Super slow importing speed

[Paul Chan]

Since about a couple months ago, I noticed that importing audio started becoming very slow. For example, a mere 10-second audio (wav) takes almost 30 seconds to import. A video of 500MB (about 20mins long) takes about an hour with the progress bar saying "import audio" the whole time. So, I am assuming that there is something not quite right with the audio importing process.

Cakewalk and all the project/audio files are running on a dedicated internal SSD (Samsung SSD 980 1TB) with 200+ GB empty space running good temperature and in good health (only 1.6TB written on it so far during a year of usage). 

System specs: Windows 10 (up-to-date), AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, 24GB RAM, MOTU M2 audio interface.

Could anyone please share your knowledge and help me troubleshoot & fix this issue as it is severely slowing down my work?

Thank you in advance!

[Lord Tim]

Importing is as fast as always here, so it's not a general thing.

If you temporarily disable your antivirus (even the in-built Windows Defender), does that make a difference? It might be aggressively scanning any accessed files and slowing things down.

[Paul Chan]

Thank you for your suggestion. I tried it out, disabling both the 3rd party app and windows defender, importing was still slow. Just now I tried to import a 22MB wav file, it took about 35 seconds to complete. I tried copying regular file in windows explorer, it was normally fast (SSD speed), so I don't think it's my drive.

I started thinking, would sample rate conversion be an issue here? What do you think? Any suggestions?

Thank you!

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, that's very possible - have a look up at your Transport module on the Control Bar. If it's converting the sample rate, you'll see a little progress bar appear, however it should be saying something like "Converting Sample Rate" rather than just "Importing" for a WAV file.

Videos are a different beast entirely because it really depends on the audio codec contained within, so it's likely that'll just say "Importing."

Edited July 28, 2022 by Lord Tim

[Paul Chan]

Actually, despite whether converting sample rate being the culprit or not, I still think it is an odd behavior as the problem only started about a couple months ago. This had never happened previously and I never changed any settings at all. I am genuinely curious of what may have caused such a slow import.

Anyhow, I ran into another trouble as now Cakewalk refuses to even start. ? (I tried to hook an Arturia Keylab into Cakewalk and used a suggestion that was mentioned somewhere in the forum about using Cubase setting, and suddenly it stopped responding and has now refused to start)

Any suggestions that might help me survive these series of unfortunate events?

Thank you.

 

[Lord Tim]

OK, that's pretty weird.

How did you hook the Keylab in exactly? It's possible you have a corrupt entry in a config file if you did any manual editing.

[msmcleod]

@Paul Chan - It's possible your ctrlsurface.dat has become corrupted and that is what is preventing Cakewalk from starting.

Try renaming ctrlsurface.dat  to ctrlsurface.dat.old in the %APPDATA%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core   folder.

[Paul Chan]

Thank you, I renamed it and now it's running normally. 

To Lord Tim, I just followed the instructions on another thread here in the forum. Someone else was asking about Arturia Keylab and Cakewalk regarding the integration issues since Arturia does not support Cakewalk (or is it the other way around??? I'm not so sure..) so when I did all the steps, I clicked OK, then voila Cakewalk left me in the dust. ?

By any chance, msmcleod, do you have any suggestions regarding the slow import rate? ("very slow" rate)

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

On 7/27/2022 at 10:42 AM, Paul Chan said:

Since about a couple months ago, I noticed that importing audio started becoming very slow. For example, a mere 10-second audio (wav) takes almost 30 seconds to import. A video of 500MB (about 20mins long) takes about an hour with the progress bar saying "import audio" the whole time. So, I am assuming that there is something not quite right with the audio importing process.

Cakewalk and all the project/audio files are running on a dedicated internal SSD (Samsung SSD 980 1TB) with 200+ GB empty space running good temperature and in good health (only 1.6TB written on it so far during a year of usage). 

System specs: Windows 10 (up-to-date), AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, 24GB RAM, MOTU M2 audio interface.

Could anyone please share your knowledge and help me troubleshoot & fix this issue as it is severely slowing down my work?

Thank you in advance!

If you provide a link to the audio/video i'm happy to test to see if it's a general Cakewalk issue or might be unique to your system.

Do you have any intensive processes also taking up disk IO that are now running at the same time? I've found a few things like Windows search can get in the way.
To help valididate this you could try running Moo FileMonitor which show you reads/writes:
https://www.moo0.com/?top=https://www.moo0.com/software/FileMonitor/

[Paul Chan]

Hi,

Unfortunately, I'm under NDA and can't provide links to the audio/video material I'm working on. However, most audio files (.wav) would trigger this slow import.

