**UPDATE*** Problems with cracks and pops after Windows 11 update - refer end post

[Harley Dear]

Hi all,

Our band uses cakewalk for backing tracks, all midi files.

Whilst we’ve had crackle and pop problems in the past ( and have posted here about those ) we’ve solved the problems satisfactorily up until now.

Since the last Windows 11 update a couple of nights ago though, CbB is not operating well like it did before. Quite a few files have severe crackles and pops now, whereas before the update they were fine.

In addition, it now takes about 5 – 10 times longer to load a CWP file than it did before.

I’ve noticed the main VST that’s affected seems to be the SSDSampler5 1 ( Steve Slate drums ). We have the individual drum set instruments routed to several outputs that go to our Soundcraft Ui24R mixer. If we now freeze the drum tracks, the file works a lot smoother, however what used to take about two minutes to freeze that drum tracks, now takes twenty – or more!

Clearly something in the W11 update has affected either the VST, or some settings within my laptop.

I followed Lord Tim’s advice on a previous post about dropouts and carried out the scans and repairs but this hasn’t fixed the problem. I also tried W11’s ‘go back’ to re-set W11 to an earlier version, but ran into problems doing that and couldn’t carry out the task.

With over 250 files, it’s too much to tray and freeze the drum tracks, and even if we did that, it’s just a sticking plaster on the problem, not a proper fix. Also we don’t want to ditch the SSDSampler5 1 as we like the sound and that would be mission impossible to re-write all our files now, and like I said, it’s worked fine up until now.

So, I’m wondering if anyone else has had these problems with cakewalk slowing down or not playing back well after W11 update? If so, how has this been resolved, or is it still a problem?

Any pointers and help would be welcome.

The buffer setting is at 2048 by the way.

Here’s the spec of our laptop. Also attached is our CWP template.

I've noticed a couple of other programmes slowed after the W11 update, e.g. Word ( when formatting a page  )

Thanks in anticipation.



 

1A Cakewalk UI24R template SI Bass.cwp

Edited July 24, 2023 by Harley Dear

[57Gregy]

I don't know why you're getting poor performance after the latest Windows update, but I suggest you dispense with the VST instruments in a live setting. I think that's just asking for trouble.

I would bounce every synth track to audio and archive/hide the MIDI and synth tracks. Moreover, I would bounce all of those tracks to a single stereo track and then archive and hide those tracks. It wouldn't take but a second to load a song then.

With over 250 files, that would take a long time to do, I know, but could be done.

Hopefully someone can help you with the update slowdown.

 

 

[Promidi]

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers for your audio interface?

[Harley Dear]

1 hour ago, Promidi said:

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers for your audio interface?

Yes Promidi, I have just done that after seeing your post- no improvement I'm afraid.

[Harley Dear]

4 hours ago, 57Gregy said:

I don't know why you're getting poor performance after the latest Windows update, but I suggest you dispense with the VST instruments in a live setting. I think that's just asking for trouble.

I would bounce every synth track to audio and archive/hide the MIDI and synth tracks. Moreover, I would bounce all of those tracks to a single stereo track and then archive and hide those tracks. It wouldn't take but a second to load a song then.

With over 250 files, that would take a long time to do, I know, but could be done.

Hopefully someone can help you with the update slowdown.

 

 

Thanks for helping.

Up until now, the way we've been running CbB has worked fine - mostly ( and apart from some glitches I have posted about before ). In fact I have an older laptop using windows 10 and CbB runs these files perfectly without any glitches. However that laptop is old and soon it will probably die on us so prefer to use the newer Rog Strix - if we can!

Our Soundcraft UI24R mixer is patched ( for lack of a better word ) to CbB which allows us to mix separate components of the drum kit as well as other instruments so we would like to have that rather than just a single stereo track.

If need be we'll freeze all the files' drum tracks as a last resort. At least we know that works until we find a better solution.
 

