Unusual Pops and Clicks Issue

[Philip Chika]

I've been using Cakewalk for years and have dealt with all kinds of issues with unwanted clicks and pops, usually it comes down to latency issues or ASIO driver issues and usually it's most prevalent when recording audio. However this issue is very different from the run of the mill issues of this sort. In this case, I'm getting pops on some (but not all) of my VSTs when playing back but if I take the vst track and bounce to track, the recorded audio is fine. It's only when live playing  the midi, and again only on some vsts (32 bit ones I believe). I've tried cranking up the latency but it makes no difference.   

Another peculiar thing is that if I record the midi and just play it back, then I get no pops. Only if I'm live playing do I get these pops. I also have an installation of reaper on the same machine. I get none of these issues with it even on the same ASIO settings. So It's definitely a Cakewalk issue, not a gear issue.

 

[David Baay]

5 minutes ago, Philip Chika said:

I'm getting pops on some (but not all) of my VSTs

I gather you mean VST instruments and probably polyphonic ones like keys/pianos as opposed to FX; is that right? Are any of them using physical modeling (e.g. Pianoteq) or disk streaming (e.g. Ivory). Both of those types would tend to give smoother playback from recorded MIDI that allows buffering up audio in advance vs. responding to live MIDI input.

[Philip Chika]

Yes vst instruments. I don't know about the  physical modeling or disk streaming but I can tell you I use these same VSTs on another machine with cakewalk with no issues as well as with Reaper, again with no issues. In any case do you have any advice on what I might try to resolve?

[David Baay]

2 hours ago, Philip Chika said:

I use these same VSTs on another machine with cakewalk with no issues

This suggests you just need to go through all the usual PC optimizations, starting with disabling CPU-throttling functions like Speedstep and C-States in BIOS. setting Windows power management to High Performance and running LatencyMon to check for spikes in Deferred Procedure Call (DPC) latency and find their cause(s):

https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

Common offenders are onboard Bluetooth and WiFi (disable one or both in BIOS).

One thing that CbB seems more sensitive to than some other DAWs is the presence of crummy 3rd-party audio drivers on the system. If you have any of these installed, you should remove/disable them (Google for instructions):

Steinberg's "Generic Low Latency" ASIO driver

ASIO4All

Magix Low Latency 2016 (ASIO4All in sheep's clothing)

Realtek ASIO

nVIDIA HD Audio (not usually a problem, but can be disabled in Device Manager)

Related to this, some users will advise to disable onboard sound (e.g. Realtek WDM/WASAPI), but I prefer to leave it active and assigned as the default sound device for Windows so that the O/S doesn't try to use the ASIO interface driver. Sometimes it's necessary to plug something into Mic/Line jacks on the soundcard in order for the O/S to detect them.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 13, 2023 by David Baay

[Philip Chika]

A whole lotta greek to me.

 

[David Baay]

1 hour ago, Philip Chika said:

A whole lotta greek to me.

https://www.google.com/search?q=translate+greek+to+english

[Jim Roseberry]

Sounds like a problem with DPC Latency (not to be confused with audio latency).

 

Download and run Latency Mon

https://www.resplendence.com/download/LatencyMon.exe

 

It'll tell you the highest DPC Latency... and list the culprit.

Many times, high DPC Latency is caused by a poorly written/behaved driver (monopolizes the CPU).

[Philip Chika]

Jim Roseberry I'll give it a shot, but how does the driver know or distingsuish between when I'm playing live and when it's just the track playing back?

[Jim Roseberry]

1 hour ago, Philip Chika said:

Jim Roseberry I'll give it a shot, but how does the driver know or distingsuish between when I'm playing live and when it's just the track playing back?

The driver would have no idea...

 

But here's the thing:

High DPC Latency would affect realtime playback (glitches).

Audio that's bounced-down (not in realtime) would thus not be affected by high DPC Latency.

[Philip Chika]

Not asking about bounced down tracks, I'm asking about midi tracks that are playing back vs me playing live. When I  record or just play live I get the glitches. But when I play back those same midi tracks, no glitches. Only happens when I play live, whether recording into a track or just playing along  with a track, or just playing without the tracks playing. 

[John Vere]

As both very very qualified computer and audio techs have just said. You need to optimize your computer. If working on a computer is Greek to you then you can expect issues with using one for audio. It comes with the territory.
There are musicians and there are nerds. You have to be both to play the game.

Or I do believe Jim can be hired as a consultant as this is his day job. He is one of the best too. 

[Jim Roseberry]

9 hours ago, Philip Chika said:

Not asking about bounced down tracks,

"In this case, I'm getting pops on some (but not all) of my VSTs when playing back but if I take the vst track and bounce to track, the recorded audio is fine. It's only when live playing  the midi, and again only on some vsts (32 bit ones I believe)."

 

This line (blue) from you original post... is why I mentioned "bounced-down" audio.

Since the bounce (whether a single track or an entire mix) is done offline, it's not subject to realtime processing demands. 

Thus, high DPC Latency wouldn't cause glitches in the bounced audio... but would cause glitches when playing back the project in realtime.

 

If you're using 32Bit plugins, those are being "bridged" to function.

Some plugins cope just fine being bridged... others can be completely unstable.

If this only happens with 32Bit plugins, it's most likely the culprit.

 

When doing basic trouble-shooting, you want to eliminate variables.

Latency Mon will either rule-in... or rule-out DPC Latency as a potential culprit.

Definitely worth the couple minutes of time/effort.

 

 

 

[Philip Chika]

4 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

If you're using 32Bit plugins, those are being "bridged" to function.

Some plugins cope just fine being bridged... others can be completely unstable.

If this only happens with 32Bit plugins, it's most likely the culprit.

