"Upgraded" to Windows 10, Cakewalk performance has suffered greatly

[abacab]

Conclusion: If you are running Windows 10, you need an SSD. 

[Suboculis]

Not to hijack, but I figured out my latency problem. It was the Fabfilter Pro L-2 on the master bus.

[Jeremy Oakes]

5 hours ago, abacab said:

Conclusion: If you are running Windows 10, you need an SSD. 

No, you don’t.

running 3 HD’s here 7200’s and even though boot time is a little slow, that doesn’t bother me. My DAW performance is great, for,what i do.

jerry

[Starship Krupa]

14 hours ago, Steev said:

Perhaps your problems are merely being caused by the changes in the different and improved ways v10 handles audio could be incompatible with the older Firewire 400 card, or maybe even the FirePods themselves, and or all of the above.

I have said multiple times in this thread that Mixcraft 8.5 has no trouble at with my FP-10's under Windows 10. Transport starts, stops, pauses, records, no hesitation, with projects of similar complexity.

I would never, ever have switched to Windows 10 if I had seen any forum mentions anywhere in my extensive Googling that indicated that it wouldn't be able to deal with my FP-10's. Everything I saw indicated that at worst, someone had to install the driver by Run As Administrator before getting theirs to work splendidly.

Actually, in my experience with the Windows 10 system that I upgraded the same way months ago, it's been kind of weird to see that older hardware like my Canon scanner and my ancient Radio Shack scale that I could barely get to work in Windows 7 have no problems with Windows 10. Really plug 'n' play.

Of course, I have yet to see a single instance of "would you like Windows to search for a driver" to yield a driver, that perfect record has been maintained through Windows 10.

Don't anyone fret about the state of my computer's OS installation. I'll get it to work, it will haul arse, and when it does, I'll know how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the trailing edge hardware that I usually have around, and what to steer clear of. I've been taming and tuning Windows boxes for 25 years.

Having Cakewalk's transport sit there and pick its nose for a few seconds when I tap the "R" key just means that I don't need to do a boring metronome count-in before I sprint across the carpet to my drum throne to start doing takes.

Anyone who's needed to restart between running REAPER or Mixbus and Cakewalk, try this for fun (since I have yet to see anyone but me mention Resource Monitor): before you exit REAPER or Mixbus, go down to Search and type in "Resource Monitor" and run it, and click on the CPU tab. Then under Processes, find mixbus.exe or reaper.exe or whatever, and tick the checkbox next to it. Find as many processes associated with the DAW as you can and check their boxes.

Then go down to where it says Associated Modules and click the down arrow to open the list and you can see all the .DLL's that each executable is calling. All your plug-ins, all that stuff. Other processes too.

Then when you exit the program, check out how long it takes for all that stuff to disappear from the list. Interesting, eh? Try it with Cakewalk.

You can do it with the Disk tab, too, and watch the VST loader suck up all your plug-ins on start-up, then watch as Cakewalk streams your tracks and sample libraries from your disks.

If you keep doing this, you will never have to record another note of music as long as you live! Try it! ?

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, abacab said:

Conclusion: If you are running Windows 10, you need an SSD. 

Before anyone suggests a Waves plug-in, my favorite reverb is already Waves TrueVerb, so don't even go there.?

Actually, based on my observations so far, I am inclined to agree with you on this. My test system has a 120G SSD as a system/boot drive, and while it's only a Core 2 Quad, the transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10 did not seem like the drop in performance it did on the main system and the notebook.

I've been researching people's experiences with SSHD's as system drives on Windows 10 systems and the verdict is still out for me. What do you think? It looks like they have some kind of adaptive algorithm or some such.

[Steev]

13 hours ago, abacab said:

Conclusion: If you are running Windows 10, you need an SSD. 

If you are running any computer with any OS in 2019 you need an SSD, LoL. As a rule of preventive maintenance and data preservation I always replace hard drives around the 5 year end of life mark at the longest before they get semi retired to a server bay and used for 2x duplicate data backups and FTP server for closed collaborations.

Only exceptions would be if a HD started making abnormal noises or became corrupted and  flunked a ScanDisk test, then I'd replace it immediately and trash it. 

