KVR Audio

theEmbark · Post by **theEmbark** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 4:08 pm

Hey guys,

I figured I would start here before going to the Ample Sound section as I don't know if this is just a general issue or specific to ample sound.

I have a 2 track piece - 1 with addictive keys loaded and another with AGM2 loaded.

In the simpler places I don't have any playback issues but the more complex part to be crackle and or pop. When I mix down the audio I am not hearing the issues so I am assuming this is a playback issue.

CPU monitor is at 12-21% during this part and RAM is at 9gbs out of 48gbs so I do not think is is an issue with either of those. Latency is 3ms and buffer size is set to 256 in Saffire Mix control.

DAW is Cubase 8.5 PRO and Interface is Focusrite Saffire Pro 40.

Any help is appreciated,

Thanks,
Kevin

incubus · Post by **incubus** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 5:18 pm

AFAIK, playback pop/clicks are real time issues, but you have a monster computer.

The obvious questions that you probably already know are things like "did you set power settings to high performance" or "what sampling rate" or "did you try a higher buffer or "what wi-fi settings do you have"

They seem to answer a good 70% of peoples issues.

I don't know anything about ample guitar.

foosnark · Post by **foosnark** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 5:46 pm

I have similar experiences with very complex parts in Maschine. Normally I don't run into it, but with the remix projects I've done, things got a little out of hand.

Real-time playback will crackle and stutter, but I can record within Maschine in real-time and it comes out smooth.

The first thing I'd do is increase ASIO output buffer size/latency.

theEmbark · Post by **theEmbark** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 6:29 pm

incubus wrote:AFAIK, playback pop/clicks are real time issues, but you have a monster computer.

The obvious questions that you probably already know are things like "did you set power settings to high performance" or "what sampling rate" or "did you try a higher buffer or "what wi-fi settings do you have"

They seem to answer a good 70% of peoples issues.

I don't know anything about ample guitar.

Thanks for the reply,

Power settings should be fine I just tweaked those before I installed Cubase. I could try going down to 48k sample rate this project is set at 96k but honestly I usually run 48k my interface was just set to 96k.

I have my buffer set low because I want to minimize latency and I built this machine with a ton of CPU to help off load some of the latency by running at a lower latency. I can try raising the buffer size and see if I have a performance increase but I'm pretty sure I tried this and it was the opposite as I expected.

I actually don't have wifi on this machine. Causes to many issues

.

I think it's less about amplesounds plugins and more about getting these settings right. I just finished this machine so I am fine tuning and trying to debug as I go.

foosnark wrote:I have similar experiences with very complex parts in Maschine. Normally I don't run into it, but with the remix projects I've done, things got a little out of hand. Real-time playback will crackle and stutter, but I can record within Maschine in real-time and it comes out smooth.

The first thing I'd do is increase ASIO output buffer size/latency.

I may have this wrong but doesn't a lower buffer size = a heavier CPU load but a lower latency level? I'm scratching my head at the idea of raising the buffer solving the issue. I would understand if my CPU was being taxed but it's hardly at work.

Either way it's easy enough to check that so I will do a little experiment anyways.

Thanks guys,
Kevin

jens · Post by **jens** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 6:39 pm

You Need this:

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Raising the buffer size might indeed help as a higher buffer generally means less it being less time-critical - your machine simply has more time to calculate stuff and pops&crackles are usually a result of the computer not being able to calculate the process(es) fast enough - for whatever reason - in your case it certainly isn't the CPU itself.

theEmbark · Post by **theEmbark** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 6:42 pm

jens wrote:You Need this:

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Raising the buffer size might indeed help as a higher buffer generally means less it being less time-critical - your machine simply has more time to calculate stuff and pops&crackles are usually a result of the computer not being able to calculate the process(es) fast enough - for whatever reason - in your case it certainly isn't the CPU

Thank you,

That makes more sense :d. And I actually already have that I just didn't think about running it during the track. Let me do that now.

Stay tuned...

jens · Post by **jens** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 6:47 pm

actually you should run it without Cubase doing anything...

nowadays often network-adapters are the culprit.

theEmbark · Post by **theEmbark** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 6:53 pm

jens wrote:actually you should run it without Cubase doing anything...

nowadays often network-adapters are the culprit.

