PC building for Cakewalk

A few things to try;
turn off wifi,
uninstall ASIO4All (if it is installed),
make sure you're using ASIO driver mode,
unplug all other USB devices,
turn off any power saving features such as processor cycling or core parking,
install the most recent ATI video driver but try to avoid the entire Catalyst control thingy,
turn off the ATI video "HD Audio device" in device manager,
test another (free? demo?) DAW and see if you get the same issues.
 

Your CPU has integrated graphics already, Radeon R7 built in, so I am not understanding why you would also have AMD Radeon HD 6800 card installed at the same time.  The built-in Radeon R7 graphics works quite well with Cakewalk. 
 
I know this because I have the AMD A10-7850K CPU, and it too has the Radeon R7 graphics built in, which is what I use. running 2 displays.
 
Just for grins, perhaps you might consider taking out that installed graphics card and disabling its drivers, to use the built-in Radeon R7 graphics instead, to see if it makes any difference in what you are experiencing.
 
And one more thought - do you have Windows set to NOT use the ASIO drivers while you are running Cakewalk, so Windows and other apps aren't also trying to access the ASIO drivers while you run Cakewalk?  
 
Bob Bone
 
 
 
 
 
 

poetnprophet
 
Also, if you haven't done so already, do a google search for optimizing windows for audio production and go through all of those instructions.
 
Dave

+1 for optimizing. You want to make sure everything is running at top performance and lean & mean. Turn your power setting to high performance - for some reason the default is power saving mode. Disable unneeded startup programs. Make sure your audio devices are not in contention with each other. Stop services that you don't need, using care not to stop vital Windows services. Go as far as you feel comfortable with (some folks mess with the registry, but I never went that far.)

Hey guys and thanks for all your great responses, if nothing else it's helped me establish a little more faith in everything I've already tried as I've been down most of these routes but have done some again this morning to try further.
 
So to start with I have now as Robert_E_Bone suggested removed the additional graphics card and back on the integrated graphics form the APU.

I also disconnected all USB devices apart from my keyboard and mouse, disconnected the USB 3.0 ports from the motherboard and the front panel audio as suggested by sanderxpander. Never had the ASIO4ALL on this setup so that's fine and all drivers up to date with all power limitations turned off.
 
Shambler, I shall have to read up on this but in the year and a half I've had this setup I've not been able to find anything concrete on this mobo and DAW issues. The search goes on.
 
PoetnProphet, the current project I'm loading whilst testing this is 6 tracks and only around 1 minute in length. 4 audio tracks, 2 instances of mini grade by AIR music VST. On these I have the 4 audio tracks going to a drum bus with one instance of Breverb and then the instances of piano go to a bus running Valhalla Shimmer. I have looked over optimization guides many times and seem to have followed to the letter but can't hurt to run through some again.
 
Rbecker, again I  shall look over the optimization guides but I've taken this pretty far already, the actual PC boots in seconds and runs lovely, just seems to struggle with the audio mainly.
 
35mm, I am using the ASIO driver and for testing purposes with the small project (see above) I'm currently working on I have the buffer size at 256, 44.1kHz. Background processes are pretty much non existent, even Windows own CPU monitor within task manager (which always seems high) shows my CPU at 1% occasionally 2% even whilst running this Google Chrome window. I can certainly try another DAW, I shall re-install the Pro Tools free version and test this again as I can't remember how it behaved with the Line 6 and never tested on the Focusrite.
 
Thanks gswitz, I shall take a look over your video.
 
Once again guys, I'm so thankful for your assistance. This whole process and this rig has tested my patience and ruined my creativity these last few months so all the help is really appreciated. I shall keep trying and report back.
 
Thanks

I would recommend going through your system, step by step, to eliminate and identify where any issues could be happening that would cause the dropouts.
 
These are only suggestions based on my experience of using Sonar ( from Version 5 through 8.5, X3 Producer and now Cakewalk by Bandlab) and the ways I have eliminated issues over the years. So these are the things I would try.
 
