Ikmultimedia B3X

I see Corky beating me to it - the tonewheel emluation isn’t that cpu intensive but emulating the swirling goodness of the Leslie is more complicated. My 2012 Lenovo i5-3360 does both without breaking a sweat :grinning:

All the fx in the B-3X will spike the CPU load. As @Torsten said many times, he uses fx outside of B-3X, as the internal fx are cpu hogs. That also includes the fx inside the Leslie. Just the Leslie gain itself will make it jump.
There are several of us running lesser computers than you. That is why I suggested Brad’s glitch free book. I am not doubting your experience, but it’s not all about background services and disabling programs. There are more things to consider. What are you buffers size? How much RAM are you using? Are you using an audio interface? What driver are you using? What is the size of your drive? Is it SSD? There’s a lot of info we don’t have from your setup to try to help you use this amazing product.

I also have a long computer building and programming past that extends into the 1980’s. Still, there were many things I had to learn when I started getting into VSTs many years ago. When I came back to Cantabile, I learned even more from the many knowledgeable people on this forum. AND…I am still learning. Shoot us some more info…someone can surely help you get it going.

Regards

Corky

I am very close to finally pulling the trigger on purchasing this, especially since it’s on sale now. Is there a way to disable the lower octave preset keys? I can’t find a setting for it. I know a real Hammond is set up this way. It’s really easy to accidentally hit them on a larger keyboard. I guess I could just set up a key range in C3?

  • Paul
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Paul

As far as I know, there is no setting for it.

That’s what I do. (For any organ, actually). Just map those keys right out of existence.

Here is a brief list of system specifications and used hardware:
PC: HP Zbook 15 G2.
OS: Windows 10 x64 version 1909 (tried Win 7, lots of troubles with nvidia and other devices drivers. Unusable).
CPU: i7-4810MQ (2,8 GHz, 3,80 GHz in single core).
RAM: 20GB.
Drives: 256GB PCIe for system/programs and 1TB SATA3 for libraries.
Audio interface: Steinberg UR22C (USB3) connected to USB3 port
Driver audio: Steinberg/Yamaha ASIO for UR22C (updated to last, of course).
Buffer size: At now I’m using a 512 bytes size, Output latency is 15-19 ms.

Setting buffers size to 256 ms I increased the frequency of glitches. Setting to 1024 ms, the high latency make all hardly unplayable.

I tried two older audio interfaces (one USB2 and one Firewire both by m-audio, getting similar performances and similar troubles.

I agree, BX-3 is the most amazing software Hammond, anyway VB3 requires less than half resources, making it my first choice, despite it sounds less real than the IKm.

Regards,
Paolo

As much as I like BX-3B-X-B3-B3X (a lot) there’s still some songs where VB3 just nails the sound. I’ve been layering them both a lot too, the main forward organ is still VB3 but IK really gives it extra definition and oomph.

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Just bought B-3X tonight.

Good sale on right now. The cross grade price is $119.99 US
I managed to get it for $83.99 with some IK jam-points I had left over.

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Here is a screenshot

Paolo

In the 2 Screenshots you posted, was first one during load, and the 2nd after load? Was there another plugin running with B-3X?
Can you post a screen shot of tools>options>Audio Engine?

Edit: BTW…what video driver are you using, and is it up to date?
I ask this because you said when opening the GUI, the CPU load spikes over 100%. Just a thought.

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Both screenshots was after the load time. The second is with hidden GUI. There was only the B-X3 plugin active, with all effects disabled except Leslie (I noticed Leslie is quite cpu heavy!!!)
The video driver is the latest available from nvidia for by Quadro 1100M, with setting for maximum performances and no power saving. Note that in Windows Task Manager, with visible GUI, happens sometimes not only 100% of cpu, but 100% of GPU as well.
I’ll post the Audio Engine screenshot ASAP.

I ended up finally purchasing this. @Corky, your presets form the other thread are really helping me learn this.

  • Paul

Thanks Paul…glad they are helping. Many more to come…after my major rig redesign effort. Gotta be ready in case live music comes back. :grin:

Here is my audio engine options. Previous answers there: Ikmultimedia B3X - #97 by cpaolo

Paolo, on the Audio Engine page, there are several settings, and it may be to your advantage to test them with your system. I found that applying the “aggressive” setting on the Multi-processor mode reduced my CPU load on my Win 7 machine. You probably need to change your Power Plan setting to High Performance. I also suggest you get Latency Monitor and test your system. Your computer should easily run B-3X. Beyond that, I currently have no solution, other than using Glitch Free. If I come up with anything else, I will post. Hopefully, others will chime in with some advice.
Below is a description of these settings from Brad’s user guides.

Audio Engine Options

The Audio Engine options page provides settings that control various important aspects of Cantabile audio processing:

Audio Driver

The audio driver drop down lets you choose which audio driver Cantabile will use for audio processing. Cantabile supports ASIO drivers for full audio input/output support and WASAPI for output audio only.

