KVR Audio

LawrenceF · Post by **LawrenceF** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 8:15 pm

What's your system specs? I only ask because what you seem to be seeing there isn't close to what I see here, not unusual of course with systems being different I guess.

As an example, when you say Studio One uses 5-10% cpu when you open an empty song with no tracks, I can confirm that here (at 64k with ASIO4ALL), peaking about 7% on it's cpu meter (looks like it's just core 1 to me), but ... this confirmation is on a White MacBook core duo P7350 @ 2ghz, not exactly what I'd call a powerhouse system by any stretch. I don't see anything like that on my Win 7 desktop system.

So if your 4-core (?) desktop powerhouse (?) is kinda performing with Studio One like my not so new or not so powerful 2 core older White MacBook, that's a little surprising, and I understand why you're not all that happy with that.

Anyway, my desktop system is an off-the shelf Gateway "gaming system" that I paid $950 for. I never even turn Norton AV off on it. 8 cores, it performs pretty well.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 8:25 pm

LawrenceF wrote:What's your system specs? I only ask because what you seem to be seeing there isn't close to what I see here, not unusual of course with systems being different I guess.

As an example, when you say Studio One uses 5-10% cpu when you open an empty song with no tracks, I can confirm that here (at 64k with ASIO4ALL), peaking about 7% on it's cpu meter (looks like it's just core 1 to me), but ... this confirmation is on a White MacBook core duo P7350 @ 2ghz, not exactly what I'd call a powerhouse system by any stretch. I don't see anything like that on my Win 7 desktop system.

So if your 4-core (?) desktop powerhouse (?) is kinda performing with Studio One like my not so new or not so powerful 2 core older White MacBook, that's a little surprising, and I understand why you're not all that happy with that.

Anyway, my desktop system is an off-the shelf Gateway "gaming system" that I paid $950 for. I never even turn Norton AV off on it. 8 cores, it performs pretty well.

haha! I have the same chip/ram

(i7/860/8gb ram)

Yeah, I'm puzzled. AND I've received a ton of advice/help and I really do appreciate it.

LawrenceF · Post by **LawrenceF** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 8:30 pm

hibidy wrote:
haha! I have the same chip/ram (i7/860/8gb ram)

Yeah, I'm puzzled. AND I've received a ton of advice/help and I really do appreciate it.

I think that's my system, i7/860. If I boot the studio later I'll post exact specs. I use a console but still, when I lower the buffers for these kind of comparisons, it's not that far away from Reaper. Reaper does a little bit better (apparently, looking at the measurements of the cpu meters as a reference) across the board on all my systems though.

Maybe it comes down to hardware and build out or motherboard or memory chips or something, dunno. I do use a PCI audio card and I do have (I think) lots of video RAM so I assume that may help, dunno.

What's the mfg make and model of your system?

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 8:39 pm

It's an msi board. I don't remember all the part numbers and such.

Richard_Synapse · Post by **Richard_Synapse** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 8:55 pm

tony tony chopper wrote:This is also what makes FL processes random-sized blocks (like sometimes just 1 sample), which some badly coded plugins don't like at all, that's the drawback.

This is why I switched to block-based processing in Orion, a la Cubase. Another reason is efficiency. With multi-threading, passing a single sample to a plugin does not seem like a good idea, as you said.

Richard

LawrenceF · Post by **LawrenceF** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 9:06 pm

hibidy wrote:It's an msi board. I don't remember all the part numbers and such.

I hear you. I don't know how these various meters relate to actual CPU and all that so it's confusing to me as a layman. I mean, that same system I spoke about above peaks at 5% cpu (in the Windows cpu meter) sitting idle with no DAW running at all. I assume that's some background processes pulling cycles, dunno.

All this stuff is really way over my head.

I feel for you, I hope you get it sorted and if not, just move on and be productive elsewhere and have some joy.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 9:14 pm

LawrenceF wrote:
hibidy wrote:It's an msi board. I don't remember all the part numbers and such.
I hear you. I don't know how these various meters relate to actual CPU and all that so it's confusing to me as a layman. I mean, that same system I spoke about above peaks at 5% cpu (in the Windows cpu meter) sitting idle with no DAW running at all. I assume that's some background processes pulling cycles, dunno.

