Inspiration can happen anytime, anyplace and we want to make it easier for you to capture those ideas as they happen. Cakewalk has come together with Intel to provide some of the best songwriters and producers on the Ourstage circuit with an ultimate mobile studio!
Now through November 21, 2009, log on to Ourstage.com and submit your original music to enter. The Top 20 submissions in the Rock and Urban genres will be selected by music fans. Out of those 20, six winners (three in each genre) will be chosen by our panel of industry professionals and will receive a complete mobile music production studio worth over $3,000 including:
• Intel Core i7 Mobile processor-powered laptop
• Cakewalk’s V-Studio 100 portable recording solution
• SONAR 8.5 Producer digital audio workstation
• Rapture virtual instrument
• Cakewalk MA-15D studio monitors
At this year’s SIGGRAPH Conference in New Orleans, Carl Jacobson met with the host of Intel’s Visualize This! TV Show, Arti Gupta, to discuss Cakewalk’s advancements in it’s software performance. Some of Arti’s questions were so technical that we thought it only fair to ask Cakewalk’s CTO Noel Borthwick to add his thoughts. Watch the video and check out Noel’s comments below:
AG: Cakewalk is a member of the Intel Software Partner Program. What challenges were you trying to solve?
NB: The bandwidth available to the typical modern DAW user using a modern CPU such as the Core I7 is astounding compared to what was available just a couple of years ago. Users expect our software to use every ounce of available CPU cycles and horsepower it can to process their audio and mix. Cakewalk has been on the bleeding edge of technology for the last 15 years, taking advantage of cutting edge capabilities of the operating system as well as available hardware resources. With multiprocessing and 64-bit computing rapidly becoming mainstream, it has become even more critical for our software to make efficient use of hardware resources.
For example, for efficient multiprocessing we try and optimize all the code paths that are used in asynchronously mixing audio. The goal is to present a multi core machine with even and distributed workloads allowing the cores to work as hard as possible. To do this, we streamline the relevant code and minimize all high latency instructions.
Some typical areas that we try and improve our performance in are:
• Multi-processor load scaling: How well does a controlled test project load across multiple CPU cores?
• 64 bit performance: How well does the 64 bit version of the application perform with multiple workloads?
• CPU use: How efficiently does SONAR play back a CPU intensive project?
• High bandwidth tests: How well does the application perform while streaming audio at high sample rates (192K, 384K, etc) and bit depths (64 bit audio, etc)?
• Low latency performance: How well does the application perform streaming audio with very small audio buffer sizes (such as 1 msec buffers)?
A master at his craft, Justin Lassen dominates a new realm of creativity, composing music to computer-generated graphic art. A one-of-a-kind producer, composer and re-mixer, Justin translates the inspiring yet hauntingly beautiful art he sees into his own musical masterpieces. With the help of his PCAudioLabs digital audio workstation with an Intel Core i7 processor, SONAR 8 and various media editing tools, Justin gives life to the one dimensional art forms.
Recently featured in Intel’s Visual Adrenaline Magazine for his work with computer technology, Justin states:
“Cakewalk’s SONAR 8 was one of the applications that were optimized and ready to take full advantage of the four cores and eight threads available with the Intel Core i7 processor.”
Among the many new features in SONAR 8 that Lassen appreciates are“the new compression, gating, and limiting as well as the tried-and-true Sonitus FX, which always find their way into all of my projects, since they don’t overload my CPU.”
Synaesthesia, a series of his latest works, has gained high acclaim throughout the fine art and technology industries. The series pairs his music with still images created by well-known graphic designers including Alex Ruiz (The Simpsons) and Nykolai Aleksander.
To view scenes from Synaesthesia and other works, visit Intel’s website and scroll through the August edition of Visual Adrenaline Magazine
Follow Justin through life in the digital world on his Live Journal
Inspiration can happen anytime, anyplace and we want to make it easier for you to capture those ideas as they happen. Cakewalk has come together with Intel to provide some of the best songwriters and producers on the Ourstage circuit with an ultimate mobile studio!