Tracktion and CPU Optimization, part 2

[whyterabbyt]

Cakewalk Sonar implemented the 'Freeze Tracks and Synths' feature, which can be turned on/off with the click of one 'Freeze' button. This would be a useful model to follow for this feature.

Freeze Points are already far more flexible.

[zzz00m]

Cakewalk Sonar implemented the 'Freeze Tracks and Synths' feature, which can be turned on/off with the click of one 'Freeze' button. This would be a useful model to follow for this feature.

Freeze Points are already far more flexible.

See my last post. Not documented.

[whyterabbyt]

Cakewalk Sonar implemented the 'Freeze Tracks and Synths' feature, which can be turned on/off with the click of one 'Freeze' button. This would be a useful model to follow for this feature.

Freeze Points are already far more flexible.

See my last post. Not documented.

'Arent fully covered' is not 'Not documented.'

[chico.co.uk]

It's not exactly rocket science working out how to use freeze points though, is it?

Drag a freeze point onto a track somewhere. It freezes the track up to that point. Err, that's it. Mouse over the Freeze point plugin, and it says "Track will freeze up to this plugin" in the top right of the gui, or in the popup help if you have it turned on.

(as an aside, it'd be nice to be able to right click a freeze point and choose "freeze" or "unfreeze", in the popup menu, rather than have to mouse down to the properties panel)

[aMUSEd]

Plus Tracktion had freeze before freeze points anyway (and well before Sonar or almost any DAW)

[zzz00m]

My point is Tracktion is paid commercial software. The basic features should be documented. This lame approach is fine for freeware.

I don't care if they want to charge extra for a manual, there still needs to be a manual without a section devoted to features that are not covered. Now that is just silly.

I have been using DAWs for 20 years, but only started with Tracktion last year. Some things that may be obvious to long time users, may not be apparent to new users.

And I am an old school 'read the manual first from cover to cover guy', so the manual is where I expect to find the important stuff.

Videos are fine for demonstrating techniques, as a supplement to the written words covering features and commands. You cannot search a video like you can a PDF manual.

So leaving core features out of the manual is just slacking, IMHO.

[whyterabbyt]

My point is Tracktion is paid commercial software. The basic features should be documented.

What, by saying 'I want this specific kind of freezing like Sonar had?' That's a pretty opaque way of making that point.

And FWIW, there were plenty of features in Sonar that were under- and un-documented too.

[zzz00m]

My point is Tracktion is paid commercial software. The basic features should be documented.

What, by saying 'I want this specific kind of freezing like Sonar had?' That's a pretty opaque way of making that point.

And FWIW, there were plenty of features in Sonar that were under- and un-documented too.

Since you obviously read my posts, you should realize that I stated (while unaware of Tracktion's freeze point feature) that it would be nice to have a freeze feature in Waveform. That was just given as an example. I stand corrected, and better informed.

I never said "'I want this specific kind of freezing like Sonar had?'" Your words, not mine.

I went on and on about the manual, only because I could have avoided all of this discussion in the first place it it had been described in the manual.

[jochicago]

But we already have this feature in the form of Freeze Points? You can freeze up to any point in the signal chain?
You can even combine several tracks in to a single freeze file with the other freeze option?

I love the idea of this feature but it pretty much hasn't worked for me. Most of the times that I want to place it somewhere I'm not allowed to do so.

I'm sending my main tracks to buses or FX tracks, and as long as I'm doing that I'm not allowed to freeze the origin tracks. I also naturally wanted to add the freeze point to a folder or submix, which also isn't allowed.

What does work: I can add a freeze at the beginning of the final/bus track, so that's a workaround.

The issue for me is the logic of it. If I freeze at the end of the origin track, it makes logical sense. You see all the plugins there become disabled and you can see the freeze as the last element. So it is easy to understand what's happening. If I put the freeze at the beginning of the route's bus, it is not quite as intuitive (although it has nearly the same effect).

---

+ 1 on the CPU video. It's got me doing more research in the right places for my CPU bottlenecks. I'll report when I have something useful. So far I've discovered software called LatencyMon Home Edition that runs on Win10. It has identified my graphics driver as a main suspect of latency.

It also has given me different status reports on my system's viability for DAW work. When I had a number of programs open, it said my system was prone to latency and dropouts. If I restart my PC and only have 3 programs open, now it says my system is suitable for real-time audio without dropouts.

I still don't understand enough to get this straight, but it is starting to become clear that the more processes in your system saturating the CPU I/O, the more your audio will struggle to maintain a snappy real-time relationship with the CPU. That helps explain why my CPU is running at 7% capacity when Tracktion starts stuttering - my bottleneck is in data transfer / CPU IO. A simple start is having nothing else running and setting the DAW as a processing priority.

I wonder if a dedicated audio card could facilitate better buffering. I'm using the integrated audio stuff.

[zzz00m]

I wonder if a dedicated audio card could facilitate better buffering. I'm using the integrated audio stuff.

Absolutely!

Many of these units are marketed on a features basis, like the number and type of mic preamps, the number of inputs/outputs, the monitoring features, etc.

The most important thing that is not heavily advertised, but usually discussed to death in many audio forums, is the performance boost you get from using the dedicated drivers for these devices, especially when it comes to a real ASIO driver.

