Collective crashes when auditioning sounds

[Mark Swanson]

I just upgraded to Waveform 11, and bought the new Collective Beta pack too. Everything installed just fine, but while trying out the new sounds in Collective, it crashes quite a bit. Everything goes away right back to the Desktop. I am told the "Waveform's Audio Engine has crashed.".
What's up with that? For what it's worth, my computer seems to choke easily as well... the CPU meter in Waveform peaks out too early with a modest song loaded in. I have an i7 in that machine and WIndows 10, where else might the bottleneck be?

[tovokas]

It's always helpful to include your system specs including your audio device, to see if others with similar setups are having the same problem. A few questions: Do the regular Collective patches cause crashes? What latency are you working at? Also, do you have high resolution/4K monitor? On my system Waveform struggles unless I run it in low-resolution mode on my 5K monitor...

[rlindsey0]

Collective crashes my Waveform 10.4.2. I just bought the new Platforms sound pack and was excited to try it out. I tried to use several different arpeggio patches, but W10 crashes irrecoverably every time. I have to restart the computer. It would be one thing if this were a 3rd party instrument, but this is TSC's own sampler. This should not be happening. I should have easily enough computer to run this.

[Watchful]

Hmm. I wonder if Platforms is intended for Waveform 11's Collective. It *should* be equally compatible. This should be responded to by Tracktion's team here on line.

[Mark Swanson]

Ok, well I have a Windows 10, and I run an i7 860 @2.80GHz and 12 GB RAM... I use a Behringer UMC 1820 interface. Audio buffer right now is at 800 samples, seems to work best for mixdown. I don't use a 4K monitor.
I can't understand why I run out of CPU so easily. That has always been a problem for me.

[astey]

Ok, well I have a Windows 10, and I run an i7 860 @2.80GHz and 12 GB RAM... I use a Behringer UMC 1820 interface. Audio buffer right now is at 800 samples, seems to work best for mixdown. I don't use a 4K monitor.
I can't understand why I run out of CPU so easily. That has always been a problem for me.

Hmm, your cpu is 11 years old. Some suggestions:

• Try collective in another daw and see how it holds up.
• Check if your cpu fulfills the minimum requirements. (It doesn’t support avx for example).
• Use multiple of 64 as sample rate. (128, 256, ..., 1024)
  

  I can't understand why I run out of CPU so easily. That has always been a problem for me.

• Check the temp of your cpu. After so many years the thermal paste becomes dry (throttling).

[Mark Swanson]

Ok, thanks for your replies, I will check out these suggestions. My CPU is old, even if it is an i7. You say I need to check its "minimum requirements", I looked at Waveform's requirements and my system is WAY moire than what the website says the program needs. What requirements are you talking about? I don't even know what "apx" is.
My CPU use is way too high, I have a monitoring program that shows was each of the 8 cores is doing, and the first core is always maxxing out while others remain quite low.

[astey]

Ok, thanks for your replies, I will check out these suggestions. My CPU is old, even if it is an i7. You say I need to check its "minimum requirements", I looked at Waveform's requirements and my system is WAY moire than what the website says the program needs. What requirements are you talking about? I don't even know what "apx" is.
My CPU use is way too high, I have a monitoring program that shows was each of the 8 cores is doing, and the first core is always maxxing out while others remain quite low.

I can't talk about Collective since I don't use it personally. I tried loaded a couple of presets now and it seems to work fine. I don't have any of the new packs though.

So these are all general advice:

AVX is a standard of cpu instructions. Some applications in the audio industry require these commands to run their engine. NI Massive X is an example: https://support.native-instruments.com/ ... -Processor

CPUs can handle a lot more commands per clock cycle nowadays as they were capable back in the days. This means that 2.8 ghz back then, aren't as fast as 2.8 ghz now.
For basic tasks your i7 should be enough though.
CPU load:
CPU balance depends on the application and how they handle multi tasking. splitting real time audio processes seems to be complicated, because processes need to stay in sync unlike video rendering. cpu load depends on your vsts a lot.

Antivirus applications draw a lot of performance. Personally I don't use their surveillance function.

[Wolfram Franke]

Hi Mark,

Wolfram from Tracktion here. All suggestions by the other people here are helpful, but I would like to make sure that your Collective version is V1.2.3. It includes a number of improvements and fixes that might have led to audio dropouts or crashes.

You can download it from the Download Manager or from the Download section of your Tracktion account.

I want to emphasize one performance tip that astey already gave you: make sure your audio buffer size is a power of two. So, for recording your note playing, you might set it to 128 samples and for arranging/mixing work, set it to 256 or 512 samples. Collective (and most other products I am aware of) uses multiples of 4, 8 or 16 internally for calculation, so this might give you a little bit more performance.

Let me know if you already have V1.2.3 or if it fixes your problems.

Wolfram

[Mark Swanson]

I do have 1.2.3 version, I made sure everything was updated when I moved to Waveform 11. But I have not yet tried these suggestions, I will do that as soon as I can and be back here in a couple of days to report! Thank you everyone.