I do notice that the status bar says either "sample rate conversion" or "loading audio data" and the process is very slow. However, these processes used to be quick back a few months ago. It's such a mystery that audio importing (even with sample rate conversion) has become super sluggish since then.

Thank you for the File Monitor suggestion, could you please share what I need to watch for in the app? (I noticed the software says that it only supports up to Window 8?)

Edited August 3, 2022 by Paul Chan

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

On 8/3/2022 at 6:25 AM, Paul Chan said:

Hi,

Unfortunately, I'm under NDA and can't provide links to the audio/video material I'm working on. However, most audio files (.wav) would trigger this slow import.

I do notice that the status bar says either "sample rate conversion" or "loading audio data" and the process is very slow. However, these processes used to be quick back a few months ago. It's such a mystery that audio importing (even with sample rate conversion) has become super sluggish since then.

Thank you for the File Monitor suggestion, could you please share what I need to watch for in the app? (I noticed the software says that it only supports up to Window 8?)

I just tested importing a 3GB/12min video into Cakewalk and it took 2-3 mins with the sample rate conversion process happening second and taking about 20 seconds of that.

So looks like it might be something specific to your project files and/or setup.
Are these wav/ video files all from the same source? What's the bit rate? Just want to rule out that there could be something odd about the content of these causing it extra work. If they are the same then try importing some known files, such as CD audio.

Not sure whether Cakewalk uses the Windows API or FFMPEG for file conversions, might be there was a change of versions there if it was working fine previously. Can you try reverting to an earlier build?

With respect to File Monitor - it works fine on OS past 8 in my experience, it's just not fully tested.
I would load up filemon and then do your import and see what activities are going on - if there's loads of non-Cakewalk activity on the same disk at the same time, it would suggest their might be contention for disk utilisation which might reduce your performance.

[Paul Chan]

On 8/7/2022 at 3:50 PM, Matthew Simon Fletcher said:

I just tested importing a 3GB/12min video into Cakewalk and it took 2-3 mins with the sample rate conversion process happening second and taking about 20 seconds of that.

So looks like it might be something specific to your project files and/or setup.
Are these wav/ video files all from the same source? What's the bit rate? Just want to rule out that there could be something odd about the content of these causing it extra work. If they are the same then try importing some known files, such as CD audio.

Not sure whether Cakewalk uses the Windows API or FFMPEG for file conversions, might be there was a change of versions there if it was working fine previously. Can you try reverting to an earlier build?

With respect to File Monitor - it works fine on OS past 8 in my experience, it's just not fully tested.
I would load up filemon and then do your import and see what activities are going on - if there's loads of non-Cakewalk activity on the same disk at the same time, it would suggest their might be contention for disk utilisation which might reduce your performance.

Hi,

As a comparison, I can imagine that a 3GB video would possibly take a couple hours to fully import on my system nowadays as the progress bar would inch forward so slowly. (knowing that I regularly import 400-500MB video that would take close to an hour to complete which nowadays I left running while having my lunch or dinner)

I work with different sources of audio files, but they are in either 48 or 96 kHz while having bit depth of 24 (my audio interface runs at 32 natively, I don't know if it makes any difference or not).

Regarding monitoring disks while importing, I just tried importing a 50MB audio file (96kHz/24bit) into my 48kHz/24bit cakewalk project setting, it took 67 seconds according to Filemon. The audio files are all on a dedicated disk and filemon says that there is nothing else running on the dedicated audio disk. However, it says that my C:\ is super busy with an average of about 10 entries per second (lowest number is 1/second while going up to whooping 20 entries/second), about 90-95% dominated by 4 things:
"chrome\user_data\default\network" ,
"chrome\user_data\default\local_storage\leveldb" ,
"asus\armoury_crate_service"  ,
"asus\armoury_crate_diagnosis"  
(I'm on an ASUS system with armoury crate running monitoring duty along with HWinfo).

However, doesn't it make not much difference as the project audio is handled by a dedicated D:\ disk separate from all the hassle of windows operational work?

 

 

Edited August 9, 2022 by Paul Chan
(fixing a mistype)

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

Hmmm that is very weird.

Do you notice issues with other content? Try copying some content to/from that drive and checking the transfer speed and how long it takes to open it in other programs.

Points to a specific disk issue - might be worth running a benchmarking tool and checking if the score you're getting matches the quoted figures for that SSD type (i'm guessing not though given what you're seeing).

Try some of the standard SSD performance troubleshooting:

https://windowsreport.com/fix-slow-ssd-windows-10/

How long have you had the drive - it might be it's on it's last legs.

