Soft Synths Breaking Cakewalk

[Darion]

Whenever I load a soft synth into cakewalk it works fine with midi information and all but as soon as I click on it and actually open it up everything slows down and eventually becomes unusable. This doesn't happen with plugins. I don't know why it's doing this or how to prevent it. My laptop doesn't have the strongest processor but this hasn't been an issue for the past two years I've been using Cakewalk so I don't know why it is now. When I have a synth opened up and am playing audio through it, Cakewalk freezes and Task Manager is telling me that Cakewalk is using 60% cpu and 500 mb of memory on a project with seven midi tracks with just one in use.

[Promidi]

Please list some soft synths where this is happening.

Is your Cakewalk and soft synth performance sluggish when your soft synths are not displaying their GUIs?

My guess is that this is because those soft synths are quite heavy on the graphics.  Without a separate GPU to handle the graphics, your CPU has to do all the graphic grunt work.  For an older CPU this performance degradation would be quite noticeable.

I have a 10 year old quad core i5 PC with a GTX960 graphics card and I have yet to experience sluggish performance with any soft synth - even graphic intensive ones while they are being displayed..

I did an experiment and temporarily disabled the GTX960.  Cakewalk and soft synths became quite sluggish.   I re-enabled the GTX960.  Cakewalk’s performance returned to acceptable levels.

[Darion]

Thanks for your reply. It seems to only happen with my Arturia synths from the V Collection X. I only have like three other synths that aren't Arturia and they don't seem to have this problem. They're also not as graphically intense.

Cakewalk doesn't die until I actually click on the icon for it to display the GUI of the synths.

Because I haven't always had this issue, I thought it may have happened because I upgraded/updated my Arturia synths to the newest versions a few months back and that that may be what caused the issue. Still not sure...

Even without the GUI open, Cakewalk still hovers at around 55-60% while playing the audio from the synths. I was mixing a song earlier that was about 60 tracks of audio and my CPU was only hovering at around 30%. Once GUI is opened and midi is playing, CPU usage on Cakewalk goes up to about 60-70% and GPU goes from about 5% to 15%. Is it possible that the CPU is doing some of the GPU's job and that I could change a setting somewhere that would offload some of that work?

I've had this laptop for two years and use it frequently for this kind of stuff so is it likely that my CPU just doesn't work as well as it used to or could it be that the newer Arturia versions are just more CPU heavy? Maybe both? I feel like it's a fixable issue without having to buy a new laptop or processor or anything because that doesn't seem to be the culprit to me. Also could memory usage play a factor? I only have about 3 GB left on my storage. If you need specs for a better idea let me know.

 

[Promidi]

1 hour ago, Darion said:

It seems to only happen with my Arturia synths from the V Collection X. I only have like three other synths that aren't Arturia and they don't seem to have this problem. They're also not as graphically intense.

Even though I have V-Collection 9, which Arturia synths specifically, maybe I can try some here.

[reginaldStjohn]

I had a similar issue a while back when I would open Kontakt instruments GUI's. The UI would slow way down and the audio would start to stutter. After analyzing it with Resplendent LatencyMon I found it was my Nvidia video card and/or driver.  I use the built in Video or an AMD video card and things have worked better.

I would suggest using LatencyMon to see if there are any issues it can find

[Darion]

I rolled back from V Collection X to V Collection 9 and it no longer freezes and is much more usable. I also installed the VST3 instead of the .dll in case this was somehow the issue. CPU usage also doesn't appear as high anymore. I'm still not comfortable with the CPU usage but it isn't broken like before. I may get a more powerful laptop soon anyways.

[Starship Krupa]

On 8/2/2024 at 5:15 PM, Darion said:

My laptop doesn't have the strongest processor but this hasn't been an issue for the past two years I've been using Cakewalk so I don't know why it is now.

Especially in situations like yours where there may be a performance issue, you really should post your system specs. See my sig for an example.

What processor, how much memory, what type of disk drive (spinny or SSD), what graphics (in your case, probably onboard in the CPU), what audio interface, these are all crucial to helping figure out what the issue might be.