 

"-Erik

"If a technical discussion on a DAW forum goes on long enough without a solution, someone will eventually tell the OP that they need more RAM, an SSD, or a Waves plug-in."

These are actually all great suggestions, though as much of a fan and advocate of Waves plugins as I am, I would highly recommend being very careful and judicial in using them with less than powerful computers as many are very CPU intensive. Waves TrueVerb is one of my all time vintage favs and really a great one and easy in the CPU. I was also a big fan of Waves IR-1 convolution reverb which was a CPU hog even running in "lite" mode, it still used massive amounts of memory for "Impulse" samples.

 These days my all time #1 go to fav is Waves HReverb which can be very easy to quite CPU intensive depending on how many and how much internal processing modules (built in plugin FX loop) are turned on.

 But on the downside of using Waves plugins having older release versions of Waves with v10 plugins on the same system can cause a mine field of problems from tediously slow VST scans, and as far as I know to date, you cannot run v9 and v10 plugins together in the same DAW project with any DAW. 

 Waves support is second to none, but I don't believe they have much incentive to correct this condition and offer much support to those who won't support them back. But on the upside, your old vintage Waves plugins will always work as they always worked, there just won't be improved functionality and refined for the latest Windows or OS X drivers, go from VST to VST2 to VST3 and or have ARA support and so on and so forth. In other words, they will eventually become obsolete as did Win XP and soon to be Win 7.. All things must pass..... R.I.P.  

@mdiemer I think I'm on my 5th year using PC Matic and absolutely LOVE IT! I run it once a week on Saturday morning on all 4 Windows computers all at once. I start it up, go have a cup of coffee, then go back and reboot the computers then run it again if I'm not satisfied with a noticeable boost in fresh boot up speed.

It cleans the Registry, defrags mechanical drives, optimizes SSD's, checks drivers, graphics and HD health diagnostics, performs a full virus scan, checks internet speed, and makes all changes and tweaks when and where needed.

 It would take me at least ALL DAY Saturday to perform all these PITA maintenance tasks, it takes less then a minute to start it up on all my PC's and PC Matic has been doing it all for me during breakfast.

 Since using PC Matic I have NEVER had a crash nor have I ever had to do a fresh clean install of Windows.

 Not only have I had all good upgrade experiences from Win 7 to 10, I had 100 % success rate CLONING all my mechanical hardrives to Western Digital SSDs with the free Acronis software. And the last time I cloned, I didn't even have to reregister any plugins, not even with the XLN Audio AD 1 or 2 or Addictive Keys plugins.. ?

 

 

[mdiemer]

4 hours ago, Steev said:

@mdiemer I think I'm on my 5th year using PC Matic and absolutely LOVE IT! I run it once a week on Saturday morning on all 4 Windows computers all at once. I start it up, go have a cup of coffee, then go back and reboot the computers then run it again if I'm not satisfied with a noticeable boost in fresh boot up speed.

It cleans the Registry, defrags mechanical drives, optimizes SSD's, checks drivers, graphics and HD health diagnostics, performs a full virus scan, checks internet speed, and makes all changes and tweaks when and where needed.

 It would take me at least ALL DAY Saturday to perform all these PITA maintenance tasks, it takes less then a minute to start it up on all my PC's and PC Matic has been doing it all for me during breakfast.

 Since using PC Matic I have NEVER had a crash nor have I ever had to do a fresh clean install of Windows.

 Not only have I had all good upgrade experiences from Win 7 to 10, I had 100 % success rate CLONING all my mechanical hardrives to Western Digital SSDs with the free Acronis software. And the last time I cloned, I didn't even have to reregister any plugins, not even with the XLN Audio AD 1 or 2 or Addictive Keys plugins.. ?

Very impressive. What would it do with an optimized system, though? Would it change all the tweaks I did? My system is pretty optimized at this point for Windows7 and Cakewalk. Wouldn't want anything changed, unless it was for the better.

 

 

[Starship Krupa]

On 1/10/2019 at 6:54 PM, BRainbow said:

I am beginning to hear the inexorable chants of the Cakewalk masses across the globe, rising steadily and surely in the background, as if unable to bear any longer this long and tragic forum post, urging you to end your long-suffering and valiant but vain attempts to avoid the inevitable.

