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

[Steev]

2 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

If you do use a Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter (to connect a Firewire audio interface to a Thunderbolt controller), it will not achieve PCIe level performance.

It's exactly the same as running a PCIe Firewire controller.

Jim, running a PCIe Firewire controller card into a PCIe port IS PORTING DIRECTLY INTO THE PCIe BUSS!! 

It works for me it works for @Base 57 see his comments above, AND NEITHER OF US HAS ANY LATENCY PROBLEMS!

That being said, although I've always liked Presunus well enough and respect it and all, I absolutely LOVE my Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 with MKII OctoPre, and I have 12 more wonderful sounding mic preamps then you do, don't I? Yes I do, and that makes my crappy USB interface more flexible then your Nitro burner. HAHAHAHA.

It only get 1.7 msec EFFECTIVE RECORDING LATENCY, shameful I know compared to your killa Quantum.

And it takes an abysmal 6.3 Total Roundtrip msec to send audio coming from my mouth thru CbB and back out to my headphones no matter how many tracks, are running though how many plugins are running and or how many I run thru CbB channel in real-time monitoring with Cakewalk's Input Monitoring thru my Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 gen 2 USB audio interface, with 8 more audio channels fed into it via ADAT, plus stereo S/PDIF feeding  I/O into a Lexicon MX400 multi FX processor ready for finecky singers who insist on too much FX I can bear to be pumped in to their own  headphone mix

Now these specs may completely REPULSE SUPER FLY PROFESSIONALS LIKE YOU, but us mere mortal humans with ears that can only hear between 20 Hz and 20 k/Hz, if we're lucky, CANNOT DETECT 6.3 MSEC OF LATENCY. So we typically don't give a monkey's arse about any reported lower latencies then that, as a rule of shut the FAQ UP about specs already, and lets JAM!

 And OH!!!!!!!!!! Don't think Ican't shave off at least a full msec of these horrible latency reports, I CAN but being I don't know any humans who could tell the difference, I don't have any reason to..

 

SPEED KILLS stability RULES at Delirium Studio!

Edited January 22, 2019 by Steev

[Grem]

14 minutes ago, Steev said:

Jim, running a PCIe Firewire controller card into a PCIe port IS PORTING DIRECTLY INTO THE PCIe BUSS!! 

 

I think you missing the point Steev. Jim is referring to an adapter.

 

And I think his point is that Firewire can not take advantage of all the speed that PCIe has to offer. I may be wrong, but that's how I am reading it. YMMV

[Jim Roseberry]

Steev, you're great at comedy.

I'm going to leave it at that.

 

 

[Suboculis]

On 1/21/2019 at 8:54 AM, abacab said:

Any links? The only reference I see is to the Spring 2018 update.

It's actually allows you to just pause the update for 7 days, not stop it completely. 

[Starship Krupa]

As far as preamps go, I'm kinda surprised to see all this weenie waggin' over built-in ones.

I thought that the "common wisdom" was that you never track anything critical with just the interface's built-in preamps. If you don't stick a Manley or a boutique clone of a Neve strip or something in front of it you might as well not even bother, right? Something with tubes, a transformer, preferably both?

Of course, that's also "common wisdom" about stock plug-ins, and Cakewalk comes with such good-sounding ones that I can't resist using them!

I do hope to one day build a nice mic preamp for tracking vocals. I assembled one for a client from a kit and the thing sounded amazing. Transformer and JFETs.

 

[kitekrazy1]

On 1/21/2019 at 7:06 PM, Starship Krupa said:

12-sided Dude! Now we're talkin! I didn't know that Pricewatch was still around. Party like it's 1999.

Buying graphics cards for my trailing-edge systems has been my achilles heel. It's always about "will it play Halo?"

I, too am a Vegas baby, still light up my copy of 10 Pro from time to time, so if you say that this pup works a treat with Emily's Optiplex and Vegas and Cakewalk....this info is GOLD.

My main system is an Optiplex 7010. It has a Gen 2 Pci-e slot for a video card. I need to drive a monitor with a DVI port and a Display Port and another monitor with an HDMI port, so the card you showed me would work with my Display Port to HDMI adaptor.

