Engine Load Max/Dropouts

[koneil4]

I've used Sonar/Cakewalk for almost 20 years and love it!  But I recently bought a new Lenovo laptop (16gb RAM - Ryzen 7 - 5700U) and I'm having all kinds of problems with dropouts. This morning I had a project open that only had one empty audio track (muted) and one instrument track with EZ Drummer 3 but that was also muted and inactive.  The only thing playing was the metronome and I was still getting engine load spikes up to 250% and dropouts.  

I'm using a brand new Behringer interface with an ASIO driver that seems to be working OK.  I've tried using a Scarlett 2i2 as well but the problems were even worse.  I've tried everything that I can think of to resolve (change buffer settings, deleting/reinstalling drivers, shutting everything else off that is running on the computer etc.) but nothing seems to help.  

If anyone has any thoughts on what the problem might be I would appreciate it.  It seems like there must be some kind of conflict with something outside of Cakewalk on the computer, hopefully it's not impossible to track that down.

 

[reginaldStjohn]

Have you run "latencyMon" program to determine what might be causing the issues? Laptops are much harder to get working consistently because of all the power saving they try to do.

Make sure you have your laptop plugged in, set to maximum power profile, turn off usb sleeping in the power profile as well.

 

[Chris-J]

Get rid of any bloatware you have that shipped with your laptop.  You said you shut down some useless stuff, that should help.

I find it helps if I set my laptop to “Airplane Mode”, plus I’ve turned off the Ethernet ports as I never use them anyway.

Make sure the laptop is plugged in to AC, i.e. NOT ON BATTERY!

You are on the right track if you are using ASIO.   Make sure you are using Focusrite’s most up to date ASIO driver with the Scarlett.  Ditto for the Behringer interface.

I have a running thread in this forum as I have a somewhat similar problem.    There is some good advice in that thread from people who know far about this than I do.    I’m in the midst of troubleshooting some smaller issues in my 3 week old Dell laptop.    It should be easy to find; it’s my one and only thread.

It has “88 mS” of silence in the thread title.