more frustration, I would invest in a currently supported interface with factory ASIO support (that particular Alesis model was discontinued). DPC issues are often driver related. Not always the audio driver, because it could be any driver running on the PC.

[Starship Krupa]

The  next thing to do is run LatencyMon again and then click on the Drivers tab and find out which one is chewing up your interrupts. I was getting high latency stats from LatencyMon and used it to figure out that my network interface driver was what was causing it. I rolled back to the previous driver and it was much smoother sailing.

If that doesn't turn anything up, what it says about BIOS settings definitely applies. Common wisdom says to disable certain Intel BIOS features for DAW work, and I was following that. Nailed my processor to what I thought was its maximum clock speed. I reenabled one of the forbidden settings (turbo boost, I believe) and my processor speed jumped. This was the case on both my Dell tower and Dell laptop. There are also power settings in the OS that allow you to set things up so that your processor never gets slowed down by the OS in favor of battery savings.

[Mark Bastable]

12 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

The  next thing to do is run LatencyMon again and then click on the Drivers tab and find out which one is chewing up your interrupts. I was getting high latency stats from LatencyMon and used it to figure out that my network interface driver was what was causing it. I rolled back to the previous driver and it was much smoother sailing.

If that doesn't turn anything up, what it says about BIOS settings definitely applies. Common wisdom says to disable certain Intel BIOS features for DAW work, and I was following that. Nailed my processor to what I thought was its maximum clock speed. I reenabled one of the forbidden settings (turbo boost, I believe) and my processor speed jumped. This was the case on both my Dell tower and Dell laptop. There are also power settings in the OS that allow you to set things up so that your processor never gets slowed down by the OS in favor of battery savings.

Update....

I tried a different audio interface  - Presonus Audiobox - with an up-to-date (May21) driver from their site. The problem got worse. 

I took my USB hub out of the chain, and sent the Audiobox straight to the laptop. That seems to have improved things a bit. 

LatencyMon is giving inconsistent feedback.  Different drivers keep topping the charts.

Acpi.sys (seems to be some sort of hardware connectivity thing)
wdf01000.sys  (something to do with the kernel)
dxgkrnl.sys (something to do with DirectX)

..bunch of others, on and off.

I'm not at all confident about messing with the BIOS set-up. I can see myself really ballsing things up. Not sure, actually, that I even know how to do it.

So I'm still all ears for any specific advice.  This problem is driving me bonkers. Thank you all for your time.

Edited May 29, 2021 by Mark Bastable

[abacab]

Well, look at the tabs on LatencyMon, and select the "Drivers" tab. That will list all the running drivers and their highest execution times, DPC's etc. Try to share that here.

Here are my screenshots showing a normal LatencyMon test result.

 

[Mark Bastable]

Sorry, yes should have included a screenshot of the Driver tab. I'll do that as soon as I can.

In the meantime, this might offer a clue - when the laptop goes into Sleep mode, the speakers fart and then emit a never-ending highpitched note that can only be stopped by unplugging the audio interface from the laptop USB port.

[Byron Dickens]

Well, there's a big part of your problem right there. You need to go into your power management settings and change them so that nothing turns off or goes to sleep ever. Everything should be "always on."

Also,  plugging your interface into a USB hub is going to cause you pproblems

Another thing is to exclude everything related to your music production from being scanned by your antivirus.

Edited May 29, 2021 by bdickens

[Mark Bastable]

The antivirus thing I get. The hub thing I can see too.

But I don’t understand why the possibility that the laptop might go to sleep later might give me problems when I’m using CW an hour earlier.

I mentioned the weird noise only because it might inform the question of how sound is being processed in use. Is there something I need to know about Sleep setting. Or indeed any PowerOff setting? The operational setting is ‘throw everything at processing’.  Have I missed something?

[Byron Dickens]

Yes.

 

Any time the computer is not receiving active input from you (ie typing or clicking with the mouse), it thinks it is sitting idle.

[Starship Krupa]

1 hour ago, bdickens said:

 

Any time the computer is not receiving active input from you (ie typing or clicking with the mouse), it thinks it is sitting idle.

Which is of course the usual state of things during rendering, when we need the processor clock the most.

I'll see if I can find Pete Brown's guide to Windows system optimization for DAW use. Pete is our resident Microsoft employee.

Edited May 29, 2021 by Starship Krupa

[Starship Krupa]

Ah, found it: 

 

[abacab]

7 hours ago, Mark Bastable said:

Sorry, yes should have included a screenshot of the Driver tab. I'll do that as soon as I can.

Seriously, don't overlook this part. It may yield some important clues.