If you are working mostly in the box, you can select a good brand with minimal inputs at a lower budget point, and reap the benefit of improved performance.

Here is a recent blog with some examples. Probably anything from #3 on down would be fine. I have heard good reviews on the entry-level Focusrite line, starting at $99. And the USB2 units can probably handle more audio bandwidth than anybody can throw at it. FireWire is all but dead, and Thunderbolt is still a work in progress on Windows PCs.
https://cymatics.fm/blog/the-best-audio-interface/

[zzz00m]

And FWIW, there were plenty of features in Sonar that were under- and un-documented too.

And I will agree that Sonar documentation is the pits. It probably contributed to its failure. I have moved on to Studio One and still learning that now. The PreSonus documentation is usable, but needs some work.

I also have Ableton Live, and think that has some of the most thorough DAW documentation I have seen, except for Cubase (I tried the Cubase demo), which is an encyclopedia.

I think that if a company wants to be perceived as professional, it should put a priority on documentation, not let it linger on a back burner somewhere.

[PierreG]

Great thread, thanks everyone for the good ponderings on this topic.

I'm running Waveform 9 on an ancient Core Duo Dell D630 laptop in Windows 10 64-bit (obviously for W9). In reading through this thread I was reminded of the fantastic LatencyMon app, which I'd not run on this laptop since upgrading it to W10 and upgrading to an SSD. The good news it that LatencyMon reveled what appears to be better all around performance on this box than when it was Windows 7 32-bit based.

Here's my reason for posting, in this process I discovered that the Tracktion / Waveform Audio Cache Size option is missing on this W10 box, not only from Waveform 9, yet also from W8 and T7. It is still available in T7-32-bit on my other laptop that's still HDD based. I'm guessing that this option is disabled with SSDs.

As many times as I'd tweaked this setting during troubleshooting / system tuning projects, I always wound up returning it to it's standard value of 6.0 seconds for best performance, so it wasn't much useful. For the record, and not too surprisingly, installing an SSD into this box has massively improved it's performance when edits are stuffed with many take comp clips that are also heavily split.

Curious if anyone's found performance improvements on HDD based systems when tweaking this parameter.

[jochicago]

I wonder if a dedicated audio card could facilitate better buffering. I'm using the integrated audio stuff.

Absolutely!

Many of these units are marketed on a features basis, like the number and type of mic preamps, the number of inputs/outputs, the monitoring features, etc.

The most important thing that is not heavily advertised, but usually discussed to death in many audio forums, is the performance boost you get from using the dedicated drivers for these devices, especially when it comes to a real ASIO driver.

If you are working mostly in the box, you can select a good brand with minimal inputs at a lower budget point, and reap the benefit of improved performance.

Here is a recent blog with some examples. Probably anything from #3 on down would be fine. I have heard good reviews on the entry-level Focusrite line, starting at $99. And the USB2 units can probably handle more audio bandwidth than anybody can throw at it. FireWire is all but dead, and Thunderbolt is still a work in progress on Windows PCs.
https://cymatics.fm/blog/the-best-audio-interface/

I'm on the Behringer UMC404HD: https://amzn.to/2qaXJ9l

It is a a joy to work with but as far as I can tell it didn't come with any drivers. I believe the selling messaging said not to bother with drivers. That it would connect to the PC as-is (which it did). I do see drivers here:
https://www.musictri.be/Categories/Behr ... /downloads

Looking at the quickstart guide, it does say to get the latest drivers for Windows. Everything is working fine though. Should I try to install those drivers regardless?

[zzz00m]

I'm on the Behringer UMC404HD: https://amzn.to/2qaXJ9l

It is a a joy to work with but as far as I can tell it didn't come with any drivers. I believe the selling messaging said not to bother with drivers. That it would connect to the PC as-is (which it did). I do see drivers here:
https://www.musictri.be/Categories/Behr ... /downloads

Looking at the quickstart guide, it does say to get the latest drivers for Windows. Everything is working fine though. Should I try to install those drivers regardless?

I'm afraid I am a bit confused now, because earlier you asked:

I wonder if a dedicated audio card could facilitate better buffering. I'm using the integrated audio stuff.

And as far as the UMC404HD, for Windows the drivers should be downloaded from their website. Mac is Core Audio supported, no drivers necessary.

[jochicago]

I think I'm confusing you 'cause I'm partly confused myself

I meant in terms of I/O / ASIO drivers and any inside processing. For instance, in the DAW settings I'm using Windows Audio as my device type. I see the Behringer as I/O options, but I didn't install any custom drivers for it and it is not going through its own ASIO as far as I can tell.

I also have ASIO 4 ALL but I'm not sure that's doing much better than the default Windows Audio. Overall it seems that this I/O buffering stuff is my bottleneck and it is seriously hampering the other parts.

The Behringer is USB, so that's going straight into the computer on its own. However, I don't know if there's an audio processing engine within the PC that would be boosted by adding a dedicated audio card or something of that nature (to take over some manner of processing or control the buffering). Forgive if this is a naive thought, I edit video on this machine so I'm used to fixing speed deficiencies by boosting with a GPU card.