Edited June 27, 2023 by Harley Dear

[Larioso]

A guy at Bluecat Audio posted these tips

https://www.bluecataudio.com/Blog/tip-of-the-day/how-to-optimize-a-windows-laptop-for-low-latency-real-time-audio/

 

He fixed his problems

- running Resplendence Latency Monitor to see what is hurting

- setting cpu affinity to let some cores avoid to clash with audio

 

Other things that comes to mind is Microsoft fablesse to make everybody logged in at Microsoft account and sync stuff and what not. I would put network wifi in flight mode or something to avoid such crap interfering. You really have to be out and about to avoid that.

 

Turn off any hibernating too, or that occupies a lot of memory windows thinks is left over.

If entire computer lags something like this might be part of issues too.

 

Seagate has SeaTools which is rather cool to do some performance tests of drives. It does non-seagate stuff too.

Hope you get some ideas...

Edited June 27, 2023 by Larioso

[Harley Dear]

Thanks Laioso

[reginaldStjohn]

Make sure the windows update didn't re-enable disabled audio devices and that it didn't install the Realtek ASIO driver.

[Harley Dear]

Thanks ReginaldStjohn.
Interesting - I went into 'Edit config file' a whole pile of entries  there relating to Reaper ( which I no longer use )  - see below. The soundcraft USB ASIO is what we use. I wonder if I shouldn't delete all those reaper references? Would it make a difference?

When the Soundcraft is connected, it shows up ticked on the devices and the reaper is greyed out.

Seeing I hardly venture into this part of the set-up, I feel like I'm stepping into Mordor, so I need to ask help before I screw it up even further ?




 

[John Vere]

Computers for live music are still a dangerous item. So much can go wrong. I only use Wave audio for my backing tracks. One less thing to go wrong.  
But here’s another thing that can go wrong and just recently happened to me. A 4  year old Samsung SSD drive which was less than half full slowed to a crawl.  I tested it with the Samsung Magician app and it was reading at about 5% of its specifications.  $50 fix. This was my main DAWS data drive. 
This was a lesson learned so I ordered 4 more Samsung 500GB SSD drives  and swapped out the 3 in my main DAW and the one in my laptop I use for live gigs. 
The Samsung Magician has a data transfer tool that made updating the OS drive a 20 minute operation.  I did this for the laptop and my main Computer. No issues at all. It’s free.
The laptop I use for gigs is 2008 Sony running W7. Only 8 GB RAM and Duo core but I can play most all my full projects on it as well as recording 16 track live bands. I say it’s the speed and integrity of the SSD drive that keeps is going.   

[Patrick Wichrowski]

2 hours ago, Harley Dear said:

Interesting - I went into 'Edit config file' a whole pile of entries  there relating to Reaper ( which I no longer use )  - see below. The soundcraft USB ASIO is what we use. I wonder if I shouldn't delete all those reaper references? Would it make a difference?

I updated Reaper recently and unchecked the option to install the  ASIO driver from Reaper. 

Edited June 27, 2023 by Patrick Wichrowski

[Promidi]

Are you comfortable editing the registry?

[bitflipper]

First principle of software troubleshooting: figure out what changed.

Assuming it's the same laptop with the same applications installed on it, can we assume that the Win11 install is the only thing that's changed?

If so, then my first guess would be that the Windows update re-enabled some background processes that weren't running under Win10. For example, were you disabling Wi-Fi previously when using this laptop on stage (recommended)? Maybe Win11 turned it back on.

Running LatencyMon could provide a clue.

[Harley Dear]

Thanks bitflipper.

Yes Windows 11 update is all that changed. Funny thing, I managed to roll back to a previous W11 update - the problem still exists so that last update must have made some unchangeable mods to the overall system.

We have been running WiFi at gigs and never was a problem before. However good point, perhaps I set up a different use on the Laptop and have that disable the Wi-Fi ???

The old laptop with Windows 10 runs seamlessly - so strange.

Yep, running latency mon to get to the bottom of it.

