You happy with Studio One 3?

[Obsolete236871]

As a Studio One 3 user, I really like the purpose of this thread. But let's stick to the actual facts and not get too emotional / personal about such things.

I'm on Windows 7 and use the 64 bit version of Studio One 3 on a third generation i5 quadcore CPU. I experience these CPU spikes as well and I think it's an issue that deserves some attention, because I haven't experienced them on Cubase (6.5 Artist) in such an unpredictable manner as in Studio One 3. I like this thread, since it showcases me that other users have experienced the same issue and my system is not some outlier. Let's use this in a productive manner to investigate the underlying issue - as some experienced KVRists have already done. There are other places for chit-chat.

[jtrake]

Own but don't use S1v3 because of bad CPU performance and some stability issues. If Presonus does something to improve these issues I will probably start using it cause I love the workflow. For the moment I use other options. So answer is not happy as of now.

[starflakeprj]

Own but don't use S1v3 because of bad CPU performance and some stability issues. If Presonus does something to improve these issues I will probably start using it cause I love the workflow. For the moment I use other options. So answer is not happy as of now.

Completely agree with you. The CPU performance is far from good, and S1 crashes pretty often for me. Still the workflow is so good (outstanding) comparing to other DAWs, so S1 is still my primary DAW.

[Obsolete236871]

The workflow is just perfect - I agree. If they solve the CPU / performance issues, no one will ever be able to say something negative about S1. They shouldn't make the mistake of building and building more features on top of a problematic kernel as some other companies did. They should fix the performance issues now and then built more features on top. Otherwise the performance issues will still be around once Studio One 10 is released in 2025.

[Robert Randolph]

The workflow is just perfect - I agree. If they solve the CPU / performance issues, no one will ever be able to say something negative about S1.

I dunno, I managed to find plenty of things problematic with Studio One, and CPU usage wasn't one of those things.

[nIGhT-SoN]

Izak Synthiemental, you put the dot on the i with this

They shouldn't make the mistake of building and building more features on top of a problematic kernel as some other companies did.

. If they don't fix it now, later will be harder when you have a lot of code that rely on this small problematic portion of code. It's like when you build a house, if your foundation is bad but you still continue constructing, later it's harder to fix it. If you have a good foundation then you can be sure it will hold up.

@Robert Randolph The only problem beside core management I have is with Sample One, but if I don't use it everything works as it should. My only problem is that there is power that can't be used with some VSTs, I gave the example of Serum with a Pad preset. Studio One uses only the first core and audio starts to dropout, in Bitwig it's using all cores and cpu usage is at 60%. I don't have CPU spikes as some reported, that's my only problem.

[nostradamoose]

Own but don't use S1v3 because of bad CPU performance and some stability issues. If Presonus does something to improve these issues I will probably start using it cause I love the workflow. For the moment I use other options. So answer is not happy as of now.

Completely agree with you. The CPU performance is far from good, and S1 crashes pretty often for me. Still the workflow is so good (outstanding) comparing to other DAWs, so S1 is still my primary DAW.

The workflow is just perfect - I agree. If they solve the CPU / performance issues, no one will ever be able to say something negative about S1. They shouldn't make the mistake of building and building more features on top of a problematic kernel as some other companies did. They should fix the performance issues now and then built more features on top. Otherwise the performance issues will still be around once Studio One 10 is released in 2025.

Out of curiosity what are your system specs?

Desktop/Laptop, CPU, RAM, Video Card, Video RAM, Bios settings (Turbo, etc), audio interface, buffer settings, plug-ins?

If you're uninformed about optimizing, power settings, bios settings, etc you might be interested in reading this. http://support.presonus.com/hc/en-us/ar ... Studio-One

[Robert Randolph]

Own but don't use S1v3 because of bad CPU performance and some stability issues. If Presonus does something to improve these issues I will probably start using it cause I love the workflow. For the moment I use other options. So answer is not happy as of now.

Completely agree with you. The CPU performance is far from good, and S1 crashes pretty often for me. Still the workflow is so good (outstanding) comparing to other DAWs, so S1 is still my primary DAW.

The workflow is just perfect - I agree. If they solve the CPU / performance issues, no one will ever be able to say something negative about S1. They shouldn't make the mistake of building and building more features on top of a problematic kernel as some other companies did. They should fix the performance issues now and then built more features on top. Otherwise the performance issues will still be around once Studio One 10 is released in 2025.

Out of curiosity what are your system specs?

Desktop/Laptop, CPU, RAM, Video Card, Video RAM, Bios settings (Turbo, etc), audio interface, buffer settings, plug-ins?

If you're uninformed about optimizing, power settings, bios settings, etc you might be interested in reading this. http://support.presonus.com/hc/en-us/ar ... Studio-One

What does this have to do with anything if another DAW works better on the same system? Izak says right above you that Bitwig behaves much better on the same system.