I lean toward nVidia cards rather than AMD because of past troubles with Mixcraft and general lore in the DAW world. However, if you have empirical first-hand knowledge, that counts for a great deal with me.

 Interesting.  Some guys on another forum are going with AMD cards.  This of course is about the recent generation of cards. Buying graphics card is an achilles heel period.  If you get one for gaming there are enough incompetent game developers that can render cards useless to make Apple envy. 

[Starship Krupa]

At this point I have about zero interest in gaming. I'm not saying that won't ever change, but I guess if it does, I can always save up and buy a swoopamatic 3-D card.

One thing that has always befuddled me is how the graphics card companies sell cards of similar specs and architecture as "workstation" cards or "gaming" cards, but the "workstation" version will be 5-10X the price.

I guess what I want for my uses, DAW, video, photo editing, and general desktop, is a solid workstation card, and it doesn't need to be anything magic. The HD4000 built into my chipset works fine, but the quality of the graphics is just dire. Blurry. Fuzzy and indistinct compared to the AMD on my other workstation and the nVidia in my notebook.

I'll give the Quadro FX 580 another chance before I buy another card. Now that TELEMETRY!!!! has had a chance to work its mysterious magic, maybe it will work, who knows. It was an optional upgrade to the Optiplex when it was new, so it should be compatible with the hardware. It worked a treat under Windows 7, I even had one monitor plugged into the HD4000 and the other into the Quadro at one point just to see if it would work, and it did.

[Steev]

15 hours ago, Grem said:

 

I think you missing the point Steev. Jim is referring to an adapter.

 

And I think his point is that Firewire can not take advantage of all the speed that PCIe has to offer. I may be wrong, but that's how I am reading it. YMMV

 

4 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

At this point I have about zero interest in gaming. I'm not saying that won't ever change, but I guess if it does, I can always save up and buy a swoopamatic 3-D card.

One thing that has always befuddled me is how the graphics card companies sell cards of similar specs and architecture as "workstation" cards or "gaming" cards, but the "workstation" version will be 5-10X the price.

I guess what I want for my uses, DAW, video, photo editing, and general desktop, is a solid workstation card, and it doesn't need to be anything magic. The HD4000 built into my chipset works fine, but the quality of the graphics is just dire. Blurry. Fuzzy and indistinct compared to the AMD on my other workstation and the nVidia in my notebook.

I'll give the Quadro FX 580 another chance before I buy another card. Now that TELEMETRY!!!! has had a chance to work its mysterious magic, maybe it will work, who knows. It was an optional upgrade to the Optiplex when it was new, so it should be compatible with the hardware. It worked a treat under Windows 7, I even had one monitor plugged into the HD4000 and the other into the Quadro at one point just to see if it would work, and it did.

@Grem I didn't miss the point, Jim demanded I show him a Thunderbolt to Firewire adaptor, and I did. ALL COMPUTERS NEED FIREWIRE CONTROLLERS FOR THUNDERBOLT. and whether they are built into Windows motherboards, a card plugged into a PCIe slot, or embedded into Apple Logic boards, the one thing they all have in common is ALL COMPUTERS NEED FIREWIRE CONTROLLERS FOR THUNDERBOLT SUPPORT.

I made the point of pointing out that you do NOT need to reach the super sonic speeds of today's modern PCIe Buss speeds for safe, indictable, and reliable very low latency recording. Do you guys have any comprehension of how short a period of time a millisecond is?

 No of course you don't, no human being does.

 On my Windows computer I'm using the Focurite Scarlett 18i20 gen 2 USB 2 and with near enough Thunderbolt latency With SONAR or CbB.

 On my Mac I'm using a Thunderbolt 2 device through a Firewire 800 port which for obvious reasons CANNOT reach full Buss bandwidth either, but that doesn't matter because they is NO NOTICABLE LATENCY ISSUES BETWEEN ARTIST AND PRO TOOLS.

 

@Starship Krupa I had suggested the AMD FirePro because AMD has a history of staying with sockets and drivers that are very forward compatible and can last a much longer support timeline then anything Intel and nVidia has ever offered.