I hear them calling, I hear them now, louder, louder, louder . . .

 

"CLEAN INSTALL, CLEAN INSTALL, CLEAN INSTALL . . . !"

on into the dark of this cold and moonless night.

Wasn't that a hit for The (English) Beat back in the '80's?

"Now that you've installed it you must deinstall it, then you do a clean install! Clean install, clean install, clean install!"

Before that they had "Mirroring My Hard Drive?"

[Starship Krupa]

Ugh, how's this for nastiness. Windows 10 ships with what I consider to be malware.

The thing I described earlier about using Resource Monitor to see what Cakewalk and other processes are up to?

I tried it on Disk Activity with MsMpEng.exe during a Cakewalk project load, and Windows Defender's realtime protection racket was furiously scanning every plug-in and audio file and synth preset that Cakewalk was loading.  You know, to make sure that my Hybrid 3 synth presets and WAV files haven't been infected with malware.

Which seals the deal, Windows Defender's realtime protection racket is hereby disabled on all of my Windows 10 systems, 'cause that is BS. Microsoft does not get to decide that every file my DAW loads, including my synth presets, sample libraries, and recorded audio, has to run through their malware checking engine before the DAW can use it.

Once again I find that a "virus protection solution" is worse for my computer than the thing it's supposed to be protecting me from. And it's one clever piece of malware, it actually ships as part of the OS itself and can't be disabled without getting into Group Policy Editor or RegEdit.

[abacab]

16 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Ugh, how's this for nastiness. Windows 10 ships with what I consider to be malware.

The thing I described earlier about using Resource Monitor to see what Cakewalk and other processes are up to?

I tried it on Disk Activity with MsMpEng.exe during a Cakewalk project load, and Windows Defender's realtime protection racket was furiously scanning every plug-in and audio file and synth preset that Cakewalk was loading.  You know, to make sure that my Hybrid 3 synth presets and WAV files haven't been infected with malware.

Which seals the deal, Windows Defender's realtime protection racket is hereby disabled on all of my Windows 10 systems, 'cause that is BS. Microsoft does not get to decide that every file my DAW loads, including my synth presets, sample libraries, and recorded audio, has to run through their malware checking engine before the DAW can use it.

Once again I find that a "virus protection solution" is worse for my computer than the thing it's supposed to be protecting me from. And it's one clever piece of malware, it actually ships as part of the OS itself and can't be disabled without getting into Group Policy Editor or RegEdit.

Windows Defender seems to have gotten a bit more aggressive in recent versions of Windows 10.  Even with Defender effectively disabled by installing a 3rd party AV, and turning off scheduled scans, you still cannot fully disable Smartscreen.  https://www.howtogeek.com/123938/htg-explains-how-the-smartscreen-filter-works-in-windows-8/

https://www.howtogeek.com/75356/how-to-turn-off-or-disable-the-smartscreen-filter-in-windows-8/

I followed these instructions, and SmartScreen will still scan certain files, until I kill the task in Task manager.  Then it starts up again whenever it wants to.

Defender was upgraded for Windows 10 Creators edition:

https://www.howtogeek.com/220232/how-to-use-the-built-in-windows-defender-antivirus-on-windows-10/

Edited January 17, 2019 by abacab

[msmcleod]

13 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Ugh, how's this for nastiness. Windows 10 ships with what I consider to be malware.

The thing I described earlier about using Resource Monitor to see what Cakewalk and other processes are up to?

I tried it on Disk Activity with MsMpEng.exe during a Cakewalk project load, and Windows Defender's realtime protection racket was furiously scanning every plug-in and audio file and synth preset that Cakewalk was loading.  You know, to make sure that my Hybrid 3 synth presets and WAV files haven't been infected with malware.

Which seals the deal, Windows Defender's realtime protection racket is hereby disabled on all of my Windows 10 systems, 'cause that is BS. Microsoft does not get to decide that every file my DAW loads, including my synth presets, sample libraries, and recorded audio, has to run through their malware checking engine before the DAW can use it.