All this stuff is really way over my head. I feel for you, I hope you get it sorted and if not, just move on and be productive elsewhere and have some joy.

Oh, I have TONS of joy

The reap blows my mind constantly

But all I can do is give my results.

Fritze · Post by **Fritze** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 9:16 pm

tony tony chopper wrote:
How many plugins are know to not work with that? Do you have a list of them somewhere?
no, but we have an option for a workaround anyway

OK. Does that mean that you get all plugins to work with that workaround?
What is the workaround and does it cost performance and if so how much?

tony tony chopper · Post by **tony tony chopper** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 9:22 pm

With multi-threading, passing a single sample to a plugin does not seem like a good idea, as you said.

Statistically it's very rare, though. Also with today's small latencies that users pick, in a FL a buffer will be typically splitted in 2 or 3 at worst.

OK. Does that mean that you get all plugins to work with that workaround?
What is the workaround and does it cost performance and if so how much?

the workaround involves slightly higher CPU usage & small latency. But we're talking about buggy plugins here, their makers can still fix them if they care.

LawrenceF · Post by **LawrenceF** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 10:38 pm

hibidy wrote:Oh, I have TONS of joy The reap blows my mind constantly

Cool. I wish you much more to come.

Fritze · Post by **Fritze** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 11:24 pm

tony tony chopper wrote:the workaround involves slightly higher CPU usage & small latency. But we're talking about buggy plugins here, their makers can still fix them if they care.

Haha! Fix them? Nice one. People sometimes don't even "fix" their plugins when they don't work correctly in Cubase.
Thanx for the info.

tony tony chopper · Post by **tony tony chopper** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 11:56 pm

Haha! Fix them? Nice one. People sometimes don't even "fix" their plugins when they don't work correctly in Cubase.

Sure but it's also not really our job to babysit other programmers, besides workarounds are still just workarounds, not as good as a bugfix, and there are still crashing bugs that we can't do anything about.
So to me the best solution if a plugin is buggy is not to buy/use it until it gets fixed.

There are incompatibilities that are no one's fault, though, either based on different interpretations of unclear parts of the VST SDK, or because of different GUI standards. Or sometimes things that weren't predicted, like multithreading problems - the stuff I started 12 years ago wasn't taking multithreadability into account because consumer multicores simply didn't exist yet, & of course things went wrong when it started to get mainstream.

Fritze · Post by **Fritze** » Sun Nov 13, 2011 11:17 am

tony tony chopper wrote:
Haha! Fix them? Nice one. People sometimes don't even "fix" their plugins when they don't work correctly in Cubase.

Sure but it's also not really our job to babysit other programmers, besides workarounds are still just workarounds, not as good as a bugfix, and there are still crashing bugs that we can't do anything about.
So to me the best solution if a plugin is buggy is not to buy/use it until it gets fixed.

Cool man, I didnt mean it that way. Sure the host dev shouldn't babysit the plugin devs.
The reason why I'm asking all this is because Reaper crashed too often here for me to happily tolerate it any longer. It's hinders productivity and is killing the fun factor.
So I'm looking for an alternative. FL looks really cool in many ways I'm interested in right now for making music. I'm talking about midi with VSTis and automation.
It's rather tiring to make extensive tests IF a plugin that behaves as expected first becomes a crasher later on. This is one of the things that was eaier in Nuendo back then: If it crashed you knew it. But nowadays I get things like "Uh, don't close that GUI too quickly after having closed another one or it MIGHT crash!"

tony tony chopper · Post by **tony tony chopper** » Sun Nov 13, 2011 7:49 pm

It all depends what crashes anyway. If it's a plugin that crashes, it won't be safe in any host. There's an exception however, because Windows keeps processes in their own playpen, so while a single plugin running in a host as a DLL can completely break it, as a process it can't, & plugin "bridges" are basically doing that, placing plugins in their own process(es). However this has a big efficiency drawback so it's only a workaround.

dalor · Post by **dalor** » Sun Nov 13, 2011 8:01 pm

tony tony chopper wrote:It all depends what crashes anyway. If it's a plugin that crashes, it won't be safe in any host. ).

+1! Same thoughts exactly. Unfortunately some companies only officially support 'major' hosts and blame then issues on the host but not their plugin.

Just because a plugin crashes in one host but not the other doesn't make it bug free.

Multi processor support differences in various hosts