In general we recommend using the ASIO driver that was shipped with your sound device. If no such driver was provided (or if its unreliable) you can use the general purpose ASIO driver ASIO4ALL which works well with Cantabile.

Most audio drivers will take exclusive control of the associated sound device making that device unavailable to other programs. This is because exclusive access provides the best possible latency and audio performance. If you need to use another audio program while Cantabile is running you can either:

  1. Stop Cantabile’s audio engine (the power button at the top right of the main window) while using the other program
  2. Check if your ASIO driver supports a shared mode. (some do, not all)
  3. Choose a WASAPI driver and set the sample rate drop down to “Shared Mode”.

The third option is a good choice if you want to play along with other music played from your computer (eg: playing along with a YouTube video).

Most ASIO drivers have additional settings that can be accessed via the “Control Panel” button.

Sample Rate and Buffer Size

The sample rate and buffer size options control the size of each audio buffer processed by Cantabile. The available choices here are dictated by the capabilities of the selected audio driver.

In general:

  • The higher the sample rate the better the quality, but at the expense of additional processing load.
  • The higher the buffer size, the less chance of audio drop outs but at the expense of possible audio drop outs.

In general for live performance work we recommend setting the sample rate 44,100Hz and buffer size to 256 samples. This provides a good balance between acceptable latency and sufficient headroom to not cause audio drop outs.

For a detailed explanation of how to configure these options see our free eBook Glitch Free.

Double Buffered Audio

When the double buffered audio option is enabled, the audio engine introduces an additional audio buffer between the audio driver and the audio engine.

This can work particularly well with some poorly designed audio drivers that consume a significant portion of the audio cycle before passing control to Cantabile. It also provides an extra cushion to deal with small unexpected stalls in the audio processing.

Note that the extra layer of buffering also causes additional latency - effectively doubling the buffer size.

Some considerations:

  • If you find you’re getting audio drop outs when processing load is still below 100% (eg: some drivers can cause dropouts even with load as low as 85%) then using double buffering might be a good option.
  • You can experiment with this option by enabling it and then halving (or at least significantly reducing) the buffer size. If you get acceptable performance in this configuration then using this option might be a good choice as it provides that extra cushion for unexpected stalls.

Number of Audio Threads

Cantabile’s audio engine can process multiple simultaneous tasks on separate threads. Normally you should set this option to the number of physical processor cores supported by your computer. Don’t set this to the number of virtual hyper-threading cores - this almost always has detrimental affects on audio processing.

Other considerations:

  • Some plugins (particularly older, non-supported plugins) have issues with multi-core processing. Setting the number of audio cores to one effectively disables multi-core processing and might eliminate problems with these plugins.
  • If you’re using plugins that have their own multi-core processing support, you may get better performance by reducing the number of Cantabile audio threads - free up some for plugin processing.

Again, refer to Glitch Free for a more detailed discussion of this topic.

Multi-Processor Mode

As mentioned above, some plugins have issues with multi-core processing. This option controls how aggressively Cantabile tries to schedule plugin processing to different cores. If you find issues when running multiple instances of the same plugin causing crashes or other unexpected behaviour you can try setting this option to “Compatible”.

If compatible mode resolves the issue, please report the plugin that’s causing the problem.

Prevent Memory Paging

This option can help on old machines (pre-Window 10) that don’t have sufficient memory to reliably run large sample based plugins. In general this option should no longer be used.

Sample Rate Conversion Quality

This option controls the sample rate conversion of audio file playback and is only used when playing audio files with a sample rate different to the currently selected audio engine sample rate.

Switch to Power Plan

When running any real-time audio software you should switch the selected Windows Power Plan to the “High Performance” plan. To save manually doing this everytime you run Cantabile, you can select a power plan here and Cantabile will automatically activate it when the audio engine starts and set it back when the engine is stopped.

Enable Output Limiter

To avoid hard clipping of output audio, you can use Cantabile’s audio limiter to automatically reduce loud signals back into range.

Double Precision (64-bit) Audio

Select this option to enable 64-bit floating math processing for audio signal processing. Generally for live performance work this is excessive and should be left turned off. See Glitch Free for a more detailed discussion of this topic.

Thanks Corky,
I’ll try experimenting a while. About the power plan, the one I use is a modified Windows plan, and is a full HighPerformances plan with a fix for core-parking. According LatencyMon, my PC is able to run audio programs.
A good tip is the one about the number of cores, I’ll try more settings

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Disabling multi-core, I saved about 4%, a little amount, better than nothing.
Here’s the LatencyMon screenshot. It’s basically the same at the time I installed.
Windows.

There is a small update to B3X now. Version 1.3.1

  • Paul
2 Likes

Version 1.3.1
* Fixed a sustain pedal logic issue with multiple presses and releases of the same note

Hmmm…could this possibly be the stuck notes issues we were having?

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From a short test sustain works now as expected but I still get occassionally crashes of Studio One and Cantabile3 on opening GUI despite of updated OpenGL drivers on my studio computer.