KVR Audio

dougsyo · Post by **dougsyo** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 11:23 am

You had better experience with Audigy ASIO drivers than I did - when the Audigy2 first came out, if I used ASIO I'd get BSOD's about every other day.

My Presonus Firebox is rock-solid. I use it with Sonar and FLStudio.

Doug

fgimian · Post by **fgimian** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 12:23 pm

hmm well I tried ASIO4All and overal it was a little more smooth and with no dropouts, however, it conflicted with the Layla3G and caused Windows to lose my soundcard until I restarted ... so ASIO4all is kinda out.

In Reason 3, my Layla is rock solid to the max, I run projects at 3ms 96 khz with no trouble at all. I actually think may have been a bug introduced in 3.1 / 3.11 since 3.02 seems a lot more stable with my setup.

The one thing I noticed was...
1. Open a project in Cubase
2. Hit F3 a couple times and watch the CPU meter, it hardly moves.
3. If you reselect your ASIO driver or change latency .... anything at all in the Devices area and repeat Step 2, what I see is a spike every time I hit F3 to open or close the mixer.

Funnily enough this is a quick way to reproduce it, but it seems to happen overtime even if you don't reselect your ASIO driver.

I'll experiment with this more when I format. I'm going to install a 2nd copy of Windows with absolutely nothing but Cubase, drivers, VST effects & Reason and see how I go.

I'll also do every tweak known to man too.

I just updated to a Dual Core Pentium, (Pentium D 3.0 GHZ, 955X chipset), could that be it ? ... who knows ...

I don't remember having this problem with my trusty old P4, but the motherboard on that thing died lol.

Doug thanks for your help, I have only ever owned an Audigy 1 to be honest and I definitely had some issues with drivers, but it wasn't ASIO related as far as I remember. I'll see if I can get hold of my Audigy from my brother who is now using it.

Thanks for the help folks, I'll keep you posted when I do some more investigation.

Cheers
Fots

WilliamK · Post by **WilliamK** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 12:34 pm

soundpalace wrote: 9. How do I manage my audio without an audio pool in Sonar ? This is a huge feature that I use daily, especially when moving audio from one project to another, everything is properly named and easy to access.

I just got my Sonar 5 box, and as far as I can tell, it does that already. When you create a song, it creates a subdirectory with the song name with all audio files inside. So there is no longer a shared-audio directorie since Sonar 5.

Wk

lavoll · Post by **lavoll** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 12:35 pm

WilliamK wrote:
soundpalace wrote: 9. How do I manage my audio without an audio pool in Sonar ? This is a huge feature that I use daily, especially when moving audio from one project to another, everything is properly named and easy to access.
I just got my Sonar 5 box, and as far as I can tell, it does that already. When you create a song, it creates a subdirectory with the song name with all audio files inside. So there is no longer a shared-audio directorie since Sonar 5.

Wk

if i remember correctly, there's a switch in the "global settings" dialogue box for this. the default is (at least on my system) to create a subdirectory for each song.

lavoll · Post by **lavoll** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 12:36 pm

but.. also. bouncing (to track) and exporting little or big clips of audio is very easy in sonar!

Hunter · Post by **Hunter** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 12:42 pm

Quite funny reading your description of you Cubase problems. I have dropouts and problems in Sonar - in the end I think every host has its problems.

Sonar is great when it works, I can work really fast. The new features in 5 like the vocal tune thingy I have yet to explore but as part of the host software are a superb feature.

The only troubles I have are dropouts when I'm trying to work fast, and in 5 I've had seizures (the puter not me!) when dragging audio around during playback, that didn't happen in 4, and there is still a serious bug in the envelopes where you can't use more than one envelope per effect.

I love the groove clip features, lets me use loops from different bpms, chop them up to my bpm, and play them in a few seconds. Now if they put in a keyboard map function on that.... hmm!

fgimian · Post by **fgimian** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 1:13 pm

I guess all sequencers are a little buggy. The dropout thing is a lot more of an issue recently since I got my new PC. Hunter are you running a Dual Core by any chance ?

