Setting Up A New DAW. Advice?

[Larry Jones]

I have put this off for years,  but this month I bought a used Dell computer and today I decommissioned the old PC and began setting up the "new" one. Anyone who's ever had to do this knows why I've put it off. The old computer was state of the art -- ten years ago -- but it was showing its age, acting weird, doing everything s l o w l y, and getting damned noisy. I kept it going as long as I felt safe to do so, but I have decided to move on. The new machine is an i7-7700, so I guess there will be no Win 11 upgrade, but I can live with that.

I just fired it up, installed the Focusrite driver for my first gen Scarlett 6i6, and spent spent 2 hours trying to get sound out of it. I finally figured it out, but that made me realize I'm a bit -- shall we say? -- out of shape when it comes to working on computers and software. There is currently no other software installed, and before I dive in and make a bunch of stupid mistakes, I'm asking for any advice, tips and best practices any of you might be able to give me to reduce the speedbumps and make the most of this experience. Are there any definite "don'ts?" What about antivirus? Anything I should do in the BIOS to improve DAW performance?

I have the installers for SONAR Producer 8.5, X2, X3 and Platinum and I'll put those in first to get all the extras that came with them, followed by CbB. Beyond that I don't know exactly what I'm going to do, or if there are big mistakes in my immediate future, so I'm open to any thoughts from all of you.

Thanks!

Edited February 28, 2023 by Larry Jones

[AndyB01]

Hi Larry

I've got the same CPU (no Win 11 for me either). I used to have a Gen 1 Focusrite interface (2i4). One thing I learned was that it really did not like USB 3.0 ports and used to BSOD all the time if I used one - luckily I had a USB. 2.0 I could use instead. Also the general release driver for the Focusrite was unreliable and used to cause crashes (I never worked out why), but I did get more stability with a beta driver the guys at Focusrite sent me. I eventually upgraded to a Gen 3 2i2 and have had no issues since.

My top tips therefore would be use the Focusrite support guys if you need them and avoid USB 3.0 for Gen 1 interfaces if you can.

My approach to the BIOS is 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' but I did find disabling fast boot was something that improved overall stability on my rig.

For AV, I use Bitdefender, nice small footprint and never causes me an issue; but the stock offer from MS Defender is more than adequate these days and no longer the standing joke it once was.

What drives does it have? Upgrading mine from spinners to SSDs had a great impact on performance and was a good value upgrade. I would recommend if you're trying to get some performance cost for a reasonable outlay.

Finally, always worth checking sleep and power settings - especially for USB ports that have a habit of dozing off when you least want them to. I set mine to a high power plan.

Hope some of that helps and good luck with the rebuild.

Andy

[Larry Jones]

@Andy

Great points, thanks! I was already aware of the USB2 vs USB3 thing. It was a hot topic for a while in the old SONAR forum, and at the time I think it was determined that USB2 was not only preferred by most interface manufacturers, it had more than adequate bandwidth for audio. Not sure about the Focusrite driver -- they seem to have a newish one for my old interface, and it worked well enough today, at least on YouTube Hot Chicks in Bikinis music, which is all I've had for testing so far (OK, I could have listened to Van Morrison...). Wish I could use the Gen 2/3 Focusrite Control, instead of the clunky Mix Control that comes with my driver.

This box came with a 1TB SSD and I added a 2TB second drive.  I don't know the terminology, but the 2TB drive looks like a stick of Wrigley's Doublemint. This is not as much storage as I had in the old machine, but I have taken a vow not to save everything in the future, and it's all backed up anyway, so I think I'll be OK. These are my first SSDs, and I'm thrilled with the speed -- and the silence.

Thanks again for taking the time!

Edited March 1, 2023 by Larry Jones

[scook]

5 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

I have the installers for SONAR Producer 8.5, X2, X3 and Platinum and I'll put those in first to get all the extras that came with them, followed by CbB.

Unless you want the DAWs, the advanced install options may be used to get all the extra content from 8.5 and X3 without actually installing the DAWs. The X2 DAW must be installed to get V-Vocal. Use the minimal installation option to get the DAW+V-Vocal (they are both included in "Program Files") like this:

adding any additional components desired.

 Don't forget the X2a update. It contains the final version of V-Vocal. 

[Larry Jones]

@scook

Thanks Steve. I haven't done anything since wrestling with the Focusrite today. What I'm wondering now is if I have all the license information for all those old versions of SONAR. I haven't even tried to find my Command Center account for some years. I guess I'll be on a search and rescue mission for that stuff next.

BTW, I think I read somewhere that there is no such thing as a full installer for 8.5, just an update from version 8. Is that true?

Thanks for your help with this and over the years!

[scook]

Your old Cakewalk account should be as it was in Nov 2017.

The Command Center still works for Platinum and other CCC aware installers.

