Problems after windows update

[Prem]

Hi I ran into this problem(Audio Dropouts, Crackles and Pops and it lags now) once again after I updated my windows.. I'm not new to cakewalk have been using it for long time. Sometime there is dropout message and sometimes there's not. I've captured screenshots yesterday  When I was facing this issue. 

See the 
Engineload in 1.jpg
Processes in 2.jpg
Memory in 3.jpg
CPU in 4.jpg
preferences in 5.jpg

When this problem occurs, I'm unable to isolate and identify the thread that is causing CPU spikes, Which one to kill? 

System info
-----------------
OS Name    Microsoft Windows 10 Home Single Language
Version    10.0.19042 Build 19042
System Manufacturer    ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
System Model    VivoBook_ASUSLaptop X512DA_X512DA
Processor    AMD Ryzen 5 3500U with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx, 2100 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM)    8.00 GB
Total Physical Memory    5.95 GB
Available Physical Memory    2.82 GB
Total Virtual Memory    8.82 GB
Available Virtual Memory    4.61 GB
 

[Spectrum424]

+1 on problems after win update.

Projects that worked smoothly before suddenly has all kinds of audio dropouts. One even crashes Cakewalk completely.

I'm not at the studio right now so can't provide any further details but will update post if needed later.

/CJ

[Prem]

Its surely not cakewalk but some windows thread causing interferance that needs to be tamed. Anybody who can help me isolate that. All this while with my current setup keeping my wifi and free AVG antivirus always on, I was able to work on project with 70 layers filled with plugins, aux buses, reverbs-delay-stauration etc busses. smoothly. Its almost a year back when I faced this same issue and I was guided by someone to upgrade System but all I did was disable my "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery" and it started working fine and I kept CBB updated.

This F. thing since 2 days after windows ..some patch update along with ASUS internal updates.
 

[Terry Kelley]

Yes, I'm seeing it too. If I try to run buffers under1024 I risk the audio engine generating tons of static noise just sitting idle. During playback it will dropout or generate the static like its a feedback loop.

Nothing has changed in settings or Cakewalk as far as I know. Only the new Windows updates. No wifi, no conflicting audio devices, no mismatched audio bit/depth settings, no other programs running, no new plugins, no ASIO driver changes. The latency monitor says everything is fine but I haven't been able to run it while its generating the static. Sometimes it just stops. Rebooting doesn't fix it. At times it will be fine for an hour with smaller buffers and then go south.

During record, I can still set the buffers to 64 and be OK with FX off. 32 will work if the project is simple with few effects.  But playback now needs large buffers. I am certainly a VST hog and it could be Windows and that colliding now but it's worked for a long time.

At this point I might play with some Cakewalk setting to see if it helps.

[reginaldStjohn]

When windows updates it could reset some settings that affect performance. Check that your power plan doesn't have things going to sleep. Check that your on-board audio, if using another audio interface, is disabled. Stuff like that can get changed with a windows update.

[scook]

Make sure the interface driver is current.

My want to re-install it, just in case.

[Klaus]

Your CPU speed is only 0.39 GHz (pic 4), so Windows seems to throttle the CPU.

Power Management not set to 100% active could be the culprit.
 

[bitflipper]

Sadly, Microsoft has a long history of screwing up audio, usually as a side-effect of a well-intentioned security "fix". I can recall at least two recent occasions where they messed with my setup, e.g. turning on my disabled integrated audio and making it the default.

They seem to be carrying on the tradition with the latest update. 

[Prem]

Power options is set to High Performance with following settings
Turn off Display and Put computer to sleep to  "Never"
Turn off harddisk :0
USB selective suspend setting : Disabled

Sound settings: 
Playback: HDMI (AMD High Definition Audio Device) got enabled..I've disabled it, will check and revert

[Jeff Bowman]

You'll need to set Minimum and Maximum CPU to 100% also with Cooling Policy set to Active.

[Prem]

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-manage-power-throttling-windows-10
Using the above link, I tried disabling the power throttling using Registry, Tried both DWORD (32-bit) Value and QWORD(64-bit). See the screenshots. Somebody help me get back CPU speed.