[nostradamoose]

What does this have to do with anything if another DAW works better on the same system? Izak says right above you that Bitwig behaves much better on the same system.

Because every DAW is coded differently. If you took the time to read the provided information, you would have found out that this information has been helping a lot of users relieve their so called "CPU issues". If you frequent Studio One's FB page, you would have also seen this information as being the "cure" to their "symptoms".

Newer CPUs (Intel Core series and others) offer a variety of power-saving features. With Windows Vista and Windows 7, these features can be used to great effect, and some of them also improve performance of single-threaded applications. However, these features actually have a negative effect on multi-threaded applications that work near system time, such as Studio One and other DAWs.

These features include Speedstep (EIST), the C-States (C1e, C3, C6), Core Parking, and Turbo Boost. The following are descriptions of these features and their effects:

Speedstep and the C-States (C1e, C3, C6): allows disabling or throttling of individual CPUs. While this may not hurt performance directly, waking those CPUs to full power takes time, leading to processing peaks and crackles/drop-outs.
Core Parking: disables individual CPUs (normally the virtual hyper-threading ones) and is used for OS-based multi-core-scheduling. This also leads to delays on parking/unparking, causing crackles and drop-outs.
Turbo Boost: enables internal overclocking of individual cores/CPUs, while at the same time shutting down other cores (keeping temperatures safe). While this can raise performance of single-threaded applications by up to 10%, the switching causes delay, and therefore crackles/dropouts.
All of these delays can additionally hurt internal bus communication, causing, for instance, issues with the FireWire bus. So, if your FireStudio, or other FireWire interface, is not working correctly, even though you have a nice big Intel Core i7 processor, this might be the reason.

[Robert Randolph]

What does this have to do with anything if another DAW works better on the same system? Izak says right above you that Bitwig behaves much better on the same system.

Because every DAW is coded differently. If you took the time to read the provided information, you would have found out that this information has been helping a lot of users relieve their so called "CPU issues". If you frequent Studio One's FB page, you would have also seen this information as being the "cure" to their "symptoms".

Newer CPUs (Intel Core series and others) offer a variety of power-saving features. With Windows Vista and Windows 7, these features can be used to great effect, and some of them also improve performance of single-threaded applications. However, these features actually have a negative effect on multi-threaded applications that work near system time, such as Studio One and other DAWs.

These features include Speedstep (EIST), the C-States (C1e, C3, C6), Core Parking, and Turbo Boost. The following are descriptions of these features and their effects:

Speedstep and the C-States (C1e, C3, C6): allows disabling or throttling of individual CPUs. While this may not hurt performance directly, waking those CPUs to full power takes time, leading to processing peaks and crackles/drop-outs.
Core Parking: disables individual CPUs (normally the virtual hyper-threading ones) and is used for OS-based multi-core-scheduling. This also leads to delays on parking/unparking, causing crackles and drop-outs.
Turbo Boost: enables internal overclocking of individual cores/CPUs, while at the same time shutting down other cores (keeping temperatures safe). While this can raise performance of single-threaded applications by up to 10%, the switching causes delay, and therefore crackles/dropouts.
All of these delays can additionally hurt internal bus communication, causing, for instance, issues with the FireWire bus. So, if your FireStudio, or other FireWire interface, is not working correctly, even though you have a nice big Intel Core i7 processor, this might be the reason.

...

The point is that if another manufacturer can provide a product without these issues, then the expectation is that Presonus should be able to as well.

[nostradamoose]

The point is that if another manufacturer can provide a product without these issues, then the expectation is that Presonus should be able to as well.

This is well documented information on how to optimize and properly setup your system settings and bios for your specific computer's specification. Which helps deal with old operating system's (OS) architecture.

[chk071]

What does this have to do with anything if another DAW works better on the same system? Izak says right above you that Bitwig behaves much better on the same system.

Because every DAW is coded differently. If you took the time to read the provided information, you would have found out that this information has been helping a lot of users relieve their so called "CPU issues". If you frequent Studio One's FB page, you would have also seen this information as being the "cure" to their "symptoms".

Newer CPUs (Intel Core series and others) offer a variety of power-saving features. With Windows Vista and Windows 7, these features can be used to great effect, and some of them also improve performance of single-threaded applications. However, these features actually have a negative effect on multi-threaded applications that work near system time, such as Studio One and other DAWs.

