CW Sonar 2025.07 playback Dropouts/Stuttering, but not in CWbyB 2024.12 latest update

[Sergei Pilin]

24 minutes ago, David Baay said:

Load distribution across cores appears much more even in Sonar - both in the app and in Windows resource monitor

Right? One would think that this nice core balancing would benefit as far as overall CPU usage goes, but no, for some reason it makes things worse.

 

Here's this exact project attached, would love to know how it compares on different setups. FF Q3, C2, and Saturn needed, the missing audio file can be replaced with any other stereo one. Maybe there is something abnormal with the both my computers after all.

test 50 tracks.cwp

Edited July 13 by Sergei Pilin
project added

[David Baay]

On 7/13/2025 at 11:37 AM, Sergei Pilin said:

FF Q3, C2, and Saturn needed

Unfortunately I don't have those plugins. A comparable project that I think everyone should have access to is Tim Lord's CbB demo,  Time to Fly.

Edited July 20 by brundlefly

[Sergei Pilin]

On 7/13/2025 at 8:37 PM, Sergei Pilin said:

Right? One would think that this nice core balancing would benefit as far as overall CPU usage goes, but no, for some reason it makes things worse.

 

Here's this exact project attached, would love to know how it compares on different setups. FF Q3, C2, and Saturn needed, the missing audio file can be replaced with any other stereo one. Maybe there is something abnormal with the both my computers after all.

test 50 tracks.cwp 2.76 MB · 1 download

I must apologize for this test because it turns out the settings in Sonar and Cakewalk were different - Sonar had default settings and Cakewalk had MixThreadCount changed to 9. Changing MixThreadCount in Sonar also to 9 sort equalizes CPU usage. Although the test was invalid, I wonder what is up with this. Default (0 - use all cores) setting neatly distributes load across all cores but the total CPU usage increases significantly. Setting MixThreadCount to the number of your physical CPU cores minus virtual cores gives a huge boost in performance. Is it a known thing and there is somewhere in the manual it asks user to set MixThreadCount to your physical core numbers? Because leaving it at the default 0 makes no sense.

[Noel Borthwick]

@Sergei Pilin there is no cookie cutter one size fits all way to handle load balancing because there are too many CPU/Hardware combinations and Windows itself isn’t a realtime OS. Additionally the actual load varies from project to project based on track count, plugin count and the actual load of individual plugins. Also notably there are different types of cores - virtual cores exposed by hyperthreading on Intel systems, and in some more modern hardware there are e-cores and p-cores.

In general reducing the thread count lower than the number of cores, could have a detrimental effect on large projects, which is why by default Sonar exposes one thread per core. We allow you to tweak it to your personal requirements. It may or may not improve performance in all scenarios. There is now also support for management of p-cores and e-cores which you may not be aware of. 
See this help topic.  You can instruct the engine to avoid using e-cores. Some users with such systems reported improved performance, but others did not. As noted above mileage may vary. 

In general Sonar is vastly improved over CbB because I streamlined many core operations that led to suboptimal multi-threading which is why you see better distribution of load in task manager. More importantly low latency performance is drastically improved allowing projects to run at very low latency that would choke the CPU before.

PS: you didn’t mention what CPU are you running on. How many cores does it have and what version of windows are you using. Also have you changed settings in the BIOS or made other system level tweaks that would impact how the cores are used?

[Noel Borthwick]

On 7/10/2025 at 12:56 AM, Sergei Pilin said:

It's just Sonar uses more CPU than Cakewalk for the same project. If a complex project in Cakewalk is on the verge of crackling but still plays fine, it may not play well in Sonar and start to dropout there. No settings could change that.

This is incorrect. Sonar uses significantly less CPU for most projects. This is at the heart of most of the optimizatons done.