Now, is this normal? 100% CPU all the time?

[Thanos Siozos]

Hello, forum.
My 1st post here. I put the box of cookies and champagne in the fridge

I took advantage of the price drop and recently I purchased CWPA 9. Now, I'm not a newbie in digital recording but I am one regarding CWPA.

My copy proves to be very CPU intensive with no good reason. When I playback even the smallest 1-track midi file the System Monitor in Accessories shows 100% CPU usage. However, Cake's internal CPU meter shows 0% usage !

Of course, this makes it absolutely inconvenient to use a soft synth like Reality in the same machine together with Cakewalk.

Is there some way to reduce the CPU usage to, say, 10-20% during playback? And why does the CWPA meter show 0%. Did I tweak some bad button?

My setup: CPU Celeron 600, 196MB Ram, Win95

Thanos Siozos

[dachay2tnr]

First of all, turn off the System Resource when running audio apps - as ironically it uses system resources. Also, turn off any other app that you don't need. (Generally that means to do a Ctrl - Alt - Delete and shut down everything except Explorer and Systray before launching CW).

Lastly, I wouldn't worry about any of the meters and worry more about the performance you are getting. In other words, are you getting dropouts, and/or breakup of the audio? The meters can be a guide to helping to track down the source of performance problems, but if everything is running ok, I would (and do) ignore them.

The Celeron 600 is not ideal for running audio, but should allow for decent performance. (BTW, why are you still on Win95?)

[gnarled]

You know, I noticed the same thing with Cakewalk in Win2k on my computer. The system resources monitor would show 100% when playing back anything! But, I think its a weird bug since cakewalks performance meter doesn't show anything near this. The highest I've seen it get is 60% when I'm playing back ~15 24bit tracks w/dx effects (incidentally, thats also where I start to get clicks and pops - boooo). I agree with dachay2tnr though - as long as your not having any droupouts or other problems, don't worry about it.

[Thanos Siozos]

dachay2tnr,
no, I don't get dropouts. And, I don't think my CPU is not capable of playing a single MIDI track (Funnily the same MIDI file played back in Media Player needs only 6% CPU!) So, it's not a performance problem. It's a Cakewalk problem. And, as gnarled verified (thanks) it seems that Cakewalk when playing back takes all of the CPU cycles for itself to ensure real time playback even if you have a single MIDI track!

Now, the REAL problem is that you can't run a soft synth with Cakewalk running in the same machine because the synth's performance will be squashed by Cakewalk.

I wondered if there's some way around this, but I guess there isn't.

BTW, I'm still using Win95 because (an untweaked) 98 is slower.