Once again I find that a "virus protection solution" is worse for my computer than the thing it's supposed to be protecting me from. And it's one clever piece of malware, it actually ships as part of the OS itself and can't be disabled without getting into Group Policy Editor or RegEdit.

I've excluded all my plugin folders, audio folders and sample folders from Windows Defender. This has sped up my VST scans considerably.

[Michael Fogarty]

On 1/10/2019 at 8:48 AM, Starship Krupa said:

Thank you ien and Noel for the suggestions. Didn't know about Controlled Folder Access, but it was already turned off. Noel, all of your items were already ticked as well.

I would like to note at this point that projects of similar complexity start right up and go in Mixcraft 8.

Noel, is that palette flash any clue for you as a developer? It's restricted to just the Cakewalk window, not the entire screen. It's brief, and it doesn't happen every time, but I've seen it. It's something I was trained to take notice of when I was a pro QA dude.

 

On 1/3/2019 at 10:38 AM, Starship Krupa said:

I've now done the thing with adding my Microsoft account to all of my Windows 10 systems. I had forgotten about that, thanks.

The way my friend recorded, and this is SOP for us, is as follows:

1. I imported a "guide track" of him playing and singing the song, just acoustic guitar and voice. He recorded this on his iPhone with a fancy Shure mic.

2. I set him up to record drum tracks, recording 4 simultaneous tracks with a "Recorderman/Glyn Johns" pair, snare, and kick. I set it up in Loop record mode, with 10 seconds of leading and trailing silence so that he could stretch a bit between takes.

3. He recorded about a dozen takes of drums in this fashion

4. We chose one take as a "working" take, muting the other ones, and saving them for later comping

5. He then recorded various overdubs of vocals, guitar, and bass

6. Which he made a pretty killer mix of, that I hope to put up here in a couple of days when he's done mastering it on his Pro Tools system back home

Beginning around step 5, I wasn't around much, because I was buried in getting financial records together. He was just having too much fun with CbB to stop. When I looked in on him during the mixing process, though, the project was getting hard to work on because there was about a 2 second lag between when you'd hit the spacebar and when playback would start, and every other time it would hit the end of the playback loop, the audio engine would die.

I defragged the project folder, which helped a tiny bit, but not much.

Which brings us to current circumstances.

What finally did help with the playback stopping was increasing ExtraPlugInBufs to 5 and Playback I/O Buffer Size to 1024. This was after spending hours combing the AUD.INI Alphabetical Manual, which should give some indication as to what level of system tuning I'm okay with.

What is weirdest is that lag between when I hit the spacebar and when playback starts! It keeps getting worse. It's now up to almost 4 whole seconds, I kid you not. Something is definitely messed up here. It seems to be related to the number of tracks in a project; it doesn't happen with all projects.

What I'm thinking at this point is that something is bottlenecking my system. Noel suggested my interface drivers, but Mixcraft is happy with a project of the same complexity.

1. You shouldn’t have to go to 1024 - I use Omnisphere/Waves Plugs on probably 30 channels/ Ivory/East West Composer/Komplete Kontrol and 10 tracks of drums/ 8tracks backing and lead vocals, ad nauseum and still don’t have to do that. 

2. I have had projects that just don’t seem to work that are much less extensive. Sometimes I open in Cakewalk Safe Mode  to find out the culprit - other times I copy the performances and start on a clean project. I think sometimes it might be because I use various controllers for different instruments and the VST get tired of being jerked around. Somewhere along the line with all thats going on something screwsup - most likely self inflicted. I have many clients and projects in the works simultaneously and though sometimes I am bent on “findind out what the problem is” sometimes for speeds sake I just paste and copy and re-load fresh instances of my VST’s.

3. That being said, my Presonus Studio 192 seems to be problemstic with Cakelab. It was given to me by the Asian Presonus Rep for me to work with Studio One back when Sonar was talking about saying goodbye to us folks. He warned me at the time that the latency is wonderful with Studio Live, but there had been tests and reports of problems with other DAW. I  have switched back and forth from it and my MOTU more than once. Now sticking with the MOTU.

4. Did you try copying all the performances into another instance of Cakelab and your other DAW and find it to be smooth - or not?

[Starship Krupa]

With use of Resource Monitor, one can find out many things. I'm keeping it running all the time since the Windows 10 switch.