[jackson white]

@PremJ Hans,  @Spectrum424, @Terry Kelley

Working on the same issues after running a rock solid system for years. Playback has degraded considerably over the last couple of months and the tried and true fixes scattered all over this forum have yet to restore a previous level of performance. 

!! CPU cores "surge" randomly with Transport running and degrade playback.

!! opening another window while Transport was running will degrade playback considerably. whether a plugin or Task Manager

- audio interface was running at 64 samples (even down 32 samples at times) with no problems

> had to raise it to 512 to get somewhat acceptable playback

> had to raise Playback I/O buffer to 2048 to finish a mix that has been running just fine for months at 512 (been using the same plugins)

> > freezing a few of the heavier tracks (i,e amp sims, drums,) that had previously run just fine did not help much, 

> > Global FX disable makes a difference, but not very useful when trying to finish a mix...

> Experiencing the same issues in other existing projects that used to run fine. Starting a new project is better, haven't had the time to load one up with more than a few basic audio tracks. Never use x32 VSTs or 'unproven' developers. 

...

- dedicated rack mount system, Win10 Pro, ASUS X99-A m/b, SSDs, all power saving features disabled 

-  using a reputable/recommended USB audio interface with native ASIO drivers, reinstalled after Win10 update,

- have not changed BIOS in years (no need, right?), but tried a few changes which made no difference, restored to original config

- LatMon has not flagged anything actionable

> completely disabled  both network adapters and BT in Device Manager = still experiencing degraded audio playback, gets worse when opening Task Manager...

> Win10 upgrades were disabled since build 1909, decided to update to 2004 last week = no difference 

...

All CxB Preferences > Audio > Driver Settings/Playback and Recording/Configuration/Sync and Caching have been checked and are set to past known good settings. Even did a restore defaults and reoptimized.

....

Diving a bit deeper to rule out;

- HW (checking USB cables and ports, running Pinform Speccy to monitor component temps, etc, DRAM check, checking component seating on slots, etc)

- VST updates (generally current with updates, but perhaps a potential issue, such as the BFD "authorization" fiasco)

....

Then there's this point from @bitflipper 

On 6/16/2021 at 2:33 PM, bitflipper said:

Microsoft has a long history of screwing up audio, usually as a side-effect of a well-intentioned security "fix"

This is likely the case for me as I was running an old build just fine (1909) and only running security fixes. Resetting optimizations for audio performance after an 'update' has always been resolved with a review of the usual suspects and reset as needed.  fwiw, I feel more than capable of troubleshooting down to whatever level is needed but no luck this time. Thinking it must be something new or some latent basic setting that's flown under the radar so far, not sure what to try next, will check/report back with any further insights. 

[jonathan boose]

There's another thread about this right next door:

"Clicks and Pops -- The Final Frontier"

There are several common reasons for click, pops and dropouts. I ran through the remedies I was familiar with in the OP.

It was suggested that the culprit might be the LAN card.   Testing with LatencyMon showed  that to be the case.

I haven't had a problem I could attribute to Windows updates.

[Per Westin]

Apart from the very low CPU speed and other already mentioned possible causes you seem to have a lot of processes going, in idle my (somewhat tweaked) Win 10 Pro machine shows 76 running services after a fresh start while my older (less tweaked) machine with Windows 10 LTSB only has 53.

From memory a freshly installed Windows has a little over 100 processes in idle so I would look for unnecessary autostarting programs/services in the taskmanager and if that doesn´t help I´d also look for unnecessary Windows Services in the control panel.

[Prem]

 Seems like side by side I should open a thread in Windows 10 forum as well. As soon as I start the DAW CPU speed comes down to 0.39 GHz which was showing 2.10 - 2.40 GHz.   

[Prem]

Hey Guys, Through Ccleaner utility I have disabled some some services on startup, they are MARKED in Red. If you can guide me any more to be disabled or if required to be enabled. 

[Spectrum424]

First off, thanks to all for your input! Much appreciated.

I think I found the culprit to my problems.

At least both my projects that had issues are now back and runs smoothly again.

I had an old ASIO4All driver installed that for some reason had found it's way into Record Latency Adjustment setting under Audio Preferences. (See pic)

After uninstall it got replaced by the FL Studio driver that apparently works better. My default driver for playback and recording is Focusrite USB ASIO.

