I think I may have found a major culprit in a problem I've been having
regarding popping/static during playback of audio tracks in Cakewalk Pro
Audio 8.

I just found out you can watch a CPU usage graph in the Task Manager in XP.
Playing a stereo 44.1/16 file brings the CPU usage to 100%. Playing the
exact same file in both Soundforge and Voyetra's Digital Orchestrator Pro it
seems to bounce around from about 2% to 13%.

System is a PIII 933mhz Compaq Deskpro running XP Home, 512 megs RAM.

Something's clearly not right. Any suggestions regarding how to remedy this?

The task manager is actually not a good measure of what is happening here.
A program can request the CPU and utilize it, but be prepared to release it
to other tasks when asked. I'm not familiar with CWP8 specifically, but it
is probably true there as well. It is simply a programming technique that
gives a different impression in a tool like Task Manger.

Now, that is NOT to say that you don't have CPU issues, only that this means
is suspect for determining that. And it would be good to continue looking
for any solutions. You might try this little free tool, Ulysses Performance
Monitor, it is pretty basic but seems to give a more accurate picture of how
hard your system is working. Go he

http://mark-knutson.com/t3/ and select 'Ulysses' on the left. Just
another tool, may or may not help with this.

Good Luck,
--
Sue Morton

"Doc" wrote in message
news
I think I may have found a major culprit in a problem I've been having
regarding popping/static during playback of audio tracks in Cakewalk Pro
Audio 8.

I just found out you can watch a CPU usage graph in the Task Manager in
XP.
Playing a stereo 44.1/16 file brings the CPU usage to 100%. Playing the
exact same file in both Soundforge and Voyetra's Digital Orchestrator Pro
it
seems to bounce around from about 2% to 13%.

System is a PIII 933mhz Compaq Deskpro running XP Home, 512 megs RAM.

Something's clearly not right. Any suggestions regarding how to remedy
this?

I'm under the impression that CWPA8 is not supposed to be compatible with
XP. You may want to check the cake web site.

Mikey
Nova Music Productions

"Doc" wrote in message
news
I think I may have found a major culprit in a problem I've been having
regarding popping/static during playback of audio tracks in Cakewalk Pro
Audio 8.

I just found out you can watch a CPU usage graph in the Task Manager in
XP.
Playing a stereo 44.1/16 file brings the CPU usage to 100%. Playing the
exact same file in both Soundforge and Voyetra's Digital Orchestrator Pro
it
seems to bounce around from about 2% to 13%.

System is a PIII 933mhz Compaq Deskpro running XP Home, 512 megs RAM.

Something's clearly not right. Any suggestions regarding how to remedy
this?

"Doc" wrote in message
news
I think I may have found a major culprit in a problem I've been having
regarding popping/static during playback of audio tracks in Cakewalk Pro
Audio 8.

I just found out you can watch a CPU usage graph in the Task Manager in
XP.
Playing a stereo 44.1/16 file brings the CPU usage to 100%. Playing the
exact same file in both Soundforge and Voyetra's Digital Orchestrator Pro
it
seems to bounce around from about 2% to 13%.

System is a PIII 933mhz Compaq Deskpro running XP Home, 512 megs RAM.

Something's clearly not right. Any suggestions regarding how to remedy
this?

Cakewalk products have always been designed to demand the CPU's full
attention. Task Manager (or whatever it used to be called in previous Win
versions) has always shown 100% usage for Cakewalk products, no matter how
much or how little CPU is being used.

"Steven Myers" wrote in message
k.net...

Cakewalk products have always been designed to demand the CPU's full
attention. Task Manager (or whatever it used to be called in previous Win
versions) has always shown 100% usage for Cakewalk products, no matter how
much or how little CPU is being used.

??

Why would this be? I ask that skeptically but also from the standpoint of
not being a tech so willing to be persuaded that there's a good reason. I
thought it was always a good idea to have some horsepower headroom.

I e-mailed Cakewalk Tech Support regarding the issue, I'll be curious what
they say. So far, they're the only computer gear company I've dealt with
that actually has some semblance of decent tech support.