Of course, when you disable or mute a plug-in, it doesn't completely remove it from the project, because in the mixing process, we want to be able to instantly turn an effect on and off to compare.

The option in Cakewalk to always stream through plug-ins has an effect.

As far as Windows Defender goes, it's no longer an issue. I hit it with the registry setting to turn off realtime protection racket, and it worked, and it did improve disk performance, not only with Cakewalk, but across the board with Windows 10.

To quote Han Solo, "It was a boring conversation anyway."

Just watching the disk activity graphs in Resource Monitor, the difference is stunning. Defender was hitting the system drive constantly. Now I get the thing about the SSD's. You need them to compensate for the realtime protection racket.

There's a bunch of other random nonsense that seems to be going on disk-wise, but Defender was the biggest offender.

[Steev]

13 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Ugh, how's this for nastiness. Windows 10 ships with what I consider to be malware.

The thing I described earlier about using Resource Monitor to see what Cakewalk and other processes are up to?

I tried it on Disk Activity with MsMpEng.exe during a Cakewalk project load, and Windows Defender's realtime protection racket was furiously scanning every plug-in and audio file and synth preset that Cakewalk was loading.  You know, to make sure that my Hybrid 3 synth presets and WAV files haven't been infected with malware.

Which seals the deal, Windows Defender's realtime protection racket is hereby disabled on all of my Windows 10 systems, 'cause that is BS. Microsoft does not get to decide that every file my DAW loads, including my synth presets, sample libraries, and recorded audio, has to run through their malware checking engine before the DAW can use it.

Once again I find that a "virus protection solution" is worse for my computer than the thing it's supposed to be protecting me from. And it's one clever piece of malware, it actually ships as part of the OS itself and can't be disabled without getting into Group Policy Editor or RegEdit.

DUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE! Windows 10 ships with what you consider to be malware???????????????? Come on bro,,,,,,,,,,,, now that's just to far way over the line of conspiracy theories..

 I would highly recommend you sign up and becoming a member of the Windows Insider Program and learn how Microsoft uses and what telemetry actually is. Windows Defender doesn't do anything any other virus protection doesn't do, and one of the reasons you can't refuse Windows updates is because that's where you get updated virus definitions as well as coordinated patches and fixes.

 I believe you mentioned that you were once Windows certified years back? Well guess what, Windows has radically changed and you may want to catch up a bit, because Windows has radically changed for the better despite anybody's dark ideas and opinions that Microsoft is out to "GET YOU"!

 That's utter nonsense..... In reality ,Microsoft is actually trying their best to "help" the average users by automatically fixing problems the average user simply doesn't understand or doesn't even know exist.

 Once Windows stops trying to find out how you use your computer it will smooth out and become speedy. But if you keep chronically pushing buttons, turning dials, adjusting levers, and continuously trying to analyze it it'll never smooth out.. And in the end game it will find out how you use your Windows computer through telemetry, and resistance is futile, and the longer you try to outsmart it the longer it will take, and it will takes steps by changing illogical configurations based on "opinion" back to logical configurations based on science to protect you, the user, from yourself..

 

For instance, did you know that until you until you specifically configure your Microsoft Account and One Drive to stop receiving Boot records and drive images your whole desktop config is being backed up in your cloud storage? That alone is an enormous sized background operation going on.

 And every system change and tweak you make "Hits the RESET" button for uploading the brand new Boot Records to your personal free cloud storage, which you may want to go and delete large files you no longer need and clean it out because you only get a few Gigs of free storage.

 I have a very strong feeling you are going to find your buddies Cakewalk project there, even if he did specifically choose to have it sent to his Avid iCloud account which if he's a Pro Tool user, I'd be willing to bet he did...……. And I'm not even a gambling man. I'm a Pro Tools user and that's exactly what I would do, because it would be stupid not to, because it's actually the best way to import .wav file from Cakewalk to Pro Tools.. Thumb drives?????? We don't need no stinck'in thumb drives... ??DaShitBeOnAutoPilotBrov.