Cheers
Fots

WilliamK · Post by **WilliamK** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 1:28 pm

I got a simple computer here, and I don't get Dropouts with Sonar 4 while playing. (haven't done any new music with Sonar 5 just yet) Only when I do some intensive things, but I would say that's normal.

Athlon XP 3000+ with 512 meg and 7400 rpm HD. Audiophile card with 256 samples buffer ASIO driver. (5ms latency)

Wk

Hunter · Post by **Hunter** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 1:31 pm

soundpalace wrote:I guess all sequencers are a little buggy. The dropout thing is a lot more of an issue recently since I got my new PC. Hunter are you running a Dual Core by any chance ?

Cheers
Fots

Nope, just a steam powered athlon 1700

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 4:35 pm

what's "auto-following"?

Hunter · Post by **Hunter** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 4:38 pm

bduffy wrote:what's "auto-following"?

I'm guessing he means the scrolling of the piano roll with playback?

orangenut · Post by **orangenut** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 5:18 pm

If VSTs are DX wrapped in Sonar, can you still do VST automation?
Is there any loss of performance by having them wrapped?

Fots - something to add to your list for tweaking. Check the latency on your PCI bus. I didn't even know I could, but it solved a problem I had on one mobo, with a Juli@ card.
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951
http://www.audiotrak.net/support_faq.htm
The video card was being given lots of time and the soundcard none, so it resulted in dropouts, clicking and scratching, particularily when I moved windows about and did scrollbar things.

Hunter - "I've had seizures (the puter not me!) when dragging audio around during playback" ROTFWL...

Interesting thread guys. Don't want to go off topic with it, but in keeping with the "exploring options for pro-use audio tools", anybody used SADiE or Samplitude. Is it really a matter of you get what you pay for?

But then for anything over 500 bucks I expect it to work 99% 100% of the time. That's what beta testing is there for. I really despise this trend of releasing buggy code, especially when its in a mission critical position in the company. I'd much rather they had a stable release and a public beta, that way I can contribute towards the stability on a seperate machine in my own time. But when I need to get down to business I don't want to be wasting my time with buggy code.

kp · Post by kp » Wed Dec 07, 2005 5:20 pm

orangenut wrote:If VSTs are DX wrapped in Sonar, can you still do VST automation?
Is there any loss of performance by having them wrapped?

Yes (with minor proviso for multi-out VSTis).

No.

WilliamK · Post by **WilliamK** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 7:29 pm

orangenut wrote:Is there any loss of performance by having them wrapped?

Nope, on my tests it proved to use the exact same CPU usage.

Wk

fgimian · Post by **fgimian** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 10:28 pm

orangenut awesome thanks for the info. I'll try it out very soon.

I think I'm definitely stickin with Cubase as long as I can fix the dropouts and I was thinking about PCI Bus Mastering and my PCI-Express video card stealing cycles from my PCI audio card so that may be it. Because essentially, it's graphical elements that cause CPU spikes. Dropouts happen randomly.

I agree with the comment about buggy software, Propellerheads produce the highest quality software I have seen and they adhere to a strict beta testing period. Sonar doesn't seem as bad as Cubase on the bug front, Cubase is definitely the one program which is often released with extremely obvious bugs and the great part is that Steinberg don't actually fix them sometimes. I'm hoping that several bugs will be addressed in the next (paid) update, this is definitely mission critical software.

The most annoying thing happened to me the other day with the dropouts ... I was recording and got dropouts ... now that's just BAAADDD, I had to redo the take so I increased the latency to be safe and it was ok.

It seems that as soon as a project is large on my system (over 65 % CPU usage), things start to get unstable. But I have experienced dropouts on smaller projects too.

I'm formatting tonight and I'll report back when I test Cubase again.

Thanks guys, please keep this goin

Cheers
Fots

Sonar Questions (thinking of moving from Cubase)