Why can't EXT handle ANY audio without crackling?

[jens]

If it is a memory leak it must be in something that I don't use - like SC drivers, vsts or something.

well, I don't have a real clue about this stuff and I don't know in which way the asio.dll and the asio-drivers of a soundcard cooperate but maybe it's the buffer-handling of different asio-drivers which make the memory-leak more obvious in one case than in another one...

[Germ777]

Ok. My latest find
The first thing I noticed about this whole thing was that some MIDI clips stopped working for Dr. Fusion by ODO. If I am not mistaken this is a sample based Synthedit made drum synth......
These clips just made no sound with Mr. Fusion. As soon as I found this I loaded another instrument and the clips worked fine (with crakling and stutering, but they triggered the sounds).
Also I froze all the instruments but that did not help so I decided to try the frozen audio clips found in the project folder inside Podium and I had excelent results. Opened Tracktion 1 and loaded all wavs and again, no problems.
Now that really got me thinking so I opened a new instance of EXT and loaded all wavs in it and everything works fine. I will go out and dio a few things in town so I will leave the project looping for a couple hours to see if I get any increased problems over time.
Also I opened the original project and tried re-loading Dr. Fusion in its original track. Still the same clips make no sound and I don`t seem to find any automation in those clips that would prevent the instrument from sounding.
I loaded a new instance of the VSTi and re-wrote the clips. They sound fine but the crakling is ridiculous so I started to get rid of iunstruments and FX and as soon as all synthedit made VSTis and FX are turned off the CPU load goes down by a lot and the project plays fine again.
So......it seems the problem seems to lie with synthedit and maybe a bit of memory. I still wonder why I got the memory message from SFz as I have 1G of RAM
I will keep testing and checking different things to find out what is going on in my set up. I just refuse to give up on a good project within an excelent host
Later.

[jens]

I still wonder why I got the memory message from SFz as I have 1G of RAM

I think everyone who uses SFZ with bigger soundfonts sees this insulting message from time to time regardless of which sequencer he uses if he hasn't switched to dfd - so to get rid of te problem do this ((dfd = 'direct from disk' -> disk streaming) top right corner of the sfz-gui)

[Germ777]

I still wonder why I got the memory message from SFz as I have 1G of RAM

I think everyone who uses SFZ with bigger soundfonts sees this insulting message from time to time regardless of which sequencer he uses if he hasn't switched to dfd - so to get rid of te problem do this ((dfd = 'direct from disk' -> disk streaming) top right corner of the sfz-gui)

[plastique]

HI

I wonder if it would be worth looking at the plug-ins used by people - if this is a regular problem?

One particular plug-in that was absolutely KILLING my project recently was - Neodynium by Elemental audio?

Normally the plug seems OK (it's a demo anyway) but in this case it was taking like 25% CPU!

I do find RM4 tends to eat up quite a bit as well - but I do run several instances for lot's of layered percussion - probably not a good idea.

Flipper.

It would be great if eXT (or in general: the host) had the ability to restrict plugins to a set amount of cpu/memory to not let it overload or leak ,
but then this could turn out very tricky and result in unnecessary side effects .

IMO it's probably unavoidable to have such a behaviour and only a code genius like jorgen may find a solution but i doubt it .
It's definitely worth to check out plugins , but this is very tedious in projects which contain a whole variety of them (load and test them one by one , AARG!).

In any case - the plugin developers should be made aware if something's found .

[DarkStar]

Kaos, this may be irrelevant but Dr Fusion only accepts MIDI data on Ch 01 (odo knows it's a bug).

[jorgen]

Hi, I ordered a Echo MIA MIDI card and have done some testing in various host and find eXT to perform indentical to other hosts usingthe ASIO dll from v1.3.5 final.

When really pushing the the cpu and moving/resizing would cause stutter in any host on my daw. Changing to ASIO4ALL, not a single stutter.

If someone still has audio clitches with echo cards in eXT even on low cpu, make sure you have the latest ASIO.dll from energyXT 1.3.5 (or latest beta). File date is 05.07.2005.

cheers
jorgen

[jens]

wtf - you even ordered a MIA but you can't reproduce it?

- of course I use the latest asio.dll and for sure I have far more crackles than with any other sequencer - my ssystem si pretty stable otherwise...

[jens]

Jorgen, did you install Windows as 'standard pc' of did you disable acpi?

[jorgen]

my Dell came preinstalled with xp sp2, anyway I can check if acpi disabled or not?

jorgen

[jens]

I guess ACPI is enabled then but anyway: in the devices-manager check the entry 'computer' -> either there's written something like 'ACPI multiprocessor pc' or 'standard pc' -> 'standard pc' has got ACPI disabled...

[ModuLR]

my clicks a lot at 1024... if I go lower, it buzzes like crazy. I'm gonna record it just so you can hear how bad it can actually get. And this would be using only a loop and clicking on the interface... no VSTs or anything. It's definately particular to ext in my case. gimmie a sec...

also when pushing really hard.. I find the opposite.. the echo drivers are more stable in not buzzing than the asio4all drivers (which even slow the gui refresh as well)... note, I meant that in other hosts.. not ext.

[jens]

Jorgen, have you got another machine to test it?

[jorgen]

jens, "ACPI multiprocessor pc"

ModuLR, is this with 05.07.2005 ASIO dll in the driver/audio folder? its in the latest beta and v1.3.5 zip.

jorgen

[ModuLR]

yeah.. I switched to the latest drivers (from the v1.3.5 zip) for this test...

example

it's that buzzy type of stuff... this is a loop (and aweful one, but hell it's an example.. hehe), with microtonic going in the background and a reverb (ambience) I think. It was using maybe about 15% cpu.. @256 samples. I used the lower latency to exagerate the buzzing.. but it's definately very real. eXT is the only host I encounter this problem with unfortunately...