Hi Brad,
i tried to stop and start the engine already.
it seems to reduce the load-meter when i do nothing.
in a fresh loaded song the load-meter oscillates between 45-65%.
after restarting the engine the load-meter is a lot more calm around 30%, on a maximum going up to 38%.
However, it doesn’t change the glitching as soon as i start playing.
I tried turning off the multi-core support in kontakt, which made the glitching a lot worse.
Setting Kontakt to use 4 Cores seemed to bring the best results.
I am probably going to stick my foot in my mouth as I usually do. I recently setup a new backup computer, and the load was consistently ridiculous. What were relatively small loads on my go to laptop were 80% and spiking higher than 120% on the new laptop. I went thru all the normal tweaks, but the only one that worked was increasing my buffer size. If you have tried this already, then disregard. I was very happy to discover this after giving up a few times.
@Corky: Did you disable all unnecessary features in BIOS? Like hyperthreading, Intel SpeedStep, Inteo Turbo, all C-States, etc.?
I really recommend to do those steps. I had similar issues a while ago (I reported somewhere on the forum). Now everything works stable without any glitches.
I did. I really thought I had touched on everything in Brad’s book, so I checked settings on my go to laptop against the newer one, noticed the buffer size was larger. Once I raised them, many of my over loads went away like magic.
What I was attempting to say was I have an “older” Win 7, as in ancient, as in just moved up from XP, and my “ancient” bios reveals very few category, and subcategory selections. Therefore, I only had minimal options to disable. Sorry I wasn’t clear. Thanks for the info, though.
Hi @Corky,
increasing the latency is not an option for me.
i have been using this setup (hardware & software) for the past years extensively at even lower latency (96 samples) without any problems.
The only thing that changed is the host - i used to work with forte.
so far here’s my workaround:
i will get my piano/rhodes sounds from my main keyboard (hardware).
piano and rhodes from kontakt had the highest impact on the load-meter.
Just checking: do you have the problems mainly with Kontakt? Have you tried playing with Cantabile’s various audio engine options re multi-core setup? I have a slight suspicion that Kontakt and Cantabile may be competing for cores…
I have reduced my Kontakt usage drastically (just one patch using Session Horns) and use mainly other instruments, selected for resource efficiency, that play nice with Cantabile. For your setup, my equivalents would be:
Addictive Keys (to my ears, far more “alive” than Grandeur).
AIR Velvet for all E-Pianos, alternatively Pianoteq 6 (gets very close to Scarbee, at least for live use)
Dexed in use here as well (latest version gets even closer to “real” DX7)
u-he Hive or Avenger for pads - I have the feeling that Reaktor is not the most efficient soft-synth, due to its “construction kit” approach. And for the usual “carpet” pads that just fill things up, I mostly use the Korg M1 VST - minimal resource usage and “good enough”.
I think we can all agree that if one host allows low latency operation and another chokes, that it could be thin end of the wedge. What happens the next time a plugin gets picky about the host?
I’m totally with Steffan on this. We need to get this sorted rather than go around it. Kontakt is WAY too important a plugin.
Hi @Torsten,
my problems mainly occur with kontakt as i play the majority of my notes with piano/rhodes.
however, i just realized that a bigger multipatch with halionsonic was causing glitches due to load-meter overload. i loaded the same multipatch that used in forte for years. after setting halionsonic to use all available cores, the load-meter stays in a comfortable area again.
i never realized that i can change the usage of multiple cores in halionsonic as i never went into trouble with forte.
i don’t mean to talk bad about cantabile. i really enjoy my first impressions. it is a fantastic program to work with!
I’ve decided to do a deep dive on this and the first part of this is going to be a built-in profiling system for the audio engine - as part of Cantabile (rather than as a diagnostic tool that only I can run).
The idea here is to get a break down of everything the audio engine is doing - including per-plugin timings plus a break down of each bit Cantabile does - eg: input mixing, MIDI processing, output mixing etc…
It will also include:
history - say 5 minutes (so that if something glitches you can go back and take a peek at what happened)
ability to adjust the detail level from nothing, to normal to detailed
ability to save a snapshot that can be sent to me for analysis
Of course the trick is to get this working without adversely impacting performance (that’d be kinda self defeating) so there’s a bit of fancy engineering involved. So far I’ve built a lock-free mechanism to get profile timings from each of the audio engine threads. I’m about to start on the code to analyse that data into something useful for a human and after that will be a GUI to view it all.
Your intentions toward Cantabile and Forte are good from my point of view, (stating your observations can’t be bad) so I understand your comparisons to your previous product. They have decided not to continue but served many people well for years and now that Cantabile may absorb some of the former users the comparisons I believe will and should continue when they help move this platform ahead. I hope you get all your performance issues addressed and believe your input has already contributed to the push to scrutinize the performance question on a product wide basis. Thanks for your participation.
Yeah I really like some of the Nirsoft. I sent him so money on paypal because I appreciate his work.
I use the BSOD utility a lot (thanks Microsoft) to figure out driver issues and the symbolic link tool because I create a lot of junction points.
Kudos to these guys!