These features include Speedstep (EIST), the C-States (C1e, C3, C6), Core Parking, and Turbo Boost. The following are descriptions of these features and their effects:

Speedstep and the C-States (C1e, C3, C6): allows disabling or throttling of individual CPUs. While this may not hurt performance directly, waking those CPUs to full power takes time, leading to processing peaks and crackles/drop-outs.
Core Parking: disables individual CPUs (normally the virtual hyper-threading ones) and is used for OS-based multi-core-scheduling. This also leads to delays on parking/unparking, causing crackles and drop-outs.
Turbo Boost: enables internal overclocking of individual cores/CPUs, while at the same time shutting down other cores (keeping temperatures safe). While this can raise performance of single-threaded applications by up to 10%, the switching causes delay, and therefore crackles/dropouts.
All of these delays can additionally hurt internal bus communication, causing, for instance, issues with the FireWire bus. So, if your FireStudio, or other FireWire interface, is not working correctly, even though you have a nice big Intel Core i7 processor, this might be the reason.

I take it that the "high performance" energy option in Windows uses optimal settings regarding these functions? At least that would explain why i never really noticed a difference between Studio One (2) and my other hosts. Admittedly, i never really did a comparison with bigger projects.

[Guenon]

Out of curiosity what are your system specs?

Desktop/Laptop, CPU, RAM, Video Card, Video RAM, Bios settings (Turbo, etc), audio interface, buffer settings, plug-ins?

If you're uninformed about optimizing, power settings, bios settings, etc you might be interested in reading this. http://support.presonus.com/hc/en-us/ar ... Studio-One

Ah, this one I have to reply to, as CPU performance was an important gripe on my list. Everything is absolutely in order on the machine I usually work on here , BIOS C-States as they should be, no throttling / parking / rest states of any kind enabled (i.e. also core parking manually disabled), CPU constatly at max speed.

It's a custom dedicated i7-3770K audio workstation running Windows 7 64bit. Quality parts, Asus motherboard referenced beforehand as one with low DPC latencies when using an identical build in other studios (P8Z77-V), 32 GB RAM, RME HDSPe AIO interface. All unneeded devices like onboard wifi, extra USB slots and onboard audio disabled, and so on. In other words, no flaky stuff going on with the drivers, nothing inappropriate installed, a reference-spec system with extremely stable real time functionality:



Studio One didn't behave erratic on this system at all (apart from the previous crashes of the scratch pad feature, etc). It merely choked under large projects, maxing out the CPU cores much earlier than even noticeably larger projects using identical plugins/instruments in a host with more sophisticated CPU management (Reaper, for example). The bulk of those projects was many instances of Kontakt, Zebra and Fabfilter mixing plugins. Rest assured the DAW and plugin settings were configured with the same kind of care as the rest of the setup .

In the end, combined with the restrictions in routing and also considering the lesser annoyances I listed, in my opinion this DAW hit the CPU hard without giving quite enough substance return, if the projects were of the nature that pushed the plugin count high enough -- and then it might get annoying.

Also, sensing a drawn-out debate hidden in all this, hah. The main point is: if you're running an otherwise stable and well-configured system (which should be a given when using DAW software, anyway), Studio One's resource use shouldn't pose a problem unless you want to build projects of this nature [and unless your specific system happens to exhibit those actual CPU spike anomalies people are bringing up]. If you think this might be the case, try it out for a good while -- like, in any case do that -- and if it doesn't choke, all is well. That's the most important thing here. After that, it's all about your preferred workflow and preferred features.

[Also note the aforementioned caveat with the Multis and test them accordingly: at least previously everything inside one Multi was always calculated strictly on the same CPU core. If you'd like to build large(ish) layered routing constructs, Multis are the designated feature for those, so if that's your thing be sure to test them enough in a real-world scenario, too. Maxing out just one core with a big Multi was of course enough to bottleneck the whole project.]

[nostradamoose]

"Windows 7", this could be a big part of your issue, since this is the most reported version from Windows users. When you start falling behind by a couple of generations of technological advancements in operating systems and hardware cohesiveness, you have to be prepared to troubleshoot your decision.

This also could have to do with your management of real time processing. Such as cpu hungry plug-ins and how many you're using. Which is usually solved by bouncing and rendering tracks, limiting the number of reverbs and other heavy processing plug-ins and management of the input and output audio buffer. Example (Most new users miss this part), lower ms setting while recording, higher ms setting while mixing.

Studio One users also have to remember that their track editing such as, transpose, Melodyne, event effects and other track changes are being processed in real time unless they are bounced.

If you're able to totally max out your system specs and only a few percentage of high performance systems are reporting an issue, it is most likely that it comes down to user usage of Studio One or something not working the same with their setup. Which can be a plethora of issues, such as hardware, software settings, technique, etc.

If most their users are working well within the range of most systems while using highly technical techniques and engineering to achieve the results they demand, it's probably a small case of isolated commonalities that need to be found and fixed.

[LawrenceF]

forum......hahahahahaha (There ya go, your day is complete)

Dude. Grow up. As if I care about any of that. Like any secure mature adult would ever care what strangers think... especially people like you who apparently get banned left and right from various forums.

Man, KVR is like... drama central.