[Paul Chan]

On 8/10/2022 at 6:41 PM, pwalpwal said:

fwiw it's not a good idea to have two AV services running - -did the 3rd party app get updated recently maybe?

good luck

I normally have WinDefender deactivated as the 3rd party is the primary AV. As of updates, it's all automatic and even if there was a major update, I have not noticed anything different with the behavior of all applications and Windows functions in general. The only thing behaving odd is Cakewalk, specifically the audio import rate, nothing else in Cakewalk is affected, not bouncing rate, not exporting rate, literally just the audio import rate.  

On 8/10/2022 at 4:18 PM, Matthew Simon Fletcher said:

Hmmm that is very weird.

Do you notice issues with other content? Try copying some content to/from that drive and checking the transfer speed and how long it takes to open it in other programs.

Points to a specific disk issue - might be worth running a benchmarking tool and checking if the score you're getting matches the quoted figures for that SSD type (i'm guessing not though given what you're seeing).

Try some of the standard SSD performance troubleshooting:

https://windowsreport.com/fix-slow-ssd-windows-10/

How long have you had the drive - it might be it's on it's last legs.

My main disk (C:\) is Samsung MZVLB1T0HBLR that came with the system from the beginning, purchased around March 2021. However all Cakewalk projects and audio files are in the dedicated Samsung  980 disk (D:\) that was purchased a few weeks after the main system. I have tried copying files from one disk to the other, and vice versa, the results are normal. I also checked the link you sent, #1, #2, #3, #8, #10 have been checked and they are okay.

Just now I was going to have fun working on a project, I imported a 86MB mp4 video (5 minutes long), took some half an hour. I finished eating my meal and did the dishes, and Cakewalk was still not done yet when I came back. I can't explain how sad I feel... ?

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, this is bizarre. The Chrome usage is another weird thing too. I'd almost suspect malware on your machine.

What I'd probably suggest is taking a full system image of your computer (using Acronis or something like that), backing that up to an external drive, then first trying a clean install of Cakewalk to see if that makes any difference. If it doesn't, then I'd suggest a clean install of Windows.

You'll be able to go back to your existing image of your machine in minutes from the backup so you'll have a safety net if you don't want to commit to this kind of undertaking yet.

I'd ordinarily not recommend going as far as nuking your OS but this is definitely an outlier. You'll at least be able to rule out hardware or virus related reasons for this. And, ultimately, this might be a real butt-pain in the short term but those import times are absolutely ridiculous - you'll save in the long run.

Edited August 12, 2022 by Lord Tim

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

I'd be inclined to agree with Lord Tim
There are a lot of variables here to rule in/out and the OS rebuild will certainly address several in one go.

Prior to doing so though i'd run a disk benchmark - this will verify whether the hard disk is achieving the expected latency/file transfer performance for different sizes of files. I appreciate that copying regular files appears to show performance as normal, but there's a always a chance that the issue is specific to a specific block size/configuration. That can then be compared against the figures for the brand new disk type of that model.

Also prior to rebuilding the OS, i'd open up the PC and do some cleaning and checking all cables are securely connected.

I can understand your frustrations with this one - so hopeful we can get to the bottom of this.

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

One other quick question - what's your CPU/RAM utilisation like?
Are you using a system pagefile? How's that configured if so?

Just wondering if there might be some contention for resource taking place elsewhere that could be causing the constraint that means you're not getting the full performance of the disks (as would seem to be indicated if other copies are occuring within reasonable time frames).

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

In your preferences can you also check these settings? For SSD I believe these should both be set to disabled for the best performance.

 

[Lord Tim]

The really wacky thing is that every other operation seems to be normal, it's just the import speed, yeah? And, aside from Chrome being pegged when things are importing (which is suspicious, mind you), everything else seems to be functioning normally.

A failing disk would affect everything. An infected system would likely show more symptoms than this. CbB seems to be playing back OK so there's no issue with reads and writes from disks... all of the usual suspects are pretty much ruled out. The only thing that could make any sense is some aggressive scanning by an antivirus or some other app while a file is being read (possibly something to do with Chrome? Who knows), but that doesn't seem to be the case either. I'm also inclined to think that it's not hardware related at all, so that really takes us back to Cakewalk, Windows or some hidden malicious actor that is oddly specific.

We're all just guessing at this point, unfortunately, even with the great info you've given us. I'd definitely start with doing a thorough virus, malware and rootkit scan, then try a clean CbB install and see if that helps. If not... then yeah, it might be system related as I said, but it's a big job to start over.  

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

Probably worth trying the import with both AV disabled as a quick test.
If that does return speed to normal then you'll want to put some exclusion rules in place for the Cakewalk process and also the music content directories.

Edited August 12, 2022 by Matthew Simon Fletcher