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amaranth_aegis · Post by **amaranth_aegis** » Mon Feb 01, 2016 9:42 pm

Hi, I just bought diva after demoing it (was really impressed with the sound!!). But now I notice a hissing and crackling noise with most of the patches. I am using Sonar Platinum (no crackling with other VSTs/synths), and I have an Intel i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz, with a Sound Blaster Z for a sound card. I have multicore processing enabled in Diva and none of my cores' CPU usage goes above 50%. It doesn't seem to matter whether I have it in Divine or any other mode, and it also doesn't seem to be worse if I reduce the Voices or the Stack. Please help? I really love Diva, but this is becoming very frustrating for me. Thanks in advance!

ere2learn · Post by **ere2learn** » Mon Feb 01, 2016 9:54 pm

You sure you registered it & your name comes up up when you load a new instance of it?

amaranth_aegis · Post by **amaranth_aegis** » Mon Feb 01, 2016 9:59 pm

Yes, and it is not like the crackling in the demo version, it really sounds like some sort of "processing" problem (like I don't have enough CPU horsepower, but I know I do). It is short, but pretty frequent.

exmatproton · Post by **exmatproton** » Mon Feb 01, 2016 11:13 pm

amaranth_aegis wrote:Yes, and it is not like the crackling in the demo version, it really sounds like some sort of "processing" problem (like I don't have enough CPU horsepower, but I know I do). It is short, but pretty frequent.

Did you try to load it in an empty project? Start with one voice, then 2, etc...

amaranth_aegis · Post by **amaranth_aegis** » Mon Feb 01, 2016 11:19 pm

exmatproton wrote:Did you try to load it in an empty project? Start with one voice, then 2, etc...

Yes, I have tried that, and it still is crackling.

xx JPRacer xx · Post by **xx JPRacer xx** » Tue Feb 02, 2016 8:03 am

And it wasn't doing it in demo mode?

If you put some notes in and render, do the rendered version got the same noise?

bcm70 · Post by **bcm70** » Tue Feb 02, 2016 10:45 am

What about re-installing your card drivers?

amaranth_aegis · Post by **amaranth_aegis** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 12:37 am

xx JPRacer xx wrote:And it wasn't doing it in demo mode?

If you put some notes in and render, do the rendered version got the same noise?

Well, I guess I must not have noticed it. I bought it after using the demo only very shortly. And no, it actually plays just fine when I export it, no crackling.

bcm70 wrote:What about re-installing your card drivers?

I tried uninstalling everything Sound Blaster related and then re-installing fresh drivers from Creative's website, and that seemed to help a bit (crackling not as loud now). Not sure if it was the drivers or one of the other pieces of software from Creative. Unfortunately, it is still crackling, but the crackling isn't as loud now, for some reason.

ghettosynth · Post by **ghettosynth** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 1:10 am

It sounds like CPU issues which can be patch dependent, which might explain why you are seeing it now but didn't with the demo. Set your latency to an absurdly high value, turn multicore on, turn the quality down to draft, and see if the crackles go away. If they do, then that's your problem. Start turning things up until it works.

What is often the problem has nothing to do with your raw CPU power, per se, but with your computers ability to deal with latency.

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

A lot of things can impact this, including other processes and drivers.

amaranth_aegis · Post by **amaranth_aegis** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 2:02 am

ghettosynth wrote:It sounds like CPU issues which can be patch dependent, which might explain why you are seeing it now but didn't with the demo. Set your latency to an absurdly high value, turn multicore on, turn the quality down to draft, and see if the crackles go away. If they do, then that's your problem. Start turning things up until it works.

What is often the problem has nothing to do with your raw CPU power, per se, but with your computers ability to deal with latency.

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

A lot of things can impact this, including other processes and drivers.

Wow, I guess didn't know that. I tried the latency checker, and this computer averaged about 1000 on it. I am not sure if that is reasonably good or not. That must not be quite fast enough for my purposes (i.e. running Diva in Divine mode with multiple voices).

I tried increasing the latency in Sonar by 30 ms and now I get it to perform without any problems at all! There does seem to be a bit of a delay now, but it's a fair trade for me! Thank you so much, ghettosynth!

xx JPRacer xx · Post by **xx JPRacer xx** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 8:02 am

Do creative provides good ASIO drivers? Maybe you can try ASIO4ALL.

Also, if you're using Win 10, I don't think the report of DPC Latency Checker is accurate on that OS.

bcm70 · Post by **bcm70** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 10:48 am

I'm not sure it's your CPU. By chance I have the same CPU and whilst I don't own Diva, I do own Bazille and I've never run into any issues with crackling, even if I jack up the polyphony and voices to max on a patch and turn on HQ (with or without Multicore).

I think if you swapped out your sound card your problems would go away. I don't know much about the particular card you've got, but Creative are better known for gaming cards than music oriented cards. Do you have any friends with an external USB interface you could borrow?

core · Post by **core** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 11:05 am

+1 for trying ASIO4ALL
I also think your soundcard might be the issue, if so maybe get a USB interface with ASIO support. Basic models are not terribly expensive.

ghettosynth · Post by **ghettosynth** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 11:09 am

bcm70 wrote:I'm not sure it's your CPU. By chance I have the same CPU and whilst I don't own Diva, I do own Bazille and I've never run into any issues with crackling, even if I jack up the polyphony and voices to max on a patch and turn on HQ (with or without Multicore).

I think if you swapped out your sound card your problems would go away. I don't know much about the particular card you've got, but Creative are better known for gaming cards than music oriented cards. Do you have any friends with an external USB interface you could borrow?

This is true, but misleading. It is still a CPU issue if the sound card is causing problems with ASIO but not the various windows sound systems. Given that turning up the latencey fixed the problem It is related to DPC latency, driver quality, or other processes impacting DPC latency.

So, yes, a new sound card might fix the problem, indirectly by providing a different driver, but it might not. If the problem is related to the sound card's ASIO driver then you should see an improvement. You could try ASIO4ALL as well. If, on the other hand, the problem is some other driver impacting DPC latency, then you might not see an improvement.

bcm70 · Post by **bcm70** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 2:47 pm

I must admit I'd never heard of DPC latency before so I've done a bit of reading about it.

It is possible it's something other than the sound card driver (although I'd still punt that it's the problem) - however there is another Latency Monitor program I stumbled across that might the OP help identify the actual problem drivers.

It's on this page: http://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/art ... cy-issues/

Be worth giving that a try.

Edit: Just in case you can't see the link as I've got less than 5 posts - if you search for "solving dpc latency issues" and "sweetwater" the page should come up.

u-he

KVR Audio

u-he Diva crackling