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Hi, I'm going to buy a new soundcard but I would need some advice..

I'm using a creative xfi xtrememusic
with an 8core AMD 16Gb Ram Hdd SSD

From all vst guitars I've tested, amplesound seems to be the best, but
consumes nearly all my CPU.. but when playing double guitar mode or
accompained with more vst instruments/effects.. sound breaks instantly.

I upgraded to 16 from 8 ram gb trying to fix the sound
issue but didn't work. I would like to use it for sequence
in renoise so I don't need low latency.

Some users told me to try my onboard audio with
asio4all, but the integrated audio hardware of my
asrock extreme4 seems to be broken so no testing done
(creative asio and steinberg generic low latency fail)

32Gb Ram will fix the problem?
motherboard with a very good onboard audio OR
a very good soundcard?

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For what it's worth, I think there is an issue with doubling guitars CPU usage. It seems to use more CPU than two or three instances of Ample Sound Guitars not in doubling mode.

I would imagine most people using Ample Sound Guitars are using a Digital Audio Converter for playback rather than a soundcard, but in any case, unless you are recording I'm not sure if the soundcard/DAC should have any effect. You can test this however by setting your ASIO buffer length really high, like 1024 and seeing if there is an improvement. I'm not familiar with Renoise, but make sure you don't have any external input monitors active. Turning on a monitor will without a doubt bring ASIO and the quality of your soundcard/DAC into play in which case you wouldn't likely see much improvement short of buying something like an RME Babyface or a bit more economical, one of the Focusrite firewire DACs. The Focusrite USB DACs aren't up to par. Cheaper DACs aren't likely going to help much.

Scroll about halfway down this page to comment #411 by TAFKAT
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-co ... se-14.html

It is my impression though that if you don't have a monitor on, that it really comes down to your CPU and RAM and how efficiently the plugin was written. With 8core AMD 16Gb Ram Hdd SSD you don't have a lot of room for upgrading and since Ample Sound Guitars use a third party platform I don't know that they can do much about optimizing it's efficiency. It took me several months of back and forth between the Ample Sound devs and the platform dev to get a bug fixed that was clearly evident in the UI. Trying to get them to work together to optimize the code (much more involved) would most likely be completely futile.

Before purchasing more RAM I would check in Windows Task Manager > Performance to see if you have any free RAM when the issue is occurring.

Another (potentially expensive and complex) option is offloading other effects to a second computer or DSP. This is often done for reverbs (which are notoriously CPU intensive), for emulation plugins, and Nebula stuff. Though I don't have any experience with it, Vienna Ensemble Pro is commonly used for this, particularly in the film music industry.
http://www.viennaensemblepro.com/

Steinberg used to make someting for this but it is discontinued now.

There is a free option out there, but I believe it only supports 32bit VSTs and is no longer developed.
http://www.fx-max.com/fxt/

I could be wrong on this, but I think you may need two identical DACs, one on each computer, for the above options to work properly, but don't hold me to that. I'm not really sure.

UAD plugins is another option. That's not a route I personally care to go down, but is an option.

Perhaps the devs will have something more helpful to recommend, but thought I'd share some of what I've gleamed over my fairly constant stress over the last several years of never having enough CPU to do what I want. Hopefully it isn't completely misleading.

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thanks Greg

About the double mode, though I don't use it, it's a very good advice.

I've been checking tafkat's list but all the hardware seem made to be used
with instruments or microphones.

The thing is I'm not going to record any external audio/instrument. I use the mouse
and standard pc keyboard to "compose" or sequence, and just a midi keyboard for reference.

Because of a reduced budget (the main reason to omit the capacity to work with microphones
or external instrument), I'm looking for any hardware able to just accelerate as possible sequenced vst
instruments and effects, using high sample rate.

Something like Uad cards but for all vst effects/instruments brands would be great. I even heard something
about using gpu as an audio hardware (like reverb via CUDA) but seems in development.

As a comment, at lass2 (very heavy but not even as amplesound) site, they claim that the more Ram the better.

I don't really know what to do, and even worse, don't have much idea about hardware technical things.
For example, googling for vst acceleration, E-MU 1212M creative soundcard brings the following sentence:
"Hardware-accelerated effects - over 600 standalone and E-MU Power FX VST plug-in effects with no CPU overhead"
Does it mean it will accelerate just those EMU capable vst effects? Or standalone means whatever vst effects i use?

Thanks and excuse this mess..

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trozos wrote:I don't really know what to do, and even worse, don't have much idea about hardware technical things.
For example, googling for vst acceleration, E-MU 1212M creative soundcard brings the following sentence:
"Hardware-accelerated effects - over 600 standalone and E-MU Power FX VST plug-in effects with no CPU overhead"
Does it mean it will accelerate just those EMU capable vst effects? Or standalone means whatever vst effects i use?
It may be a moot point since it doesn't look like anyone sells it anymore. In any case, the 1212M is a DAC like those listed in tafkat's list, except it also includes a DSP like the UAD interfaces, but yeah, although it says you can add plugins, it doesn't mention third-party. Also, E-MU is not a brand you hear about in the music industry, even at the hobbyist level which would make me very weary of it. Being PCI is a big plus though. PCI is the most optimal way to interface. Sorry I'm not more help here.

I'm not sure what OS you are using, but some free optimization in the meantime if you are on Windows:

http://us.focusrite.com/answerbase/opti ... -windows-7

http://www.alesis.com/tipsnov08

http://www.prismsound.com/music_recordi ... hp?tt=0023

If you upgrade to 32GB of RAM, you are probably looking at around $325-$350 for decent sticks on Newegg. If you go that route be sure to chime back in here to let us know if it helped. If it does help noticeably I'll make the upgrade from 16GB as well. I do record and happen to have the DAC at the very bottom of tafkat's list, the Focusrite Saffire 6. I'd really like to save up my pennies and get an RME Babyface as my next performance upgrade, but RAM, costing half as much, might be a more reasonable next step if it helps sufficiently.

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Hi, I'm still with the same motherboard (onboard audio broken). I've done some testing
with creative xfi xtrememusic. I don't have a clue about what is going on here. I've tested
2048 latency samples with asi4all.

2 heavy + 3 light vst instruments + vst effects
When sound starts everything is ok..

- system cpu start increasing from 3 to 24%
- ram starts in +-24% and stays in 24%
- renoise CPU indicator keep increasing. reaching 75% errors start and at 99,9% sound is
completely broken.

Summing up, when sound is broken,
these are the consume percentages:

Renoise CPU indicator: 99.9%
System Resources monitor: CPU: 24% RAM: 23%

Maybe Ram has nothing to do or something is not working like it should?¿

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You'll need to track down the plugin causing the problem. Turn all the VIs and effects off in your project. Save the project. Close xtrememusic, and it probably wouldn't hurt to restart your computer. Open the test project again in xtrememusic. Make sure the issue doesn't still exist with all your VI and effects disabled. Then turn on one VI at a time to see if the CPU issue occurs. If it doesn't, start turning on one effect at a time.

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If I turn off all effects, reverb, delays in all channels..
sound is nearly perfect.

About the virtual instruments, I know the most "problematic": amplesound and lass2

But the main thing is: only 25% of the CPU and RAM is use
What could I do to force host or plugins to use the rest??

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Sorry, I think I misunderstood your issue. I thought you were saying that with all the plugins loaded things would work at first but gradually, without doing anything else, the CPU usage would start increasing until it couldn't function.

There is no way to assign a certain amount of CPU or RAM to each plugin, and if you are maxing out that wouldn't help you anyway.

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