Firstly I would ensure that I was only ever working with one audio device enabled on my system. So if you have the ability to do this ..... go into your PC BIOS settings and disable the onboard audio device and also disable any HDMI audio device that may be part of your GPU board. Once that is done ensure that windows is aware that your PC is now using ..... in this example your we will say your Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. Make that the Scarlett is set as your windows default audio device. I would then make a couple of changes to the windows audio settings. By selecting your "Playback Devices" in windows audio you can then configure the default device. Select the device and the click properties and then advanced. Make sure that "Allow Applications to take Exclusive control" is unchecked. Once these seteps are done you should be able to play audio through the Scarlett from Windows media player or similar to test this behaves as expected. if all is okay there you can then move onto checking that the audio is configured correctly in Cakewalk.
 
Start Cakewalk and before you open any projects go into the the preferences options from the edit menu. In there you should see options for setting up the audio device. Under "playback and recording" ensure that your driver mode is set to ASIO. Then in the "driver settings" option make sure that your Scarlett ASIO device is set as your playback and recording timing master. Once those options are done you can then use the ASIO panel to set your latency and buffer settings. Once these have been configured you should have the basis of a usable system on just about any windows based PC that is running any OS version from XP, Windows 7, Windows 8 and up to windows 10.
 
 
I would then test this for playback by creating a blank project, then import an mp3 or similar onto an audio track and then hit the play button and see if audio comes out through the Scarlett as expected.
 
I know this may seem like "baby steps" but you have to go back to basics to get your system working in the simplest form before you can then add in other capabilities. if it doesn't work doing this then I would say you must have a more fundamental issue with something. Maybe hardware related or another application or process accesiing the audio device and causes it to stutter and dropout.
 
Let me know how you get on with those suggestions and based on your findings it may help troubleshoot your issues further if this doesn't resolve them.
 
Best of luck.
 
Neal
 
 

 
This is a video i made that shows some basics.
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOVuzOja-yE&feature=youtu.be[/tube]
 
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOVuzOja-yE&feature=youtu.be
 

ah nice trick. Ty Matron

So I just run latency monitor but I'm not sure I understand the results. I ran this for around 3 minutes whilst Cakewalk was running and I was using the one instance of baby grande, pops and all present.


 
The USB port total execution looks very high compared to everything else? Anyone any ideas on these numbers?
 
Thanks

One of the above earlier posts had mentioned something I forgot about, as it had been a while since Craig Anderton had posted about it - Craig had discovered that for some reason the hi-def audio drivers were causing similar issues, if memory serves, and his solution was to disable those when running Sonar sessions (the hi-def drivers are certainly not needed to be active anyways during Sonar/Cakewalk sessions, because it would be using the ASIO drivers of the audio interface.
 
So - you can locate those in Device Manager, and simply disable and then test the effects of doing so by launching Cakewalk and seeing if it helps.  When done, if no help with the issue, you can simply enable the driver(s) again - just takes a few seconds.
 
Also - make sure you don't have any high-latency inducing effects loaded into the project when trying to track/record (like convoluted reverb effects, for example).  You can simply hit the letter 'E' on your computer keyboard to toggle on/off the bypassing of all effects - if the issues go away with effects bypassed, you know then that one or more loaded effects is contributing to the audio issues, and you can either bypass effects until moving on to mixing, or temporarily swap out any hi-latency effects until you finish tracking, and then when ASIO Buffer Size is jacked up to 1024 or 2048 for mixing, those hi-latency effects can get swapped back in.
 
Disabling WiFi is quite often needed - literally disabling the driver OR if a function key to turn off transceiver, that works too.  This is a common issue with laptops, but can cause issues in desktops as well.
 
i have also had personal experience with many kinds of issues with certain audio interfaces not behaving well, when they were designed for USB 2 but plugged into a USB 3 port.  I ALWAYS make sure I test any newly acquired audio interface in USB 3 ports prior to making repeated use of that port - for that very reason, and if issues, then I make sure to always use a USB 2 port when a particular interface fails to work properly using USB 3. (Some interfaces work equally well in either USB 2 or 3 ports).
 
Bob Bone
 

Plug your focusrite into a usb2 port, NOT usb3. 

Were the alternate USB ports USB 2? You didn't seem to specify. Some/many newer motherboards have zero USB 2 ports, and you want to make SURE you know which ports are of what type.
 
This certainly is likely to be something local to your system, 
 
Bob Bone.

Other thing to note is that Pro Tools First barely touches the processor in comparison to Cakewalk my system usage in Pro Tools sits around 2% when playing back 6 instances of Hybrid whilst it's nearer 50% in Cakewalk.