AMD has a history of staying with the CPU socket for decades as well, for instance, when I first bought my ASRock FX990 gamer grade Motherboard with a AMD3+ socket  about 6 or 7 years ago I was running the all powerful Phenom 965 4 core Black edition at the time. I was able to swap out AMD CPUs over the years without the change any hardware or my motherboard, all it took was a simple free BIOS flash and the FX990 mobo was ready to support FX 8 core CPUs which is currently running the FX8370 which just became obsolete last year or so when AMD introduced the AMD4 socket to support their new Rysen Thread Rippers MORE THREADS FOR  SUPPORT THE UP AND COMMING NEW FRONTIERS OF VIRTUAL REALITY COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY WE ARE RACING HEAD LONG INTO.

And AMD4 CPU sockets  like AMD3 sockets, support all grade AMD CPU's from the cheapest to the most expensive powerhouse workstation grades. Which pretty much means they a rather long history of not, or seldom do Orphan any hardware tech just to sell you the new latest and greatest new hardware.

 Being all AMD FirePro's from the early V3900 first gen PCIe , V4900  2sd gen PCIe, and up to the later more powerful V5900 PCIe they all use the same AMD legacy drivers.

 Apparently nVidia has already "orphaned" the Quatro FX580, meaning they are not doing update the drivers allow support for Windows 10, I wouldn't put it back in

 AMD FirePro accelerated graphics cards hardware and drivers are designed specifically for DCC (digital content creation) workstations, not gaming. While they can hold there own in games they'll never compete in a bench test with video cards designed for games running FirePro drivers and vise versa.

All your DAWs will display a stunning crisp look, especially noticeable in the LED VU displays, the cursor will glide smooth as silk across the time, and being all this is handled entirely by the FirePro's own GPU and RAM, your CPU and system RAM will be freed and relieved of graphics processing tasks, and you WILL notice a slight bump in DAW horsepower and performance, as you would with installing any Accelerated Graphics Card by AMD or nVidia.

Running onboard graphics chips are like recording with onboard audio chips. Which they many look and sound great enough to fool you into thinking they are powerful by watching videos, they are crippling performance for any DAW or NLE (video editing/DAW)

Edited January 23, 2019 by Steev

[Steev]

8 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

As far as preamps go, I'm kinda surprised to see all this weenie waggin' over built-in ones.

I thought that the "common wisdom" was that you never track anything critical with just the interface's built-in preamps. If you don't stick a Manley or a boutique clone of a Neve strip or something in front of it you might as well not even bother, right? Something with tubes, a transformer, preferably both?

Of course, that's also "common wisdom" about stock plug-ins, and Cakewalk comes with such good-sounding ones that I can't resist using them!

I do hope to one day build a nice mic preamp for tracking vocals. I assembled one for a client from a kit and the thing sounded amazing. Transformer and JFETs.

 

My sentiments exactly, built in audio interface mic preamps are designed multi purpose interfacing balanced equally between high energy line level signals that require little to no gain, and very sensitive condenser microphones that typically require a wide range of gain structure and cover a wide impedance range to cover an insanely wide range of mics from various dynamic mics to various condenser mics with no coloration with the least amount of noise. And as far as I can tell these days, they are all doing a pretty damn good job at it in a one size fits all manor of speaking, they are all "good" enough.

 That is until you plug in an AKG 414 or a Neuman U 87 good enough is no longer good enough to fully appreciate in depth of why these are widely considered the cream of the crop World's Best and why so many manufacturers strive so hard to reach these standards and even clone them.

 I do own a vintage Focusrite ISA 1 which is excellent for dialing in the proper gain structure and exacting impedance for any particular mic. I also have a vintage Focusrite Liquid Channel channel strip which is more versatile and excellent.

 And I relied on them heavily for decades and meticulously maintained them with tender loving care... And then Cakewalk built in a surprisingly powerful ProChannel channel strip, perfected "Input Monitoring", Focusrite enhanced ultra low latency USB 2 interfaces, Eventide came out with the UltraChannel, and Waves came out with the Sheps Omni Channel, and it didn't take long to realize, through empirical evidence, that these beloved pieces of vintage gear where no longer essentially needed, and still great, but became more of a PITA then anything else..

