betta wdm drivers

sandrob · Post by **sandrob** » Sat Oct 19, 2002 11:50 am

does new wdm beta drivers work good for you?
i tried 2-3 times to use them, but i had problems in wavelab. in the moment when wav starting to play i heard some distortions.
also when i browseing samples in wavelab's "open" window i heard same thing??

krizrox · Post by **krizrox** » Sun Oct 20, 2002 7:22 am

Also curious as I was thinking of buying Sonar.

huffcw · Post by **huffcw** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 11:53 am

I asked Creamware when they plan for a final release of the WDM drivers - and they couldn't even give a rough estimate. This is very dissapointing. I would at least expect some rough timing. It makes me think it is not a priority for them - I hope they get their act together on this. Almost every other audio card out (even very cheap ones) have been supporting WDM drivers for a while now.

I have a Midiman card that can get down to 2ms of latency using WDM in Sonar without glitches. This card only cost a fraction of the what the Pulsar costs.

ASIO is good - but it isn't the answer for everyone!

bassdude · Post by **bassdude** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 4:36 pm

I have a Midiman card that can get down to 2ms of latency using WDM in Sonar without glitches. This card only cost a fraction of the what the Pulsar costs.

Yeah, and it only does a fraction of what the pulsar does! These "most of the other cards" you refer to are basic I/O cards so you would expect the manufactures should be able get solid wdm drivers together fairly quickly.

I kind of wish one of them "most of the other cards" manufactures would make a card that offers the same features as the Pulsar so we *can* make fairer comparisons.

huffcw · Post by **huffcw** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 5:07 pm

Yes, the Pulsar can do alot more - but isn't just the basic I/O of the Pulsar that the WDM drivers would apply to (please enlighten me if I am wrong)?

I really don't understand why the Pulsar's DSP system would cause so much more trouble in developing drivers for it's basic audio I/O.

Post by **garyb** » Fri Nov 08, 2002 1:26 am

lotta lines of code..........

samuel40 · Post by **samuel40** » Fri Nov 08, 2002 8:28 am

they are working great for me

bassdude · Post by **bassdude** » Fri Nov 08, 2002 5:42 pm

On 2002-11-07 17:07, huffcw wrote:
Yes, the Pulsar can do alot more - but isn't just the basic I/O of the Pulsar that the WDM drivers would apply to (please enlighten me if I am wrong)?

I really don't understand why the Pulsar's DSP system would cause so much more trouble in developing drivers for it's basic audio I/O.

When I use to do TV repair work, I would get a lot of customers coming in saying - "telly won't switch on mate. I'm sure it's just a loose wire. Shouldn't cost too much to fix then eh?"
Maybe the trade off for having alot of flexability is that drivers take longer to develop?

EarlyFirst · Post by **EarlyFirst** » Sun Nov 10, 2002 2:21 am

Not trying to cause a fight , But I do remember reading in the Oasys list that it took a specialist 6months JUST to write the VXD for the card driver.

Another thing to think hard about, is Creamware has yet to break compatibility with the driver( it's unified now ) so they have to think about many thousands of users when doing new drivers, some with V1 cards some with V2 cards.

One thing I don't understand is why Cakewalk has not added VST/VSTi support..

From a user's point of view that's one of the main reasons I would and have skipped on Sonar, not to mention there first synth I had as a tracker

anyway just some thoughts

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Sun Nov 10, 2002 3:35 pm

I’m not surprised about the little priority here… most of us are using ASIO!

huffcw · Post by **huffcw** » Sun Nov 10, 2002 7:54 pm

Yes - I agree. Cakewalk is being insane by not considering implementing ASIO driver support and VST support. They seem more concerned with politics (not wanting to use something a competitor developed), then with providing valuable features and the greatest flexibility for the users of their software.

Even Sonic Foundry has decided to adopt ASIO and VST. Acid Pro 4.0 now support both and includes more midi features.

I really wish I wouldn't have gotten so used to Sonar - maybe I will have to consider switching afterall... Cubase SX looks really good from what I have seen.

bc · Post by bc » Sun Nov 10, 2002 9:39 pm

If enough users screamed for ASIO that might make a difference, but I feel Cakewalk is probably stubborn on this.
That said, I'm used to Sonar and don't want to give it up and I certainly don't want to give up Pulsar.
There was a time recently when I thought about switching either audio app or soundcard but I feel Creamware is working diligently on the WDM drivers and have made good progress in the last few months.
As far as the current RC WDM beta driver at Creamware's site there are 3 main issues I see:
1) Still occasional blue screens -driver not completely stable
2) Occasional sync problems between midi/audio and/or audio/audio. (corrected by stopping playback and starting again)
3) The latency could be improved

If #1 and # 2 got fixed these would be good drivers. Then maybe they could tweak for better latency later.