[bitflipper]

Yeh, wi-fi can kill audio performance. Network interrupts take priority over audio interrupts, and that sneaky little bugger is constantly chatting with the world, probing for any of his networky cohorts to start a chat. Best to kill that chatty CPU thief when you have better things to do than search for printers.

Every version of Windows enables services on initial installation, including some processes that you don't need when your laptop has just one purpose. When you reinstalled Windows, it likely turned on a bunch of things that are either new services or services you'd previously disabled under Win10.

LatencyMon is a good start, but it'll only tell you about a specific type of problem (DPC overhead) and may not tip you off to other background processes that are hogging the CPU, memory or I/O bus. You'll still have to painstakingly run down the list of running processes, identify which ones are eating resources and figure out if they're necessary (e.g. antivirus realtime protection).

Check out the link that Larioso posted above. It's specifically about using laptops on stage.

[Henrizzle]

I have had the same sort of issue with Windows11 on large projects and was able to solve this issue... sometimes... Go into the Device Manager and disable any audio devices are part of the system that you are not using. Like the Nvidia audio devices for example that is part of the HDMI audio for the GPU and any additional audio device that may be part of your motherboard that you are not using. This solved the issue for awhile but I still get pops and scrapes now and then and I notice sometimes there are residual buffers that are repeating through tracks that have no audio data. This to me points to either a memory management or not zeroing buffers when they should be cleared issue. I found doing larger mix frames will reduce but not eliminate the issue. I think I will try going back to  the last version of Sonar soon if this persists. I have to data or exposure to source code for Cakewalk but I assume there have been incremental changes over time... but... I have also been doing progressively larger project over time as well, more tracks, more bussing, more plugins etc.

One more thought, Cakewalk if you are listening. This suspiciously sounds like a buffer / cache alignment issue. The logic is, if there are stray writes this programs would probably crash eventually. So... if buffers are not allocated and padded to cache page size. Invalidating or flushing the cache could cause something like this occasionally while not crashing the system. So there are lots of things in flight, it could be a Windows update that got more aggressive with memory cache management and now exposes these issues or changes in Cakewalk over time, or the issue has always existed but not exposed until now.

Another possible issue is multi-processing and thread synchronization. I suppose if it is this issue, disabling multiprocessing would solve this issue. Thread sync and execution is managed by the OS, so changes in Windows update could also expose issues not encountered by bugs from before. The scary thing now is in the past I would experience pops and scrapes now and then but when I go to render it would always work correctly... that is no longer the case. So now I have to listen to the entire output and there may be small artifacts that add a little noise that is not so severe that I can hear in one pass... to be revealed at a later time after the song has been published for example. This leads me to to possibly going to a different DAW in the end.

Humm... I just did a render with multiprocessing disabled, it took a long time but... little clicks are gone. This points to possible one or both issues I mentioned above.

Edited July 23, 2023 by Henrizzle
Additional thoughts.

[Harley Dear]

*** UPDATE ***

I took my laptop into a tech expert. He couldn't see too much wrong with it, so he updated the BIOS, Nvidia and Internet drivers.

That seems to have fixed the problem as CbB is running like it did prior to that Wii update.

Whilst we don't know which of those updates did the trick, it least it's working and gigable now.

Thanks everyone for your detailed help - it really was appreciated and something I can store for any future problem/s I might have.

Harley

[Matthew Carr]

The last post was the post above from Harley!

Sounds like his problem was a driver issue, but if you want a great free guide to optimising a windows laptop for live performance, a read of this produced by the guys at GigPerformer  gives some good advice.

The Ultimate Guide to Optimize your Windows PC for the Stage

I'd also really recommend:

- If at all possible, keeping a separate, dedicated setup for your live performances - that way you can keep it off the internet (mostly) and avoid updates until they've been tested on your home rig. 

- Bouncing your midi down to audio - unless you modify vst params used in the backing track on the fly. With 250 songs it's a pain, but will use a lot less resources.

- Never have wifi enabled when playing - so very often the cause of dropouts