 

 Want to see Cakewalk by Bandlab perform like an ULTRA LOW LATENCY fire breathing dragon and actually save several hundreds of dollars on a KILLER software bundle? Latency so low you will be able to run FX in real -time recording thru Cakewalk "Input Monitoring"? Behold the World's BEST selling and most trusted USB audio interface The Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 2sd gen USB 2 achieves MUCH lower latency than any old legacy Firewire 400 audio interface can even achieve, and has noticeably better digitally controlled mic preamps and signal flow/path curcuit protection.

 The Scarlett 2i2 is a little brother to my Scarlett 18i20, it performs the same, it just has less I/O. Running on TODAYS current Focusrite ASIO drivers, tested on my 6 year old Win 10 Pro, AMD FX 8370 (8-core) with 16 gigs of DDR 3 /PC 1866 RAM installed tested with CbB with 64 bit Double Precision Engine Running.

Recording at 24/44.1 or 24/48 achieves an effective recording latency of 2.7 msec... 12.6 msec total roundtrip. (Humanly impossible to detect.)

Recording at 24/96 achieves an effective recording latency of 0.7 mesc with a total roundtrip of 6 mesc. (Humanly impossible to tell the difference.)

 

I've been studying and performing these tests of Scarlett gen 2's ever since they came out. The ONLY DAW that beat my test results of Cakewalk by Bandlab for lowest latency results was Apple Logic Pro. That's rather curious to me being I always considered Logic Pro to be the SONAR of Mac computers. However even though Logic Pro shaved off a couple of msec's of CbB test score, it's still humanly impossible to detect and or tell the difference. And the real kicker is, the Scarlett gen 2 USB 2 audio interfaces are x2 times FASTER/LOWER latency then my old Digi 03 Firewire audio interface in Cakewalk, Logic Pro, and ya might want to sit down for this.... EVEN Pro Tools as well. Interestingly enough, Pro Tools has the lousiest latency scores of everything I've tested, but...…………………. It doesn't really matter.

It's a moot point because it's humanly impossible to detect the difference..?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 17, 2019 by Steev

[abacab]

2 hours ago, Steev said:

For instance, did you know that until you until you specifically configure your Microsoft Account and One Drive to stop receiving Boot records and drive images your whole desktop config is being backed up in your cloud storage? That alone is an enormous sized background operation going on.

 And every system change and tweak you make "Hits the RESET" button for uploading the brand new Boot Records to your personal free cloud storage, which you may want to go and delete large files you no longer need and clean it out because you only get a few Gigs of free storage.

That's exactly the reason I have disabled One Drive, and never sign in to my Microsoft Account.  I use a local machine user account only. I have also blocked as many Windows processes as practical in my network firewall, without breaking Windows.  Now I love my Window 10. Out of the box, she was a bit too chatty for my taste, LOL! 

And I have disabled Defender as much as Windows 10 Pro will allow, and only use 3rd party security software.   Running Windows with the user in control, as it should be!

Edited January 17, 2019 by abacab

[Starship Krupa]

2 hours ago, Steev said:

DUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE! Windows 10 ships with what you consider to be malware???????????????? Come on bro,,,,,,,,,,,, now that's just to far way over the line of conspiracy theories..

?? I would highly recommend you sign up and becoming a member of the Windows Insider Program and learn how Microsoft uses and what telemetry actually is. Windows Defender doesn't do anything any other virus protection doesn't do, and one of the reasons you can't refuse Windows updates is because that's where you get updated virus definitions as well as coordinated patches and fixes.

 

Dudicle, duderino, dudecahedron, I said nothing about telemetry or conspiracies or any of that.

I agree that Windows Offender acts like most other virus protection rackets except that without special knowledge, you're not allowed to turn it off.

My tongue is somewhat in my cheek, but I consider a program that runs on my system without my permission that I can't disable and that slows everything down, nervously scanning my sample libraries while my DAW loads them to make sure that they don't contain viruses, to be malware. It impedes the usefulness of my computer while doing nothing useful whatsoever. Nothing useful for me, anyway. I'm sure that it was The Answer for people who can't handle downloading and configuring AVG Free and Malwarebytes.

2 hours ago, Steev said:

Microsoft is actually trying their best to "help" the average users by automatically fixing problems the average user simply doesn't understand or doesn't even know exist.

