Bug, play = silence for a few seconds before audible sound, other times sound instantly comes thru.

[Davydh]

Cakewalk never did this before.

E.g. I could load a single track project with just guitar. Click play and silence for about 5 seconds then it starts working,
other times it works straight away. Has anyone experienced this? Sorry if this is the wrong place to put this.
I couldn't find a specific bug reporting section.

[David Baay]

Do track and bus meters show signal from the start? Almost certainly an interface/driver issue. What is it? Possibly failing pre-amp section if you've had it for a long time. Try the headphone out if it's an external interface.

[Promidi]

Can you give a bit of info about your system? Version and build number.  CPU, Ram, audio interface. Driver mode (ASIO or WASAPI)?

Are sample rates consistent between all audio programs and windows.

Has Windows updates borked your hardware drivers (I have told my Windows never to do this for quality updates)

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-disable-automatic-driver-updates-windows-10

Maybe reinstall your hardware drivers (other hardware as well as audio interface). Do this by actually going to the respective manufacturer's websites rather than relying on Windows updates.

Note: I have never has this particular issue.

[Will.]

6 hours ago, Davydh said:

Cakewalk never did this before.

E.g. I could load a single track project with just guitar. Click play and silence for about 5 seconds then it starts working,
other times it works straight away. Has anyone experienced this? Sorry if this is the wrong place to put this.
I couldn't find a specific bug reporting section.

I get this from time-to-time on my test machine and laptop, but never experienced it on the main system (it's offline.) I only connect when there are updates available, both for windows and CbB. 

The other two are constantly connected. So, i think it's safe to assume that theres a disk reading that's busy to refresh itself. It can also be because your "antivirus" are doing a quick scan before releasing the project for playback. It can also be a plugin, or your hard disk trying to locate the stored files. Then there's those background apps that are running at the same time. 

Its somewhere in the line of these things. Nothing to be worried about. It's not DAW related. 

[Davydh]

I have an SSD with 16 GBs of RAM, but I did have another program running in the background.

[Will.]

2 minutes ago, Davydh said:

I have an SSD 

SSD aren't all that you know. They are great no doubt, but they burn out quick 3/5 years? (They are like those pesky mobile memory cards we used to have.) Hack! I've got an HDD that's running on 10years now in my test machine. 

I'm running my second SSD in my Main machine and I only have it 5/6years. i7 6th gen 32GB ram. 

I'm just saying here that it might system related. Like you've said, you had something running in the background. 

[Starship Krupa]

I had this issue big time a couple of years ago, then the devs implemented some fixes and it's been great since then.