Stutters and Glitches while recording

[David DeLisle]

I've been a longtime Cakewalk user from the Original Cakewalk to Music Creator to Sonar to the current Cakewalk by Bandlab product.  

With the new release I've been continually finding glitching and stuttering in my recordings that were driving me nuts.  It always seemed like a processor problem or something with a system interrupt.  I'm running Windows 10 with plenty of memory and a decent processor speed.  I've tried many things to avoid the problem without success, such as turning off wifi, disabling anti-virus software, and using Ctl Alt Delete - details tab to assign Realtime priority to Cakewalk.  I've also tried bouncing down all effects to free up the processor, but I still had problems with freezing, glitches, etc. while recording.  I finally found something that worked, so I wanted to pass it on.  Previously I had enabled read and write caching and maxed out the buffer the buffer size thinking this would help my system performance.  But when I disabled all caching, presto, no issues.  My guess is that shifting to the cache while recording was in process was causing these glitches.  Hopefully my issues won't come back.  I wanted to pass this on in case anyone else is battling this problem.  [ Preferences, Audio, Sync and Caching, File System bar ]

[Terry Kelley]

Glad you posted this!

I had been periodically having glitch/stutter issues using certain plugins like MUnison and MHarmonizerMB. Things would be fine and then go south and back to fine.

I was going through Preferences looking for something else one day and noticed Read Cache was enabled. I don't recall setting it but I might have in frustration trying to fix a problem. So I disabled it.

I haven't had an issue since. I read the manual and some comments from people about why it happens but never found a satisfying answer. I don't know if cache was taking too long to fetch, fetching the wrong stuff and having to flush or what ...

 

[reginaldStjohn]

Another often overlooked culprit is a video card driver. I found this issue when having issue when certian pluins GUIs were open.  I never could resolve it in software and had to try different video cards (went from nVidia to ATI).

Latencymon is your friend when trying to track down some of these issue.

[John Vere]

+1 to Latency Monitor 

While you’re on their web site also download WhySo Slow. I just did this and wow it really shows you what’s happening under the hood on your system.

I was having distorted audio and stuff taking forever to open on my laptop and its conclusion was my lousy 8 GB of RAM and the duo core 2.5 hz processor. Everything else got a green light. It was nice to have all that info with in a minute. 

[Terry Kelley]

Latency Monitor never showed any issue even when the noise/glitching was happening. But certainly, if it's complaining, fix it.

[Doug Hartley Music]

Thanks, David, for your post. This helped me correct the issue that just started happening with my Cakewalk. I must've changed the caching when trying to solve a MIDI issue, and it ended-up causing the audio to stutter. I unchecked the cache boxes, dropped the size of the caches, and the problem went away.

[David DeLisle]

Glad this fix is helping other folks out.  I have been stutter, glitch free with Cakewalk for over a year now with the same computer!

 

[Binney Stone]

This fix helped me as well! So simple and yet effective. Thanks for this very useful fix!

[Starship Krupa]

14 hours ago, Binney Stone said:

This fix helped me as well! So simple and yet effective. Thanks for this very useful fix!

Binney, could you tell us what settings you had to change or what program(s) you had to disable to get your results? It would benefit future searchers.