And there you have it right in a nutshell. They finally caved to the "average user's" inability not to click on every piece of crap that someone forwards to their inbox.

My protection against viruses and trojans and hijacks and ransomware since I first started using computers has always revolved around "being smart about not running things that stand a chance of infecting my system." I don't click on random things that people send me via email, I scan things I download on an ad hoc basis, and I schedule system scans to run when I'm asleep. The last never finds anything wrong.

I don't like being forced to run a program that inflicts needless loads on my CPU and disk access just because other people lack computer smarts. It's fine, there's still a way to turn it off if you know what to do.

[Jim Roseberry]

2 hours ago, Steev said:

 Want to see Cakewalk by Bandlab perform like an ULTRA LOW LATENCY fire breathing dragon and actually save several hundreds of dollars on a KILLER software bundle? Latency so low you will be able to run FX in real -time recording thru Cakewalk "Input Monitoring"? Behold the World's BEST selling and most trusted USB audio interface The Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 2sd gen USB 2 achieves MUCH lower latency than any old legacy Firewire 400 audio interface can even achieve, and has noticeably better digitally controlled mic preamps and signal flow/path curcuit protection.

 The Scarlett 2i2 is a little brother to my Scarlett 18i20, it performs the same, it just has less I/O. Running on TODAYS current Focusrite ASIO drivers, tested on my 6 year old Win 10 Pro, AMD FX 8370 (8-core) with 16 gigs of DDR 3 /PC 1866 RAM installed tested with CbB with 64 bit Double Precision Engine Running.

Recording at 24/44.1 or 24/48 achieves an effective recording latency of 2.7 msec... 12.6 msec total roundtrip. (Humanly impossible to detect.)

Recording at 24/96 achieves an effective recording latency of 0.7 mesc with a total roundtrip of 6 mesc. (Humanly impossible to tell the difference.)

I'm not sure if the above was serious... or in jest

By today's standards, running 6ms total round-trip latency isn't really that low.

ie: RME Fireface-800 (now about 15 years old) connects via Firewire... and can achieve 6ms total round-trip latency at 44.1k using a 64-sample ASIO buffer size. 

 

Using a Presonus Quantum (connected via Thunderbolt-3), you can do things like run Helix Native (software only version of the Helix guitar processor) at 96k using a 32-sample ASIO buffer size.  That's 1ms total round-trip latency.  To be able to to this effectively requires a fast well-configured machine.

If the comments about latency perception were serious, you absolutely can tell the difference between 6ms and 12ms latency (especially with high transient instruments). 

Dial up your favorite piano sample library... and set your ASIO buffer size such that playback (one way) latency is 6ms.  Now double the current ASIO buffer size so that playback (one way) latency is 12ms.  Which one feels tighter and more immediate while playing?  If your audio interface permits,  cut the original ASIO buffer size in half (3ms playback latency)... and compare  playing response to the previous two settings.  It's pretty easy to feel the difference.

 

If you're going to monitor thru software: 

• Anything higher than about 6ms total round-trip latency starts to feel pretty sluggish
• Upwards of 10ms total round-trip latency starts to feel unbearably sluggish
• Below 5ms starts to feel more comfortable
• Below 3ms feels tight 

 

If you have an audio interface that allows super low round-trip latency, you can test this for yourself.

• Set the audio interface to operate a 1ms total round-trip latency
• Open a test project with a single audio track
• Insert a delay plugin that offers fine control (1ms increments) and set the delay to be 100% wet
• Use the delay plugin's time parameter to simulate various amounts of (additional) round-trip latency

 

If you're going to do something like use a V-Drum kit to trigger drum samples from Superior Drummer 3 (in realtime),  you're going to want the lowest possible round-trip latency.  Round-trip latency above about 3ms will start to affect the feel.  Round-trip latency of 6+ms and the drummer will feel he's playing thru molasses.   With round-trip latency below 3ms, the drummer will feel much more comfortable.

 

 

[Jim Roseberry]

19 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

And there you have it right in a nutshell. They finally caved to the "average user's" inability not to click on every piece of crap that someone forwards to their inbox.

Both Microsoft and Apple have caved to the "average" user.