Botom line is Sonar/Pulsar users need to continue being patient. Hopefully soon we'll have some good drivers.

huffcw · Post by **huffcw** » Sat Jan 04, 2003 5:01 pm

Sonar will now support ASIO. Cakewalk plans to offer a free update either in January or early February. They are advertising it as compatibility with ProTools ASIO - but it will be compatible with all cards with ASIO drivers (I am not sure why they don't say that - except that they are probably trying to minimize the fact that they are now supporting a platform developed by a competitor by focusing on support of ProTools rather than the support of ASIO).

jbraner · Post by **jbraner** » Mon Jan 06, 2003 5:35 am

I'm using the beta WDM drivers with SONAR and they've been fine. I've got a Luna II and Pulsar I, and can get 2ms latency, although I usually leave it a little higher to keep CPU utilisation down.

Being a Cakewalk/SONAR user for many years, I was really getting impatient, but I must say that the beta drivers are very usable for me.

John Braner

cyberzip · Post by **cyberzip** » Tue Jan 07, 2003 11:23 am

You got down to 2ms with a CreamWare card?! I'm impressed! I don't seem to get below 90 ms or so (with a PowerSampler 1). At the moment that I click to view the mixer or something else, playback stops.

I think I have to tweak some more, but please tell me what settings you're getting 2ms with!

Other than that, the WDM beta drivers work ok for me, but when stopping or pausing in a media player (WMP or Winamp) in WinXP, the audio starts to stutter in a loop. I don't have that in Win2k.

Best regards

cz

Shayne White · Post by **Shayne White** » Tue Jan 07, 2003 11:22 pm

I can get down to 1.5ms with the beta drivers in Sonar, but unfortunately the audio keeps getting out of sync between different outputs at <20ms latency. Also other programs such as Winamp and Sound Forge crackle most of the time, so I just went back to the 3.1c final release drivers. They won't go below 11ms, but they're more stable (IMO).

Next month Sonar is getting ASIO support -- yippee!

Shayne

cyberzip · Post by **cyberzip** » Wed Jan 08, 2003 3:00 am

I tried to go down to 5.8ms and to my big surprise it worked! (This is with WinXP.)

So you can get 11ms with the 3.1c drivers? That ain't too bad either... maybe I'll go back to those to avoid the stuttering & crackling in media players.

It feels pretty weird that Sonar is getting ASIO support, after whining to CreamWare about the lack of WDM drivers for ages.

/cz

sandrob · Post by **sandrob** » Wed Jan 08, 2003 4:25 am

maybe is stupid question, but i didn't use (never seen) cakewalk or sonar anymore and i think i will not - just wondering:
is it posible to use busses and more recordings inputs in those programs with wdm drivers?

jbraner · Post by **jbraner** » Thu Jan 09, 2003 7:50 am

cz,

I was able to get 11ms with 3.1c too (Hi Shayne). But with the beta drivers I can get lower. I don't really use 2ms (but it -does- work) because the CPU utilisation goes pretty high - but I use 4.4ms to play softsynths (B4 and DR008). Sometimes it freaks out a little when I'm looping sections of a song (to practice playing a part) - so then I just up the latency to 10-20ms, and record at 4.4ms.

Then when I'm done tracking, I put the latency back up to 30-40ms to get lower CPU utilisation for more plugins (I use DX plugs rather than Creamware effects).

This is all with XP (with the usual audio tweaks), P4 2.4GHz, Asus P4B533-V, 1GB RAM).

The low ( <4ms )latencies do work though, although I find that the CPU utilisation swings up and down +/- approx 5%. When I go to higher latencies, it still swings up and down, but not as much.

re: Shaynes point, I don't seem to have the sync problems with audio anymore. I think (I can't remember now) that went away with the beta drivers....

PS - cz, I see you're using a powersampler I. I have a Pulsar I, but I got a Luna II to with it. This lets me set the ULLI lower, which gives smaller block sizes. My latency slider used to not go lower than 11ms. It's only since the Luna II that the slider goes lower, and I could try the lower latencies.

rgds,
John Braner

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jbraner on 2003-01-09 07:53 ]</font>

cyberzip · Post by **cyberzip** » Thu Jan 09, 2003 9:12 am

Hi JBraner!

Thanks for your long reply! I haven't done that much testing yet, but 5.8ms gives a constant 3-4% CPU utilization on my P3 1Ghz, which is acceptable for me. I haven't even bothered to try soft synths & samplers that much yet, but now it seems a lot more feasible.

I have an ULLI settings slider in my SFP 3.1c-software too, but I haven't experimented with it that much since it didn't help much before I got the SFP-package. (I was one of those who waited for the free light-version of SFP that was released just before Christmas. What a long wait that was, btw!)

I'm curious to see how good my system will behave at 5.8ms with a lot of vocal tracks...

Have you (or anyone else reading this) noticed any other pros or cons with the new WDM-beta?

Best regards

cz