agreement beween buffer size settings
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Posted on Nov 12, 2008 03:21 am
fortymile
Member Since: Jan 18, 2003
i was browsing around on here yesterday looking into pops and clicks. ever since my driver problem a few weeks or a month ago (which i resolved, somehow) i get clicks and pops in certain situations. looked like noize said, in one of the threads, that there's a setting in your audio app which has to match your soundcard control panel's buffer setting.
if this is true, where is it in cubase? and what do i do, specifically?
the situation i'm experiencing is this. when i want to work on a project i've already begun on another day and which has some stuff in it already, i must load it and then wait a while before the thing will play cleanly. if i load it and then just immediately try to play it, a disaster unfolds. clicks, pops, stuttering, hangups, the screen redraws or looks like it's frozen, etc. some of this is obviously memory, i guess, right? it's new, though.
usually what i do is i hit play then hit stop when the problems begin. then rewind and do it again and go a little farther. once the system is at least coping with it, i walk away and let the entire song play. then i can come back and work on it with no problems. it's like it has to go through the whole thing first.
but anyway, there seems to be a popping problem anyway, generally. i can tell there's something wrong with the buffer settings. i'd like to fix this.
latency is great. but i raised the soundcard's buffer to 384 samples yesterday anyway as an experiment. no change in the pops and stuff
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Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
Nov 12, 2008 02:28 pm forty, try moving to 512 just to see what happens. With 512 meg of ram you might just be on the border for performance and it never reared its ugly head until now.
Its possible that something else might be eating up a little of the system resource that was not doing it before.
pjkPrince CZAR-mingMember
Since: Apr 08, 2004
Nov 12, 2008 02:59 pm If you're using ASIO interface, then I think the asio control panel controls your buffers, not the DAW.
Also, if you're playing through the whole song, and it then plays nicely, I'd guess that you're running out of ram:
2.53 ghz pentium IV w/512 RAM
That would be a big possibility. If you're on windows, check your mem usage (ctrl-alt-del, task manager, performance). If your available mem is low, then the PC will swap memory pages down to the HD, which is way slow compared to RAM access. After you've played the whole song, all the song bits are stored in RAM memory, while all the stuff you didn't need is paged down to the HD.
You could also see the memory page swapping by using perfmon, and watching the pages/sec. This will tell you how many pages are being swapped out of memory to HD per second. Higher the number is worse.
Example:
This is my work PC, with 4g of ram. When I opened a video editing program, notice the high page swap. And, the high disk use (of course). After the prog was loaded, there was still a lot of swapping going on.
Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
Nov 12, 2008 03:55 pm Yes, that ASIO panel is were you do the main set up. But in Sonar and Cubase both you need to make certain that the numbers for the buffer match in both the panel and in the app.
forty, you can try increasing the page file size as well to 1500 or something.
Nov 12, 2008 04:27 pm there is definitely a memory shortage, because i get popups from time to time telling me that windows automatically increased the paging file size. also, the simple fact that it must play through before it cleans up was a pretty good clue.
but just so i know, where is the ASIO panel? i have only ever adjusted the buffer setting on my audiophile 2496's control panel, which is accessed from the windows taskbar. is that the asio panel or no? and where in the app do i input a setting? i've never done anything to buffer size within the app itself.
i don't know why i would suddenly develop a memory problem. the music computer doesn't really go online anymore and i don't remember installing anything new.
pjkPrince CZAR-mingMember
Since: Apr 08, 2004
Nov 12, 2008 04:38 pm Yep, if you're using ASIO, then that's where it is configured.
If you're using WDM or MME, then I think the DAW program can control the buffers that it's using. So the hardware may think 512, but the program is thinking 384.
With asio, you set it in the hardware panel (ap2496) and the software has to use whatever the hardware says.
Maybe your projects are getting more demanding? Also, when I do audio on my laptop, I always go in and end any processes I don't need running (itunes helper, print helpers, video helpers, etc). That usually frees up some precious space (my lappy has 512m).
ctrl-alt-del, task manager, processes, select one to kill, end.
Nov 12, 2008 05:03 pm but are you saying i have to do something within cubase with the buffer settings or not? i cant understand if thats what you guys are saying or not. or if the program automatically uses whatever the hardware is set to.
and yes i close stuff down. i'm to the point where i go into services.msc and stop all mcafee processes (otherwise they attempt to reboot). i dont know a lot of the names of things to close down in task manager. well, the obvious ones like tunes are easy enough so i end annything that i know what it is, but im sure there are more i could shut down
Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
Nov 12, 2008 06:01 pm forty, yes setting it in the 2496 control panel should force Cubase to use what ever you set in the panel. I know Sonar can over ride that though if need be.
Honestly though, you really don't need to add anything or have done anything out of the ordinary. The system may have caught up somewhere and is now using resources differently then it did before. I've seen that happen a time or two.
After I upgraded to Sonar 8 PE I was skeptical about their claims on reduced system resource usage. So I benchmarked before on 7 PE and then again running 8 PE using one of my very system heavy projects. The project honestly pushed 7 to near 100% resource usage as it is a very large project using live VST and VSTi's throughout.
To my amazement 8 PE cut it squarely in half. That same project now uses a tad under 50% of the resources it was using originally.
I would hope that Cubase and the like will follow them soon. I know it was joked about for years in a Cakewalk group I'm in that they should try and make it use less resources. Everyone freaked out when they honestly came through and found a way to do it without sacrificing Sonars performance.
pjkPrince CZAR-mingMember
Since: Apr 08, 2004
Nov 12, 2008 07:01 pm wow, that's sweet. 50% cut is unreal.
Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
Nov 12, 2008 07:05 pm That's what I said as well.
It actually boots the app up faster and loads huge projects in less then half the time it used to take. I'm simply amazed at what they have done.
And to boot, 8 PE is now well worth its full price just for the synths and pluggins that are in it.
