Hi @cpaolo, thanks!
Well, it’s not just a matter of the vst I use now, which of course are mainly lightweight…as a matter of fact, I would like to have room for “heavier” ones in the near future, hoping I will continue playing after this covid madness.
Anyway, just to get you an idea…I used to play in a prog rock band and that’s the kind of stuff I play more often, though I also like other things (jazz, jazz rock, fusion, “cosmic” rock, etc.). Presently my piano sounds come from Keyzone Classic, but I would like to switch to something more “realistic” sounding (say Ivory or Ravenscroft).
I use a few analog polysynth emulations (arminator, OBxd, PG-8X, etc.) but I would really like to be able to use DIVA (I have played the demo and it sounds great, though it strucks 140% time load as soon as I play a chord )
My hammond sounds presently come from NI B4 (which I have since 15 years ago) and the Organized Trio (which went to become VB3) vst. I use Dexed for FM sounds. I also have a (key switchable) soundfont of mellotron sounds which I load into GPlayer.
My first attempt with Cantabile (I have Solo) has been to setup a song that we did with my band. I have put together two versions (one is based on racks, since I am still learning how to use them). And I must say that I am happy because 1) I was able to re-learn the song (also thanks to the old scores which I found in the basement), 2) with Cantabile I can play the keyboard parts over my (no keys) rehearsal tape and just four “states” are needed for a ten minutes long song…
So my first goal would be to get from Cantabile the same “sound” that I was used to…here is the original track from the CD (all played on hardware synths):
Hi everyone!
Just an update on my new music pc. I had to increase the budget by 50%. and I finally assembled the following system:
CPU: Ryzen 5 3400 G (6MB cache, 4.2 GHZ Max boost) actual base speed 3.7 GHz
MotherBoard; Asus PRIME B450M-K II micro ATX
HD: Samsung NVMe M.2 MZ-V7E500 500GB
Power Supply: EVGA 500 B1+ BRONZE 500W
RAM: G.skill Ripjaws V 32 GB (2x16) DDR4-3000Mhz
Case: Aerocool Aeroonefrost PC Atx (ok, it’s large! no plans to play live at the moment!)
cost: about 600 euro
I have run the Perftest song and got
50% max 40% average, according to Cantabile profiler.
Here is the updated list (that’s just a recap of the data collected from postings above). Sorry, can’t upload a pdf, so I’m uploading excel screenshot.
FYI: I’ve been looking into these performance issues and have a pretty good idea what’s going on. It’s not related to CantabileCore.dll as suggested above and instead related to other changes.
I’m working through it but at this stage not sure how long it’ll be - I’ll either find that I’ve done something really stupid and it’ll be an easy fix, or it’ll be a more prolonged matter of performance profiling, testing and tuning.
Here the result of the DPC latency checker of my Geekom i9-13900H 5,4 GHz max 32GB RAM+2TB SSD without audio optimization except that the power plan was set to maximum performance:
One issue makes a big difference regarding to the performance of the i9-13900H processor. This is thermal throttling.
It was reported on Youtube that the thermal throttling of the IT13 i9-13900H 5.4 GHz max was due to factory thermal paste (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVnKO16PNCQ) . Therfore, I replaced the factory themal paste with Conductonaut (liquid metal, Thermal Grizzly).
Previously, some performance cores reached the 100 °C limit relatively quickly and their performance was throttled. With Conductonaut, this behavior can no longer be observed and the core temperatures remain fairly stable around 50 °C in normal operation.
To figure out how effective the cooling through the liquid metal is I performed a stress test with Spectral Layer 10 Pro.Unmixing a song at best quality is very demanding for the processor.
As you can see, the temperature increases from 50 °C to 65 °C, which is still remote to the 100 °C limit of throttling.
Indeed, the exchange of thermal paste with liquid metal makes a big difference for the performance of the IT13 i9-13900H 5.4 GHz max.
and I finally assembled the following system:
