minminmusic Posted March 26 Share Posted March 26 Been wondering...does it seem to run projects started in Cakewalk by Bandlab more efficiently? Wondering if the overhaul is better or worse for the CPU and graphics card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terry Kelley Posted March 26 Share Posted March 26 (edited) I haven’t noticed anything significant either way. Others can chime in. i have a couple of VST loaded projects that won’t play cleanly unless I freeze some tracks and there was no improvement with Sonar. I’m fine with that because I know these are excessively loaded with VSTs. The biggest culprits are the sample based VSTs. Edited March 26 by Terry Kelley 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vere Posted March 26 Share Posted March 26 Only thing I did notice is it opens way faster. Overall it’s seems pretty perky to me. Only weird thing is the start screen is sluggish and a circle gizmo goes round for what seems too long compared to Cakewalk. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Baay Posted March 26 Share Posted March 26 (edited) 3 hours ago, John Vere said: Only weird thing is the start screen is sluggish and a circle gizmo goes round for what seems too long compared to Cakewalk. I don't really see sluggishness in the Start Screen, but I do sometimes get a persistent spinner/hourglass. It doesn't seem to prevent any action from being taken, but it's a little distracting and might make you think it's busy and isn't going to respond. Edited March 27 by David Baay 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vere Posted March 27 Share Posted March 27 Yes that is it. It might phone home checking for updates every time it is opened. Some people probably will object to that. But then this is not the actual full release yet so they probably are keeping closer tabs on users. The start screen would be the perfect place to activate a “John is now starting a new project “ check in. Just kidding. One thing is in Cakewalk if you opened a. Project and then later saved and closed it would return to the inside of that project folder when you chose either the existing or recent projects tabs. That seems to have changed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Baay Posted March 27 Share Posted March 27 5 minutes ago, John Vere said: One thing is in Cakewalk if you opened a. Project and then later saved and closed it would return to the inside of that project folder when you chose either the existing or recent projects tabs. That seems to have changed. Not sure what you're saying here. The Browse button in Sonar is the equivalent of Existing Projects in CbB. Both always default to the top level of your Projects folder, but the new Browse button added the ability to add alternate starting paths. And the Recent tab doesn't open an Explorer window. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vere Posted March 27 Share Posted March 27 (edited) Right! Now I remember what it was. It has changed for Cakewalk now too. If I opened a project directly in windows explorer then when you close it the recent?? button would take you back inside the project folder of the project you just closed. This might have changed back a while ago for Cakewalk. I don’t often work that way. Yes I like the way the start screen works now. I set it to the root of my Audio storage drive. But I like that I have the option to go directly to a folder now. I have about 10 different sub folders. Some people were saying there’s nothing big that changed in Sonar but some of these little things are definitely improvements. I especially love the way it basically copied everything from my Cakewalk custom settings over. My keyboard shortcuts, workspaces etc. Only tweak I made was the template folders. And after staring at a few other DAWS the graphics are slowly growing on me. Edited March 27 by John Vere 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bristol_Jonesey Posted March 27 Share Posted March 27 I aee no difference whatsoever between the 2 versions for load times, cpu usage or ram usage 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noel Borthwick Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 Yes it is a lot more efficient for drawing the UI, which is visible in the responsiveness of meters and now time scroll smoothness. I posted a video some weeks ago with Sonar and CbB demonstrating this. There have been numerous optimizations to the UI to improve performance. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noel Borthwick Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 My dev PC was bought from @Jim Roseberry at Studiocat.com These were the specs: I9 Platinum Studio: Silent Mid Tower Case 1000w Ultra Quiet Power-Supply I9-10980xe (18 cores, 36 processing threads, 4.8GHz max turbo frequency) X299 Chipset Motherboard 64GB DDR4 1TB SSD (OS/Applications) GT-710 video Windows 11 Pro However, the UI smoothness can be seen on pretty much any PC. Its smoother even on my surface book 2. 4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Misha Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 I wanted to share my experience with hardware + Cakewalk on a separate topic, but this seems a good fit. Similar to Alcoholic Anonymous I must admit, I am a plugin glutton. I like to keep things active (unfrozen) so I can easily make changes in real time. My last computer was a decent machine i7, 12cores, nvme, 32ram, USB 3.2 blah blah... That PC had hard time with Izotope plugins(Nectar, Ozone), IK Lurssen mastering, several Kontakt instances, some dynamic plugins with "look ahead", oversampling, etc. I spent dozen of hours "tunning" that machine. Done a full reinstall couple of times. Don't get me wrong, I was able to get by, but needed to plan / adjust workflow , huge buffer size, slimmer projects, freezing, that kind of thing. Last year, I finally decided to upgrade computer. Seller had awesome return policy and I took a chance on refurb Thinkbook Plus (3rd gen- 12th Gen Intel i7-12700H 2.30 GHz). What can I say? This is probably everything I wanted out of PC for music making. For fun of it, testing limits, I loaded 3 (!!!) full instances of Ozone, Nectar (full rack), Kontakt and other heavy duty stuff in a single project in Cakewalk, it didn't choke on 512 buffer. My conclusion is that something in architecture changed and life became beautiful. No more I/O bottlenecks. Of course this is very different from computer to computer and I just got lucky with this particular model. The point I am trying to make is this. While my previous computer had abundant resources that superseded all software pre-requisites by nearly double fold, it was struggling with I/O, with music making. While there are many things you can do to improve efficiency, we, PC people are also at the mercy of specific manufacturer/model of computer. THE END. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Baay Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 33 minutes ago, Misha said: My conclusion is that something in architecture changed and life became beautiful. The number one biggest factor in DAW host performance is Deferred Procedure Call (DPC latency). It needs to be both low and stable (consistently less than 300us is good, less than 150us is better, and I have heard tell of machines that run in the 25-50 range). DPC latency is highly dependent on motherboard architecture, chipsets and chipset drivers, and the activity of background processes that call them. The power management hardware, drivers and processes of battery-powered laptops tend to make them inherently inferior to desktops in this regard - even when plugged in - but some are better than others. Bluetooth and WiFi are two of the other common offenders and these also tend to be active on laptops and not so often on desktops. Another big factor is clock speed and, again, desktops usually have an advantage over laptops because they can afford the extra power and cooling requirements of a higher clock speed at any given core count, and it's easier to keep them from throttling back because they're overheating or the power supply is not keeping up. As a result of all this, laptops tend to be kind of a crapshoot for DAW performance because you have little or no control over the hardware that goes into them, and the only way to know in advance what you're going to get is to have firsthand reports from a reliable source who has tested and optimized the exact machine you're considering. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Misha Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 2 minutes ago, David Baay said: As a result of all this, laptops tend to be kind of a crapshoot for DAW performance because you have little or no control over the hardware that goes into them, Tell it to my laptop It's not a powerhouse gaming machine at all... but has a "lucky" combination of intestines to handle Cakewalk plus multiple instances of very heavy duty plugins without any sacrifices. I was genuinely surprised by what this laptop can pull. P.S. I've read somewhere that one shouldn't trust numbers that something like latencymon produces with Win11. But honestly, I didn't even need to "comfort" check latencymon on new machine. It just works, with internet, Bluetooth on and other audio programs opened on the background. It would be great if a tool existed that can specifically emulate DAW+interface+ stress under X+Y+Z and give you proper benchmark. Latencymon in my view just too broad, and if you don't know what you are doing, you can cause more damage than you started with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Baay Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 5 minutes ago, Misha said: It's not a powerhouse gaming machine at all... but has a "lucky" combination of intestines to handle Cakewalk plus multiple instances of very heavy duty plugins without any sacrifices. I was genuinely surprised by what this laptop can pull. My point, exactly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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