If you forgot your old Cakewalk password contact support@cakewalk.com. They will have to perform the password reset.

 

SONAR 8.5 was the first version of SONAR with a downloadable upgrade HOWEVER; the downloadable 8.5 upgrade is not a full version of SONAR. The upgrade requires SONAR 8.0 be installed prior to running the upgrade. 

The only way to get a full version of SONAR Producer 8.5 was to purchase the disk set. The only differences between the full retail version of SONAR 8.5 and the upgrade disk set were the price and packaging.

 

SONAR X1 was the first fully downloadable version.

 

[JoeGBradford]

Before you decommissioned the old PC did you deauthorise any ilok and Steinberg PC based licences you may have and other software authorisation that are tied to PC hardware eg Waves? 

[Larry Jones]

@JoeGBradford

This is a great reminder - I still have access to the old machine, and now that you mention it, I'll need it!

[JoeGBradford]

You will! Mine all went very smoothly except for the Steinberg Licence manager which was a pain until I found a Licence manager helper piece of software which solved the problem. Worth bearing in mind if you have any Steinberg VSTs etc and get a problem 

[Starship Krupa]

Shoot. Late to the party here for some reason, but have shared some knowledge with Larry via messages.

As far as anti-malware solutions, sure, the stock Defender seems to be a decent enough choice. I'm not a great source of knowledge regarding anti-virus software because I don't do the things that make that type of software have to do what it does. I don't open email attachments, I don't install iffy software packages. That's pretty much it. I call it using anti-malware behavior instead of anti-malware software.

I've gotten exactly two malware infestations in the over 30 years I've been using PC's. One of those was when I was working at a software company and the head developer's PC had a virus that he never seemed to get rid of, and he gave me a floppy with a new build on it. It did no damage beyond making my system unbootable, and I fixed it instantly with an anti-virus program. The second was when I deliberately disobeyed my own policy of not installing software from iffy sources. This was over 20 years ago and I took the lesson to heart. Once again, while it was annoying to clean it up, nothing was lost or compromised as a result.

In that time, especially in the days before Windows 10 and Defender, I did repair several friends' computers that had been rendered so slow as to be useless due to anti-virus software itself. Memory consumption, CPU resources, annoying pop-ups, slow file I/O, basically I've seen anti-virus software exhibit everything that people fear about malware with the lone exception of data loss. So I'm cynical about it.

I never, ever used (and still don't) any anti-malware solution that stayed running, and especially not one that scans in real time upon file access. I run Windows 10 Pro so that I can disable Defender's realtime scanning.

The thing to know about Defender is that by default, it stays running and scans every file that is read or written to disk. For people who want that level of protection, I suggest at the very least they go into the Defender settings and exclude certain folders from realtime scanning. These would be the project folders from your DAW(s) and NLE(s), C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3, whichever folder(s) your VST2's live in, as well as those programs' own folders, including any, like Cakewalk uses, that use AppData\Roaming folders.

You don't want or need for Defender to be realtime scanning every audio or video file that your computer reads or writes, it's just wasteful of computing resources. I noticed that program installers are able to put in their own Defender exclusions and have suggested the Cakewalk devs  do the same thing. Celemony Melodyne, a program that does a LOT of speed critical disk work, was the program I noticed putting in its own exclusions.

As for the other things mentioned: that "stick of gum" form factor is called M2. Pretty much any motherboard made in the past 10 years will have at least one. There are 2 types of drive controller technology that you can plug into an M2 slot. NVMe and SATA. Of those, NVMe is the faster, but since they're both SSD's, in use the practical difference is negligible. You'd only notice a difference when running drive benchmarks.

Dang, "hours" is a long time to get a class-compliant USB audio interface to work. Care to share what the issue was? I'll chime in in agreement that USB2-?USB2 does seem to work more reliably than USB2->USB3 in some cases. US3 ports are supposed to be fully backward compatible with older USB2 devices, but really, if I have a choice between plugging a peripheral into the type of port it was made for, or plugging it into a port that only supports it in compatibility mode, I'll bet on the native port.

A trick I learned years ago, from helping out someone on this forum I think: if you have an older device that just won't play with USB3, and you don't have enough USB2 ports (notebook or whatever), you can plug a USB2 hub into one of your USB3 ports and plug the device into the hub.

Another thing: audio interfaces are the one type of device where I would make sure to be using a high quality USB cable. No, it usually makes no difference in the function of other devices that don't rely on streaming a ton of data, but it does with audio interfaces. The less RF interference the better. USB and your interface have built-in error-correction, but the thing is, they're happiest when there are fewer errors to correct. Spring for a nice braided sleeve Belden or Monoprice cable. Weirdly enough, it can even result in your recording and playback sounding better, due to better jitter performance. This is stuff I would much rather not be true, but it is. There's so much (justified) backlash about expensive audiophile cabling and whatnot, but jitter is for real, its effect on perceived sound is real, and the less of it the better.