 And the only piece of essential outboard hardware I rely on in my studio today, is a VERY reasonably priced less then one year old Allen & Heath ZED 14 analog mixing desk, which I consider the world's smallest large format mixing console.. But that's a topic for another conversation involving Allen Parsons and Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album "Tour".?

 

Edited January 23, 2019 by Steev

[Steev]

17 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

Steev, you're great at comedy.

I'm going to leave it at that.

 

 

Thank you Jim, so kind of you to notice. ? I do believe and sincerely wish that we can be friends.

 And if Bandlab didn't pick up where Gibson left off, I'd be well on my way to be moving from SONAR to Studio ONE and most likely set my sails for the Quantum eventually, by the time SPLAT slipped deeply into the deepest depths of obscurity.. Ah but God, and Meng were on my side and saved me a BOATLOAD of Franklins, and my future looks bright....

 So I'm gonna leave off with some of my favorite rock and roll words of wisdom of all times. Where it is written.... On what ever they right it on in the mighty "Church of Rock Music"

Ew,,,,,EE,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Ewwww, ah, ah...……. Ting, Tang...…………….. Rama/Lama...…………. Ding..Dong……...

 

Yep, it's ALL GOOD! :O))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

Edited January 23, 2019 by Steev

[John]

I do everything on my computers. That is the point of software. Without it a computer is a block of nothing. Add software and it can do anything you want it to do.  I suppose that if you run a business centered around a computer it should be dedicated to the job for that business. Otherwise, I see no reason to limit ones self to only doing one thing and only one thing.  I do video I also do photography and yes I do music.  Each is done not for myself alone but others and I do a lot of documentations of events. I do DJ work too. 

I have laptops, desktops and tablets to help accomplish the jobs I do.   When I not doing anything for anyone I will on occasion play a game or two. 

[Steev]

This maybe hard to see without squinting with the 400p limitation, but it's a screenshot of CbB smoothly running 50 tracks of audio and MIDI with dozens of audio FX actively running by Cakewalk, Eventide, and Waves.. Waves Sheps Omni Channel window displayed which was used in real-time vocal recordings monitored through Cakewalk "Input Monitoring" with undetectable latency, and also running

Addictive Drums 1 (active)

and AD2 (frozen),

Rapture Pro (active),

and Cakewalk TTS 1 (frozen)

 As a long time rule, went I'm satisfied with a track, I freeze it. Period. More for safety percaution against accidental destructive edits, then to recover needed CPU power which is seemingly endless with an AMD FX 8370 running any DAW (it isn't), it certainly isn't with Video editing software like Sony Vegas Pro, it's merely MASSIVE CPU performance which, like everything else in the world, has it's limits.

Anyway, my Scarlett 18i20 gen 2 USB 2 has no problems keeping up with 50 tracks with CAKEWALK by BANDLAB and delivering ROCK SOLID performance with ultra low latency through all the above, with CbB's CPU meter staying under and average 30% across all 8 cores..

 

Only thing breaking a sweat in this music project is ME single handedly performing every part multi tracking and recording my rendition of Frank Zappa's "Wet Tee Shirt Nite", which after about 5-6 months of the old school trial and error method is almost ready to be posted to Bandlab.com and grouped down to under 12 less then perfect tracks available to all in Bandlab's nifty "Mix Editor" where anyone can mix or retrieve for importing into your DAW of choice, and by all means, do what you think is necessary to perfect them if you want and think you can... Have at it!

I have an enormous amount of fun on Bandlab jamming and collaborating with musical artists of all skill levels..

 Working in the studio on a professional level isn't fun, it's WORK, often tedious, often painful working hard to make poorly executed "elevator music" sound like professionally crafted "elevator music", and doing so in  genres I normally wouldn't even listen to. It can really, really suck sometimes, but it pays a hell of a lot better then driving a truck, which can be a hell of a lot more fun at times, but hey, we do what we do to survive.

I don't make a dime on Bandlab, but it's fun and it reminds me of who I was yesterday and who I am today, both at the same time, and why I learned how to use all this recording studio crap in the first place, and how far I need to go to take it to the limits.. And where to stop before going to far.?

Edited January 23, 2019 by Steev

[Jim Roseberry]

6 hours ago, Steev said:

I do believe and sincerely wish that we can be friends.

Steev, we can absolutely be friends.  