Saw this right before I posted the below message,
I am aware of this. For this build I am just running LAN via the motherboard. I ran it both ways the system seems to idle around 500 (not sure what metric that is ms?) with occasional spikes to 1000 but not higher then that. There seemed to be more spikes pushing that 1000 line when the track hit the part with more notes to process.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alright so I dropped the sample rate to 48k on my interface and in Cubase. I also raised the buffer to 512. Latency is definitely more consistent at the moment. I'll run this config for a while and see if I have any issues or at least fewer issues.

Thanks for the insight on the buffer size and the reminder to change my sample rate

Kevin

jens · Post by **jens** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 7:07 pm

I would not use 48k - rather 44,1 - you will have minimal quality improvement (if at all - usually nowadays plugins use sufficient oversampling if and where it matters anyway) but if you run at 48k stuff needs to be resampled to 44,1 in the end and that is a good source for quality loss...

Your results are absolutely terrible for a modern machine - especially if it is as powerful as yours. Something is very wrong. Make some experiments - start with simply switching off the internet while running the latency checker and if that doesn't improve Things dramatically then try switching off your network device in the device manager.

theEmbark · Post by **theEmbark** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 7:15 pm

jens wrote:I would not use 48k - rather 44,1 - you will have minimal quality improvement (if at all - usually nowadays plugins use sufficient oversampling if and where it matters anyway) but if you run at 48k stuff needs to be resampled to 44,1 in the end and that is a good source for quality loss...

Your results are absolutely terrible for a modern machine - especially if it is as powerful as yours. Something is very wrong. Make some experiments - start with simply switching off the internet while running the latency checker and if that doesn't improve Things dramatically then try switching off your network device in the device manager.

Thank you for confirming my suspicions. Something just doesn't seem to be running or setup correctly but trying to narrow it down

.

Lowered to 44.1 as the points you make are very good especially with all the VSTs I use.

However, so far this has raised latency?

Going to look at devices now as I have quite a few hooked up so it's very possible one or more is causing an issue.

theEmbark · Post by **theEmbark** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 7:26 pm

So I remembered another utility that tells you which drivers are acting up, LatencyMon by resplendence.com

looks like this is GPU related which makes a bit of sense as I am running 3 monitors which I'm sure doesn't help the situation,

I am going to look and see if there are any fixes out there and/or if a different GPU would fix the problem.

Thanks,
Kevin

theEmbark · Post by **theEmbark** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 8:08 pm

There was an update available for the GPU I am going to let this run for a few hours while I'm out and see the results. It already looks like latency went down a bit but the directX driver and Nvidia driver keep raising the bar.

Would someone mind running it on there machine and give me an idea of where I need/want to get to?

Thanks,
Kevin

incubus · Post by **incubus** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 9:40 pm

theEmbark wrote: I could try going down to 48k sample rate this project is set at 96k but honestly I usually run 48k my interface was just set to 96k.

Probably bingo. Not sure I can explain it properly but 96k and vsti/etc can be very problematic.

foosnark · Post by **foosnark** » Fri Aug 12, 2016 12:33 am

theEmbark wrote:Would someone mind running it on there machine and give me an idea of where I need/want to get to?

Every once in a while I get huge spikes in "interrupt to process latency" and it tells me my system can't handle real-time audio. Which it actually can.

It told me there might be a power management problem, so I checked, and found that CPU throttling was enabled. I turned that off, rebooted... and I still get the performance warnings and it still claims throttling is enabled, but it isn't.

Since I'm not having trouble with audio except under extreme conditions, I'm really not too worried about it.

Chickenman · Post by **Chickenman** » Fri Aug 12, 2016 12:51 am

Have you tried the Asio4all driver? - often times worked better than factory drivers for me.

Are your samples installed to a SSD? If not it might be a failing HDD.

WIndows 10 can work fine but if you want to get the most out of whatever hardware you have then a stripped Windows7 is going to be better.

For comparison:

DPC.PNG

I also have a xeon - make sure all power saving features are turned off in the Bios and it is manually set to it's max clock speed.
Unplug everything else that is connected via usb/firewire etc and rerun your tests/project.

I have been working @ 96k for years without issues as have many others.

VST "Popping and Crackling" During more complex parts