Wavelab and Intel p-cores and e-cores - my experience and solution!

WaveLab
1

I thought it could be useful to share my experience of this with the Wavelab community, but also in case a Google search lands pretty much anyone who uses a DAW and has Intel e-core issues lands here :wink:

A couple of years ago I bought a new PC with Intel i5 processor running Windows 11 - it’s certainly got enough grunt for all real-time mastering tasks but with a couple of issues:

  • When switching Wavelab to background e.g while listening back and doing admin, audio glitches occur
  • When rendering a montage, render time doubles when putting Wavelab in the background

The reason for this is that the latest gen desktop and laptop Intel processors have a mixture of Performance Cores (p-cores) and Efficiency Cores (e-cores), with the objective of reducing power usage and extending time on battery for laptops. When switching Wavelab to the background, the Windows task scheduler shunts Wavelab (or any other DAW) to run on the e-cores at much lower performance… hence the audio glitches (esp. on fully loaded 96kHz projects) and slower render time.

After some frustration (and realising it’s not a Steinberg problem!) I found the solution: an app called Process Lasso. This app allows one to assign a specific app/exe to p-cores only (called “processor affinity”) - so when switching Wavelab to the background, it continues to run on the performance cores with no audio glitches and full render speed!

I have now tested this on hundreds of mastered tracks - it is stable, and causes no issues. The free version only allows you to set the processor affinity at run time, the pro version (which is about 40 bucks) allows you to automatically set Wavelab affinity to the p-cores at startup.

I have found this to be a great solution - as always YMMV! But if you are experiencing these kind of issues on the latest gen Intel CPUs, it might be worth a try :slight_smile:

5 Likes
2

Thanks for your valuable report.

1 Like
3

You’re welcome - happy to answer any questions about my adventures :slight_smile:

4

Just a quick FYI, Windows already allows one to set both affinity and priority within Task Manager. You can right-click on any process in Task Manager → Details and set both individually. Affinity is easy enough, but one should take care when changing priority as you can prevent required system processes from executing (e.g. setting a process to “Realtime.” :slight_smile: )

If the Process Lasso is working, right on - but there are direct, native solutions as well.

1 Like
5

Yes that it is true! The disadvantage of that method is that you have to do this every time you start Wavelab - or edit in the registry. Process Lasso allows this with a few clicks without diving into the registry - and so also easy to add to other DAWs I use.

But yeah - I never mess with priority!

3 Likes
6

Hahahaha. Yeah, I found that out the hard way :smiley:

2 Likes
7

Microsoft/Apple/Linux knows, what is best for you.

Tweak the system until it breaks. We all know that, right?

2 Likes