I think it's great that Bandlab bought Cakewalk!

I've been a Cakewalk user since the CompuServ forums.  ?

Excited to see what the future brings... especially this being NAMM weekend.

 

[Rico Belled]

"Running onboard graphics chips are like recording with onboard audio chips. Which they many look and sound great enough to fool you into thinking they are powerful by watching videos, they are crippling performance for any DAW or NLE (video editing/DAW)"

This is complete hogwash. Video editing can be different (although with Vegas Intel HD graphics provide a FAR bigger boost than my GTX1050ti, just saying), but for DAWs this is far OUTDATED info. As a matter of fact, on some systems latency can go LOWER with integrated graphics than with a PCIe card; this is not theory, I've experienced it.

 

R

[Steev]

33 minutes ago, Rico Belled said:

"Running onboard graphics chips are like recording with onboard audio chips. Which they many look and sound great enough to fool you into thinking they are powerful by watching videos, they are crippling performance for any DAW or NLE (video editing/DAW)"

This is complete hogwash. Video editing can be different (although with Vegas Intel HD graphics provide a FAR bigger boost than my GTX1050ti, just saying), but for DAWs this is far OUTDATED info. As a matter of fact, on some systems latency can go LOWER with integrated graphics than with a PCIe card; this is not theory, I've experienced it.

 

R

Oh I can believe that if don't don't specify how many streaming cores Vegas is allowed to use, considering the GTX1050ti is a GAMER card, and not a DCC card, it'll most likely reserve most of it's cutty cores for serious flash bang shoot'em ups across your computer screen. ?

Edited January 23, 2019 by Steev

[Grem]

Personally, I would never use onboard graphics in my main DAW. I do use them with my Surface Pro. And it works great for getting ideas down.

 

But if you have no other choice, I would go for the AMD Ryzen solution. They have much APU than nVida or Intel.

[Grem]

My first DP in the new forum!!

 

 

Edited January 23, 2019 by Grem

[kitekrazy1]

41 minutes ago, Grem said:

Personally, I would never use onboard graphics in my main DAW. I do use them with my Surface Pro. And it works great for getting ideas down.

 

But if you have no other choice, I would go for the AMD Ryzen solution. They have much APU than nVida or Intel.

  They are much improved.   I could see it in a dedicated DAW.    It depends on the video card but some really consume power.

[kitekrazy1]

Back to topic, what version of W10 is the OP running?

[Steev]

1 hour ago, Grem said:

Personally, I would never use onboard graphics in my main DAW. I do use them with my Surface Pro. And it works great for getting ideas down.

 

But if you have no other choice, I would go for the AMD Ryzen solution. They have much APU than nVida or Intel.

 

 I just helped a friend configure and build a new AMD Ryzen 7 ThreadRipper workstation with the new FirePro Z series PCIe 16x v3 Graphics card running Vegas Pro 16 and it's a jaw dropping rather shocking experience. ? I WANT ONE!!

 And what's equally shocking is all the components for this build was less then $1600 (us) from Newegg.com. That's about 40% less cash outlay then a comparable Intel i7 build.

 I'm actually planning on upgrading my current AMD FX machine to Ryzen by years end as it's getting a bit long in the tooth, and only supports PCIe 16x v2.1 which does a serious job with the older FirePro V5900 which I thought was blazing fast.. But that was before I actually witnessed what the Ryzen could do running a 15 minute long music video with heavy editing with 3D titling, all kinds video FX and transitions and iZotope Ozone running on the master buss and in 5k video pumped into a 24" Acer desktop monitor for Vegas GUI and a 40" 4k Samsung Monitor for full screen video monitoring both connected thru DisplayPort. WOWZER is more like an understatement. No video lag, no latency, no ghosting, not even a burp or flicker with all that processing going on. AND it rendered the 15 min project to 4k .mp4 in less then 6 minutes.

 And so after some rather rigorous benching the new Ryzen workstation with Vegas Pro all I can say is I WANT ONE NOW! ?

 I think if we finished that case of Beer I brought over for the build party I most likely would have logged into my Newegg on the spot and reordered the exact component list, LoL, but I'm still more then good until the end of the year, even though I really, really WANT ONE NOW!?