As far as tuning Windows 10 for DAW/NLE performance, the best guide that I know of comes straight from our own (I call him that because he uses Cakewalk and sometimes participates on the forum) Pete Brown, Microsoft engineer and musician: https://aka.ms/Win10AudioTweakGuide.

The Dell BIOS settings are notoriously primitive and locked down, as befits their expected operating environment where they don't want the head of accounting's gamer kid to come in on Saturday and render his parent's workstation unusable or unstable by trying to overclock the CPU and RAM. I've found that I can do a few things to optimize it for DAW/NLE use. Starting from the defaults, of course disable any hardware ports you're not using (serial, parallel, onboard audio). Then make sure that Intel Turbo Boost is enable, as well as hyperthreading and (this is controversial) SpeedStep. These actions, along with an OS power plan setting that nails the processor speed to 100%, will get your CPU to idle and burst above its rated clock.

And regarding BIOS versions, there are some who adopt a "not broke, won't fix" approach, but I am not one of them, and Dell themselves recommend keeping Dell systems updated to the most recent BIOS. I just flashed a new one into my Dell notebook and it seems to have somehow resulted in improved LatencyMon readings.

Basically, anything that says "power-saving" is oriented toward portables running on battery. Desktops that are always plugged in don't need that throttling. If you want to save a few dollars on the electricity you're workstation is using, turn it off when you're not using it. Now that drives are mostly solid state, the old debate about whether to leave drives spinning or turn them off is moot, and systems now boot up almost as fast as they return from sleep.

As ever, run Task Manager and look for unnecessary processes and startups. Dell has a bunch of management stuff for corporate IT people that you don't need at home. Dell Data Vault and Management Console and the like. It is good to go to their website, make an account, and register your system. That way you can run their driver update checker more easily. And I have found that in a few cases, the Dell drivers for a given component worked better than the Intel or Realtek or whatever.

My favorite utility for checking system information is HWINFO. Free of course, and it lets you monitor processor speed (to see if something's holding it down) and temperatures. Especially in a SFF system like yours, it's normal to get some fan blast when the CPU is really working hard. That's just the fan doing its job as it should: it blows harder when the chip gets hotter, and the chip gets hotter as it works harder.

Using the onboard Intel graphics can result in reduced CPU performance, but only for a secondary reason: if you're doing things that tax both the CPU and the GPU at the same time, the resulting heat can cause throttling. If you separate CPU and GPU they don't have to share a cooling solution.

When guying a refurb system, I'd probably want to reapply the CPU heatsink paste (if it's not too big a hassle in an SFF). It can eventually harden and become less effective. The smaller the case, the harder heat is to manage, so give it all the help you can, make sure there's space around the case for the air to get in and out.

[Larry Jones]

@Starship Krupa

Thanks, Erik! I'm still bumbling through the setup of the "new" PC, but it is my wont to get my cart in front of the horse from time to time, and so I have embarked on two recording projects before I was entirely hardware-ready.  As a result I am having to interrupt the creative flow occasionally to sort things out. It's been a pleasure working with the new box, but there are issues. Mostly there seem to be a few plugins that I used to use a lot and no longer have. I thought if I installed all my old versions of Cake/SONAR I would have all those plugins, but I don't. The best free guitar amp simulator I ever had was Guitar Rig 3, which must have come with some old version of SONAR. It came along for the ride to the new machine, but as a limited time demo version, wanting to be activated with a serial number. I have no idea.

But free plugins are (not even) a dime a dozen, so I'll survive the losses. Right now I need to figure out why I can hear my electric guitar through the monitors when it is plugged in but not routed anywhere. And then when it is routed to a track I can hear it through the track and also through whatever phantom leak it's sneaking through. I know this because the two sounds are a noticeable number of milliseconds apart. I'll post a question about this in its own thread, so if you have any thoughts on it you can jump in there.

Again, many thanks for your well-beyond-the-call-of-duty post above. You are a great and generous resource.

PS: Since you asked, I don't remember what the problem was with my Scarlett interface, or if it even was the interface that was giving me a headache. I have a policy of not concerning myself with why something didn't work. I screw around until it does work, and then I forget about it.

[Starship Krupa]

3 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

I have a policy of not concerning myself with why something didn't work.

As do I. For the most part. Sometimes I want to take note of how I boogered something up for future reference!

4 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

The best free guitar amp simulator I ever had was Guitar Rig 3, which must have come with some old version of SONAR. It came along for the ride to the new machine, but as a limited time demo version, wanting to be activated with a serial number. I have no idea.

I think the latest, albeit "lite" version of Guitar Rig is included with NI's free Komplete Start package.

You know about the "Favorite Freeware" topics in Instruments and Effects, right? You'll find all the plug-ins you need there. Buying plug-ins these days is optional.