Apple has all but abandoned their power-users.  Look at their machines... virtually no user-serviceable (internal) expansion 

• A new boot drive means a trip to the Apple store
• There's no expanding RAM for any current MacBook Pro (what you buy is what you get - WYBIWYG)

Lucky for us, with the Pro version of Windows 10, we can still take full control.

[msmcleod]

5 minutes ago, Jim Roseberry said:

I'm not sure if the above was serious... or in jest

By today's standards, running 6ms total round-trip latency isn't really that low.

ie: RME Fireface-800 (now about 15 years old) connects via Firewire... and can achieve 6ms total round-trip latency at 44.1k using a 64-sample ASIO buffer size. 

 

Using a Presonus Quantum (connected via Thunderbolt-3), you can do things like run Helix Native (software only version of the Helix guitar processor) at 96k using a 32-sample ASIO buffer size.  That's 1ms total round-trip latency.  To be able to to this effectively requires a fast well-configured machine.

If the comments about latency perception were serious, you absolutely can tell the difference between 6ms and 12ms latency (especially with high transient instruments). 

Dial up your favorite piano sample library... and set your ASIO buffer size such that playback (one way) latency is 6ms.  Now double the current ASIO buffer size so that playback (one way) latency is 12ms.  Which one feels tighter and more immediate while playing?  If your audio interface permits,  cut the original ASIO buffer size in half (3ms playback latency)... and compare  playing response to the previous two settings.  It's pretty easy to feel the difference.

 

If you're going to monitor thru software: 

• Anything higher than about 6ms total round-trip latency starts to feel pretty sluggish
• Upwards of 10ms total round-trip latency starts to feel unbearably sluggish
• Below 5ms starts to feel more comfortable
• Below 3ms feels tight 

 

If you have an audio interface that allows super low round-trip latency, you can test this for yourself.

• Set the audio interface to operate a 1ms total round-trip latency
• Open a test project with a single audio track
• Insert a delay plugin that offers fine control (1ms increments) and set the delay to be 100% wet
• Use the delay plugin's time parameter to simulate various amounts of (additional) round-trip latency

 

If you're going to do something like use a V-Drum kit to trigger drum samples from Superior Drummer 3 (in realtime),  you're going to want the lowest possible round-trip latency.  Round-trip latency above about 3ms will start to affect the feel.  Round-trip latency of 6+ms and the drummer will feel he's playing thru molasses.   With round-trip latency below 3ms, the drummer will feel much more comfortable.

 

 

I agree.

I'm have the 2i2, 6i6 & 18i20 and I can run at around 2ms playback latency, which is fine for me.

I find 6ms playback latency intolerable for piano.

 

[Starship Krupa]

3 hours ago, Steev said:

For instance, did you know that until you until you specifically configure your Microsoft Account and One Drive to stop receiving Boot records and drive images your whole desktop config is being backed up in your cloud storage? That alone is an enormous sized background operation going on.

 And every system change and tweak you make "Hits the RESET" button for uploading the brand new Boot Records to your personal free cloud storage, which you may want to go and delete large files you no longer need and clean it out because you only get a few Gigs of free storage.

 I have a very strong feeling you are going to find your buddies Cakewalk project there, even if he did specifically choose to have it sent to his Avid iCloud account which if he's a Pro Tool user, I'd be willing to bet he did...……. And I'm not even a gambling man. I'm a Pro Tools user and that's exactly what I would do, because it would be stupid not to, because it's actually the best way to import .wav file from Cakewalk to Pro Tools.. Thumb drives?????? We don't need no stinck'in thumb drives... ??DaShitBeOnAutoPilotBrov.

I didn't know that, but I have all of my Windows systems set to log in with local accounts, not Microsoft accounts, and I turn off OneDrive, so it's probably not been happening.

I either do it manually or have command line scripts that I run before DAW sessions that shut down all of my cloud storage services (along with crap like iPod Service and iTunes Helper and Adobe Updater and all that) before I start DAW sessions, so again, no Avid iCloud upload. I export his stems and put them in a folder on Google Drive and he imports them into Pro Tools. I guess to you his way of doing it is "stupid," but it gets the job done. Also, we use FLAC, not WAV, for faster file transfer.