In isolation this makes sense, but two things give me pause. First, these same plugins work just fine on my other Cakewalk installation which is on a weaker machine (I-7, 4th gen, 16 gb) using a Tascam USB interface on Win 10 64, but not so well on this new machine (I-7,  6th gen, 32 gb) with a focusrite scarlet 2i4 interface Win 10 64. However even on the new machine, these plugins work fine in Reaper, only a problem in Cakewalk. But on the new machine I have the latest version of Cakewalk, on my legacy machine I have not downloaded the latest upgrade yet. Now I'm afraid to. Anyway I will be trying the Latency Mon this evening. Wish me luck!

[Philip Chika]

12 hours ago, John Vere said:

There are musicians and there are nerds. You have to be both to play the game.

Or I do believe Jim can be hired as a consultant as this is his day job. He is one of the best too. 

Yeah I know. I'm actually both as well, software engineer with over 30 years in the field, but I'm software more than hardware these days.

Quote

disabling CPU-throttling functions like Speedstep and C-States in BIOS. setting Windows power management to High "Performance

These types of BIOS features did not exist back in my board slinging days (8088 to 286) and I could not find them in my current BIOS. I used Atari ST's in those days, they were vastly superior for music prod at that time but I readily yield to the experts in that area these days, current tech has moved well beyond where I ever was. Wonder if I could hire Jim to take a look. 

Edited December 15, 2023 by Philip Chika

[Jim Roseberry]

I'm heading out of town until the 21st.  

If you need assistance, I can certainly help.

 

One thing about Reaper, it's using a different application to bridge.

• Bit-Bridge is used for Cakewalk
• I believe JBridge is used for Reaper

Some 32Bit plugins cope well with one... but not the other.  

In short, to make your life less complicated... avoid 32Bit plugins.   ?

[Starship Krupa]

On 12/15/2023 at 11:26 AM, Jim Roseberry said:

In short, to make your life less complicated... avoid 32Bit plugins.

This.

If you go over to the Instruments and Effects forum, there is a topic on Favorite Freeware Instruments, where I bet you can find free 64-bit substitutes for whatever you're using.

If not, you can post there what you're using now and see if we can find you good substitutes.

REAPER is known for being a DAW that plays very well with challenging plug-ins, but they are the Achilles heel of any host. 

[David Baay]

On 12/14/2023 at 9:46 PM, Philip Chika said:

When I  record or just play live I get the glitches. But when I play back those same midi tracks, no glitches.

Playback of pre-existiing MIDI is more like playing recorded audio because CbB can look ahead and buffer up the  audio in advance rather than having to process each MIDI event as it arrives "unexpectedly" in real time. This is what the Prepare Using XX Millisecond Buffers setting is al about in MIDI Preferences. The default is 50ms which is equivalent to approximately 18 buffers of audio.

If it's really about bridging 32-bit plugins, Jbridge is very inexpensive and can be used in place of CbB's Bitbridge. I used it for years until I swore off 32-bit plugins altogther as it addressed some other issues with Bitbridge.

https://jstuff.wordpress.com/jbridge/

 

[sjoens]

On 12/13/2023 at 9:19 AM, David Baay said:

I prefer to leave it active and assigned as the default sound device for Windows so that the O/S doesn't try to use the ASIO interface driver.

Same here but I finally had to remove the SoundBlaster's ASIO from CbB's registry list for CbB to even open.  Originally it was benign, but some update broke something and made it hostile.

My newer laptop uses RealTek and has no ASIO, so no issues there.

EDIT: New Windows 10 install restored the Soundblaster ASIO tho CbB still functions better with it removed from Cakewalk's ASIO registry.

Edited February 25 by sjoens

[John Vere]

@wiviv you should start your own topic because what you have done is called high jacking. And when you do state what you problem is as this and what gear you are using is totally not clear. Like are you using an audio interface etc 

 

 

[Jim Roseberry]

14 hours ago, wiviv said:

Hi. I'm officially back to Team Parallels after having used VMware Fusion for years. The reason is that Parallels actually runs Windows 11 ARM on M1 machines, while VMware is stuck making excuses for why they can't do it. Years ago, like maybe around 2012 or something, I switched from Parallels to VMware because I like to use audio applications on my guest system and Parallels had a weird audio stuttering issue, where if the host system was very busy there would be these minuscule clicks and pops in the audio, even with full VM tools support and everything working correctly. It seemed as though maybe Parallels didn't implement an audio buffer at that time, so any slight delay would immediately cause micro gaps. VMware never had this issue, so instead of trying to fix it I just switched over at the time. Today I can only use Parallels, but surprisingly this is still an issue even in almost-2022. When I play audio inside a guest application, it works fine until I go back to the host system application and start doing stuff. Then I get clicks and pops. They're very faint, probably because these M1 machines are so fast, but it's still noticeable. I'm on an Apple M1 2020 Macbook Air 13", 16 GB RAM, 8 core GPU model. I'm running the Parallels recommended Windows 11 install, activated and fully up to date. My Parallels Desktop version is 17.1.1 (51537). VM tools are active. I have to believe that this is fixable, because it feels to me like with even a 5ms audio buffer (in the VM, not in the guest) you'd never get this problem. I'd be fine with slightly delayed audio if it means I get clean audio. However, I can't find anything in the way of an option for setting this. I'm perfectly fine with editing files outside of the main UI if this is required. Appreciate any help you might have to offer!

This is not going to be helpful... but why "chase your tail" with VMs?

They're never going to be ideal for low-latency audio applications (DAW purposes).

If you have a M1 Macbook Air, run the likes of Reaper (small, clean, lean, CPU efficient).

With the Macbook Air, you're dealing with relatively low CPU clock-speed... which is going to make (clean) low-latency audio harder to achieve (especially under VM).