An update or uninstall of ASIO-drivers might fix the problem.

I'll run a few more test tonight and update with result.

/CJ

[Per Westin]

8 hours ago, PremJ Hans said:

Hey Guys, Through Ccleaner utility I have disabled some some services on startup, they are MARKED in Red. If you can guide me any more to be disabled or if required to be enabled.

English is not my native language so I apologize for misspellings and maybe sometimes coming off as a bit impolite, which obviously is not intended.

My thoughts anywho (you obviously get the idea "remove/disable anything not needed" for your use):

The Bonjour service is installed as part of Ilok so I think it might need to be reenabled(?), never thought about experimenting with it though.

Is ElanFPservice for fingerprintbased login? If so and unless you use it I´d stop that too (maybe set it to manual start depending on what you use it for?) or possibly uninstall it.

Do you use the internal soundcard? If not I´d disable the RtkAudUService64_BG service or uninstall/disable that soundcard in Windows'  device manager.

The FLV stuff doesn´t need to autostart, you can set FLV as your default mediaplayer in Windows settings if it´s your preferred player.

 

Apart from the above it´s hard to give advice based on just what CCleaner can do, as an example my printer's service shows up in Windows services panel, but not in CCleaner (I set that to manual start BTW which works fine on my machine).

I learned a lot from Blackviper's tweaks and Tweakhound's tweak guide (back when Vista was new his guide turned my midrange laptop from unusable for DAW to recording 16 tracks simultaneously troublefree), when it comes to services I recommend to not mess with any service you're not sure of what it does exactly and just disable 1 (or at least just a few) at a time so if you run in to problems you know what probably caused it.

This guide for that other DAW is worth reading too.

I think Pete Brown's Unofficial guide is a good place to start before doing anything else.

I hope the above is useful.

[Prem]

On 6/18/2021 at 10:21 PM, Per Westin said:

English is not my native language so I apologize for misspellings and maybe sometimes coming off as a bit impolite, which obviously is not intended.

My thoughts anywho (you obviously get the idea "remove/disable anything not needed" for your use):

The Bonjour service is installed as part of Ilok so I think it might need to be reenabled(?), never thought about experimenting with it though.

Is ElanFPservice for fingerprintbased login? If so and unless you use it I´d stop that too (maybe set it to manual start depending on what you use it for?) or possibly uninstall it.

Do you use the internal soundcard? If not I´d disable the RtkAudUService64_BG service or uninstall/disable that soundcard in Windows'  device manager.

The FLV stuff doesn´t need to autostart, you can set FLV as your default mediaplayer in Windows settings if it´s your preferred player.

 

Apart from the above it´s hard to give advice based on just what CCleaner can do, as an example my printer's service shows up in Windows services panel, but not in CCleaner (I set that to manual start BTW which works fine on my machine).

I learned a lot from Blackviper's tweaks and Tweakhound's tweak guide (back when Vista was new his guide turned my midrange laptop from unusable for DAW to recording 16 tracks simultaneously troublefree), when it comes to services I recommend to not mess with any service you're not sure of what it does exactly and just disable 1 (or at least just a few) at a time so if you run in to problems you know what probably caused it.

This guide for that other DAW is worth reading too.

I think Pete Brown's Unofficial guide is a good place to start before doing anything else.

I hope the above is useful.

Thanks for these link, Though it didn't solved, atleast I dicovered there's something called as "Ultimate power plan" through Tweakhound's link. I tried clean boot as well but the CPU kept on showing 0.39 GHZ speed. Uninstalled Antivirus and checked too. 

I've updated the Bios, Enabled Microsoft ACPI -compliant control method battery again through device manager. Now it fluctuates in 1.9 to 2.93GHZ. I'll observe today.

CPU getting stucked at one particular speed(0.39Ghz or 0.70 etc) is now becoming common problem. and in many forums,youtube channel etc people are suggesting to use Throttlestop . I'll observe and if still not able to solve it then I'll use Throttlestop.  It comes with its own pros and cons.

 

[Prem]

Testing: Antivirus ON, Chrome browser , Cakewalk with 70 layers and plugins filled(already completed project ) --playing it in loop. Will observe today.