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High power usage in Cakewalk


jono grant

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Hi, I have a session with a lot of midi tracks running some fairly large samples.

Even with all plugins disabled and buffers set higher than I'd like, I'm getting freezes and stops when trying to record additional midi.

In task manager,  Cakewalk shows CPU: 7.2%  Memory: 13,778.20  Power usage: VERY HIGH

I have 64 GB RAM. (Is it too little?)

How can i fix the VERY HIGH power usage? Bigger power supply? Or is there another factor causing that?

Any help appreciated! Thanks

Jono  

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Pragi said:

 the i/o buffer settings   512 ?

Bigger?

Mine is 256.  I am not have high power usage. 

I am using a older version of the task manager.  Where are you seeing: Power usage: VERY HIGH  (screenshot might be handy)

What graphics adapter are you using?

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Well, that's the thing, no, I'm getting dropouts while trying to record new midi.

I don't think it's overheating, I'll check in the bios.

I just have so much going on in the file. Large libraries loaded and running live, video file playing, plugin city (although disabled)

It's a tv score/musical.

*Basically, at a certain point, after adding more midi, it can't handle it. Task manager is just telling me of the problem. 

I wondered if doubling the RAM and getting a bigger power supply would help.

i'll check the temp

 

 

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2 minutes ago, jono grant said:

Well, that's the thing, no, I'm getting dropouts while trying to record new midi.

I don't think it's overheating, I'll check in the bios.

I just have so much going on in the file. Large libraries loaded and running live, video file playing, plugin city (although disabled)

It's a tv score/musical.

*Basically, at a certain point, after adding more midi, it can't handle it. Task manager is just telling me of the problem. 

I wondered if doubling the RAM and getting a bigger power supply would help.

i'll check the temp

 

 

Doubling the Ram would only help if you are actually hitting the ram ceiling.

Getting a bigger power supply would probably not help. 

How many tracks in the project?

What happens if you disable the “video file playing”?

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I agree you need to kill some useless process. Have you run latency monitor by Resplendent? 
And video will kill you machine if you don’t have a capable video card. I just upgraded and what a difference in editing and rendering.  Your other specs are very good.
Another thing I learned was the more cores you have and they need to be used not idle. 
 

There’s lots of stuff can cause issues and they won’t show in task manager all the time 

Edited by John Vere
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1 hour ago, Promidi said:

Doubling the Ram would only help if you are actually hitting the ram ceiling.

Getting a bigger power supply would probably not help. 

How many tracks in the project?

What happens if you disable the “video file playing”?

Everything I close/disable, helps in some way. 

Probably about 60 tracks in the project. I could have a session with tons of audio and plugs and it's okay (UAD DSP) - I imagine i could have a fair amount of midi tracks but mixed with audio/video/plugs, I think that's where it starts to get bogged down.

Yes  - not using anywhere near my RAM, but seems to act like ceiling for some reason. Like in the old days of Win XP, you could have 16 GB of RAM but windows would only allow 4GB to be used at one time. I know modern windows can use all it's RAM but still strage.

Just trying to figure out where the bottle neck might be. All the meters show reasonable load except "power" being very high when using plugins/midi and moderately high when only midi. It's the only thing I see in the red so to speak.

happy to upgrade, just not sure what! :)

 

 

 

 

 

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Are you seeing huge lag in drawing GUI when you edit notes and controller events in Piano Roll View? If yes then you may encounter same issue I had. In my experience Cakewalk suffers from it when a certain amount of MIDI data (events/clips) in a project crosses a critical mass, and for me this happens since Sonar times. Bouncing clips to reduce the amount could help but I don't have any real recipe.

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+1 Unfortunately, the performance monitor doesn't deep dive into every plugin to look like this (I didn't embed the image because it is large and is from S1P), but something to bear in mind is that not all VSTis are created equal. Depending on how libraries are streamed and the complexity of the VSTi itself (about all of them have internal FX you cannot shut off via CbB), one or more of them can easily be giving you a nice latency hit that you are not able to see with the performance monitor itself. If you have shut off all FX in CbB (so you got busses too), then I would focus on VSTis...

  1. Look at disk usage in Windows Performance monitoring (this will also add another CPU hit, so be mindful of this, but can help to see). As CbB is the host, it will hide which VSTis are causing it, but will let you know if it is a streaming issue.
  2. Look for VSTis with internal FX that "could have" any look ahead associated with them on their audio processing.

Many VSTis do have an internal FX bypass function, so rather than troubleshoot via freezing, you should also be able to bypass internal FX via that method. If there is a consistent point where the dropouts occur (especially if it is one instrument becomes "active" each time in the same place) that is a good place to focus.

Before starting troubleshooting, be sure to save it as a new project first. *IF* you are lucky and it is isolated, deleting tracks (or ones associated to suspect VSTis) can help narrow down the root cause.

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12 hours ago, jono grant said:

I've tried all different ones. I usually mix at 2048 and track at 128. 

I have plugins disabled, so I assume it's all the midi stuff going on.

 

Besides the high voltage processes that need to be eliminated, it is advisable to
ensure that the I/O buffer is set to high (512 or 1024) when using many Midi/VST instruments.

Go to :

system and cache

i/o Buffer

If you haven't already done this.

 

 

Edited by Pragi
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