"Steven Myers" wrote in message
k.net...

Cakewalk products have always been designed to demand the CPU's full
attention. Task Manager (or whatever it used to be called in previous Win
versions) has always shown 100% usage for Cakewalk products, no matter how
much or how little CPU is being used.

Also, I should mention that it only exhibits this behavior when playing
digital audio. When I mute or archive the audio tracks and play only midi,
the CPU use drops to next to nothing.

Cakewalk products have always been designed to demand the CPU's full
attention. Task Manager (or whatever it used to be called in previous Win
versions) has always shown 100% usage for Cakewalk products, no matter
how
much or how little CPU is being used.

??

Why would this be? I ask that skeptically but also from the standpoint of
not being a tech so willing to be persuaded that there's a good reason. I
thought it was always a good idea to have some horsepower headroom.

This is a guess.
Streaming audio and applying real-time effects, from a computer's
perspective, is very labor-intensive. Perhaps Cakewalk reserve its own head
room for itself, so there's less chance that other things might interrupt
its work. Cakewalk tells the OS "gimme all of it," and the OS says, "OK,
it's yours."

PA 8 was a million years ago, and I don't remember whether the CPU usage
indicator had yet been included in the app.

"Steven Myers" wrote in message
k.net...

This is a guess.
Streaming audio and applying real-time effects, from a computer's
perspective, is very labor-intensive. Perhaps Cakewalk reserve its own
head
room for itself, so there's less chance that other things might interrupt
its work. Cakewalk tells the OS "gimme all of it," and the OS says, "OK,
it's yours."

As further input, running a similar file under 98SE I'm having no such
problems on a less powerful system - PIII 550mhz Win98SE w/384 megs ram vs
the PIII 933mhz WinXP w/512 megs ram. Looking at the resource monitor, it
shows System Resource, User Resources, GDI resources (whatever that is) all
in the 70's percentage wise running the file on Cakewalk while on the
internet. Not sure if this reflects CPU useage. Definitely not getting any
popping or clicking on this slower system w/98SE.

"Doc" wrote in message
k.net
"Steven Myers"
wrote in message
k.net...

Cakewalk products have always been designed to demand
the CPU's full attention. Task Manager (or whatever it
used to be called in previous Win versions) has always
shown 100% usage for Cakewalk products, no matter how
much or how little CPU is being used.

??

Why would this be?

Any program that is interactive or interacts with common I/O
equipment like a sound card ends up waiting for the next
occurence of an event or a one of a list of events.

There are two commonly used means to have a program wait on
the next occurance of a given list of events. One is called
"interrupt driven" where the program tells the operating
system that it wants the system to go to sleep and wake
everything up when the next event happens. The other is
called "idle loop" where the program checks to see that the
event has not happened, and if so turns right around and
checks again.

Of necessity an idle loop makes the system CPU 100% busy,
but in fact the system can either be busy doing work or
waiting for the next event to happen, but its hard for the
system monitor to tell the difference.

Recently, Steven Myers posted:

"Doc" wrote in message
news
I think I may have found a major culprit in a problem I've been
having regarding popping/static during playback of audio tracks in
Cakewalk Pro Audio 8.

I just found out you can watch a CPU usage graph in the Task Manager
in XP.
Playing a stereo 44.1/16 file brings the CPU usage to 100%. Playing
the exact same file in both Soundforge and Voyetra's Digital
Orchestrator Pro it
seems to bounce around from about 2% to 13%.

System is a PIII 933mhz Compaq Deskpro running XP Home, 512 megs RAM.

Something's clearly not right. Any suggestions regarding how to
remedy this?

Cakewalk products have always been designed to demand the CPU's full
attention. Task Manager (or whatever it used to be called in previous
Win versions) has always shown 100% usage for Cakewalk products, no
matter how much or how little CPU is being used.

I've never seen anything like this in any of the Cakewalk products I've
used since early DOS versions.

When going full-tilt, Sonar typically taxes my CPU with 1% to 3% usage.
;-P

Neil