Re: Windows 10 Super Lite 500mb
Mazie Wingeier
Since about a couple months ago, I noticed that importing audio started becoming very slow. For example, a mere 10-second audio (wav) takes almost 30 seconds to import. A video of 500MB (about 20mins long) takes about an hour with the progress bar saying "import audio" the whole time. So, I am assuming that there is something not quite right with the audio importing process.
Cakewalk and all the project/audio files are running on a dedicated internal SSD (Samsung SSD 980 1TB) with 200+ GB empty space running good temperature and in good health (only 1.6TB written on it so far during a year of usage).
Thank you for your suggestion. I tried it out, disabling both the 3rd party app and windows defender, importing was still slow. Just now I tried to import a 22MB wav file, it took about 35 seconds to complete. I tried copying regular file in windows explorer, it was normally fast (SSD speed), so I don't think it's my drive.
Yeah, that's very possible - have a look up at your Transport module on the Control Bar. If it's converting the sample rate, you'll see a little progress bar appear, however it should be saying something like "Converting Sample Rate" rather than just "Importing" for a WAV file.
Actually, despite whether converting sample rate being the culprit or not, I still think it is an odd behavior as the problem only started about a couple months ago. This had never happened previously and I never changed any settings at all. I am genuinely curious of what may have caused such a slow import.
Anyhow, I ran into another trouble as now Cakewalk refuses to even start. ? (I tried to hook an Arturia Keylab into Cakewalk and used a suggestion that was mentioned somewhere in the forum about using Cubase setting, and suddenly it stopped responding and has now refused to start)
@Paul Chan - It's possible your ctrlsurface.dat has become corrupted and that is what is preventing Cakewalk from starting.
Try renaming ctrlsurface.dat to ctrlsurface.dat.old in the %APPDATA%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core folder.
To Lord Tim, I just followed the instructions on another thread here in the forum. Someone else was asking about Arturia Keylab and Cakewalk regarding the integration issues since Arturia does not support Cakewalk (or is it the other way around??? I'm not so sure..) so when I did all the steps, I clicked OK, then voila Cakewalk left me in the dust. ?
Do you have any intensive processes also taking up disk IO that are now running at the same time? I've found a few things like Windows search can get in the way.
To help valididate this you could try running Moo FileMonitor which show you reads/writes:
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I do notice that the status bar says either "sample rate conversion" or "loading audio data" and the process is very slow. However, these processes used to be quick back a few months ago. It's such a mystery that audio importing (even with sample rate conversion) has become super sluggish since then.
So looks like it might be something specific to your project files and/or setup.
Are these wav/ video files all from the same source? What's the bit rate? Just want to rule out that there could be something odd about the content of these causing it extra work. If they are the same then try importing some known files, such as CD audio.
Not sure whether Cakewalk uses the Windows API or FFMPEG for file conversions, might be there was a change of versions there if it was working fine previously. Can you try reverting to an earlier build?
With respect to File Monitor - it works fine on OS past 8 in my experience, it's just not fully tested.
I would load up filemon and then do your import and see what activities are going on - if there's loads of non-Cakewalk activity on the same disk at the same time, it would suggest their might be contention for disk utilisation which might reduce your performance.
As a comparison, I can imagine that a 3GB video would possibly take a couple hours to fully import on my system nowadays as the progress bar would inch forward so slowly. (knowing that I regularly import 400-500MB video that would take close to an hour to complete which nowadays I left running while having my lunch or dinner)
I work with different sources of audio files, but they are in either 48 or 96 kHz while having bit depth of 24 (my audio interface runs at 32 natively, I don't know if it makes any difference or not).
Points to a specific disk issue - might be worth running a benchmarking tool and checking if the score you're getting matches the quoted figures for that SSD type (i'm guessing not though given what you're seeing).
I normally have WinDefender deactivated as the 3rd party is the primary AV. As of updates, it's all automatic and even if there was a major update, I have not noticed anything different with the behavior of all applications and Windows functions in general. The only thing behaving odd is Cakewalk, specifically the audio import rate, nothing else in Cakewalk is affected, not bouncing rate, not exporting rate, literally just the audio import rate.
Just now I was going to have fun working on a project, I imported a 86MB mp4 video (5 minutes long), took some half an hour. I finished eating my meal and did the dishes, and Cakewalk was still not done yet when I came back. I can't explain how sad I feel... ?
What I'd probably suggest is taking a full system image of your computer (using Acronis or something like that), backing that up to an external drive, then first trying a clean install of Cakewalk to see if that makes any difference. If it doesn't, then I'd suggest a clean install of Windows.
I'd ordinarily not recommend going as far as nuking your OS but this is definitely an outlier. You'll at least be able to rule out hardware or virus related reasons for this. And, ultimately, this might be a real butt-pain in the short term but those import times are absolutely ridiculous - you'll save in the long run.
Prior to doing so though i'd run a disk benchmark - this will verify whether the hard disk is achieving the expected latency/file transfer performance for different sizes of files. I appreciate that copying regular files appears to show performance as normal, but there's a always a chance that the issue is specific to a specific block size/configuration. That can then be compared against the figures for the brand new disk type of that model.
One other quick question - what's your CPU/RAM utilisation like?
Are you using a system pagefile? How's that configured if so?
Just wondering if there might be some contention for resource taking place elsewhere that could be causing the constraint that means you're not getting the full performance of the disks (as would seem to be indicated if other copies are occuring within reasonable time frames).
The really wacky thing is that every other operation seems to be normal, it's just the import speed, yeah? And, aside from Chrome being pegged when things are importing (which is suspicious, mind you), everything else seems to be functioning normally.
A failing disk would affect everything. An infected system would likely show more symptoms than this. CbB seems to be playing back OK so there's no issue with reads and writes from disks... all of the usual suspects are pretty much ruled out. The only thing that could make any sense is some aggressive scanning by an antivirus or some other app while a file is being read (possibly something to do with Chrome? Who knows), but that doesn't seem to be the case either. I'm also inclined to think that it's not hardware related at all, so that really takes us back to Cakewalk, Windows or some hidden malicious actor that is oddly specific.
We're all just guessing at this point, unfortunately, even with the great info you've given us. I'd definitely start with doing a thorough virus, malware and rootkit scan, then try a clean CbB install and see if that helps. If not... then yeah, it might be system related as I said, but it's a big job to start over.
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