Ideal Computer

[NSGUITAR]

Okay I'm getting SIIICKK and tired of my projects crashing on me. To the point where I want to start punching things.

I load maybe 40 tracks, and my playback/computer goes to mush... I'm running windows Vista, with 4 gigs of ram and dual-core 2.71 GHz processor.


I need to know why I'm having such a bad time when I'm in the mixing stage.. I have my Profire's buffer size set to as high as it goes, as well as in reaper.. And I'm still getting slow playback, random crackles quite often, and it seems that when I push ONE wrong button (Random) my reaper just DIES, and I have to restart it..

I'm getting really sick of this.

What is the ideal computer for what I need?

 

[cloy26]

a faster one.

/thread.

but really, a quadcore cpu with 8 gigs of ram should get you some decent results.

 

[NSGUITAR]

a faster one.

/thread.

That's not too helpful. :b I was hoping for some specifics.

 

[LeSedna]

Okay I'm getting SIIICKK and tired of my projects crashing on me. To the point where I want to start punching things.

I load maybe 40 tracks, and my playback/computer goes to mush... I'm running windows Vista, with 4 gigs of ram and dual-core 2.71 GHz processor.


I need to know why I'm having such a bad time when I'm in the mixing stage.. I have my Profire's buffer size set to as high as it goes, as well as in reaper.. And I'm still getting slow playback, random crackles quite often, and it seems that when I push ONE wrong button (Random) my reaper just DIES, and I have to restart it..

I'm getting really sick of this.

What is the ideal computer for what I need?

Run Windows 7.

Don't wanna sound cliché but this could just solve all of your problems.

 

[cloy26]

word. vista is shitty.

are you looking to drop more money? If so, how much?

 

[NSGUITAR]

word. vista is shitty.

are you looking to drop more money? If so, how much?

Oh yeah. I'm down to drop over a grand if I need to. I just need to get this fixed, because I'm looking at producing full time.

 

[NSGUITAR]

As far as windows 7 goes. I'm sort of scared to switch to that.. I have no clue what VST's of mine are and aren't windows 7 compatible

 

[Morgan C]

As far as windows 7 goes. I'm sort of scared to switch to that.. I have no clue what VST's of mine are and aren't windows 7 compatible

It's been out for like a year, I'd imagine any respectable plugin would be compatible by now. I haven't had a single plugin not work because I'm on Windows 7.

 

[Ascendant]

As far as windows 7 goes. I'm sort of scared to switch to that.. I have no clue what VST's of mine are and aren't windows 7 compatible

If they work on vista chances are pretty high that they'll work on 7, any serious company and products that aren't 5 years old oughta have Windows 7 support. As long as it's the same architecture (x64 to x64 for example) though that shouldn't really be a problem either, not one that I have experienced so far running reaper x32 on my x64 box with nothing but x32 plugins.

 

[PlasmaShock]

Maybe you should embrace the Mac side of things. They're excellent for audio production. I use both a PC and a Mac for different projects and the combination of the two have given me a solid base at both the hardware and solid level.

 

[TheWinterSnow]

7 has the same issues that vista does, it just seems that for some people/systems that sometimes 7 doesn't ahve this issue (and is a hit or miss with me when it wants to work vs when it doesn't want tot work). It has to do with interrupts, a computer has to process more than one thing, after a specified amount of time a background (or other program) will flag an interrupt for whatever the processor is doing to do another task that needs to be done. This is what the buffer is for, the CPU is obtaining that much (of real-time) of audio and effects processing so that when an interrupt happens, there is a "buffer" time which other processes can do their thing without making the audio skip. Most of the time interrupts can happen so fast that we can't here the delay in the programs taking place for a brief time where there isn't audio, but what we do hear is the popping/clicking from when the audio flickers on/off within microseconds.

Interrupts take more time on Vista and 7 compared to XP, because they are doing much more (especially the 64-bit flavors). There was a thread where someone posted a link to a free program that tested the ability to run real time audio by measuring the latency of the interrupt services, I can't remember what it was, if someone knows, please say so. You can run that test to see what is causing such horrid latency with the background services, shut them off and see how you fair afterwards. Once that is all taken care of than you can upgrade other things. For starters, the faster the clock speed on your CPU, the shorter the latency of the interrupt services and therefor, the lower you can set your buffer latency. Faster Processor with as much onboard cache as you can get.

 

[NSGUITAR]

So would all of you guys agree that it's probably Vista, and not the internals of my computer? When I bought the computer, I got 4 gigs of ram, because people were telling me that 8 was not necessary.

 

[NSGUITAR]

7 has the same issues that vista does, it just seems that for some people/systems that sometimes 7 doesn't ahve this issue (and is a hit or miss with me when it wants to work vs when it doesn't want tot work). It has to do with interrupts, a computer has to process more than one thing, after a specified amount of time a background (or other program) will flag an interrupt for whatever the processor is doing to do another task that needs to be done. This is what the buffer is for, the CPU is obtaining that much (of real-time) of audio and effects processing so that when an interrupt happens, there is a "buffer" time which other processes can do their thing without making the audio skip. Most of the time interrupts can happen so fast that we can't here the delay in the programs taking place for a brief time where there isn't audio, but what we do hear is the popping/clicking from when the audio flickers on/off within microseconds.

Interrupts take more time on Vista and 7 compared to XP, because they are doing much more (especially the 64-bit flavors). There was a thread where someone posted a link to a free program that tested the ability to run real time audio by measuring the latency of the interrupt services, I can't remember what it was, if someone knows, please say so. You can run that test to see what is causing such horrid latency with the background services, shut them off and see how you fair afterwards. Once that is all taken care of than you can upgrade other things. For starters, the faster the clock speed on your CPU, the shorter the latency of the interrupt services and therefor, the lower you can set your buffer latency. Faster Processor with as much onboard cache as you can get.

Do you have any form of an instant messenger? This was very helpful, but I'd like to talk to you more about it.

 

[TheWinterSnow]

Under my avatar, thats what it is there for!

 

[Joshua Wickman]

I think using cracked plugins can have a lot to do with your system being unstable. I think a lot of people overlook this and think there computer is the problem.

 

[NSGUITAR]

I think using cracked plugins can have a lot to do with your system being unstable. I think a lot of people overlook this and think there computer is the problem.

heh?

 

[Joshua Wickman]

I'm not here to judge you dude, just saying from my experience in the past. I spent 1400.00 building the computer of my dreams only to end up having the same problems i had on my old computer. Once i bought all my plugins and had them up to date 99% of my problems disappeared.

 

[egan.]

What Josh said. Being legitimate adds two major advantages to stability. The first is the obvious advantage of updates and support. The second is that your system will likely be more streamlined as there will likely be fewer things installed that could cause problems.
Another important part of stability and going "pro" is dedicating your DAW to audio and not installing tons of extraneous stuff and doing minimal browsing etc. I know there are a hundred guys who will chime in and tell you that they record while editing in photoshop and watching porn vids on the internet but you are asking for trouble IMO.

 

[sprack]

DPC Latency

There was a thread where someone posted a link to a free program that tested the ability to run real time audio by measuring the latency of the interrupt services, I can't remember what it was, if someone knows, please say so.

This is generally true. Cache more so than clocks. A fetch from cache is in the range of 10-80 clocks, a fetch from main mem is in 700-2000 clock range.

Faster Processor with as much onboard cache as you can get.

Make sure power-management is off. Anything else that will promote itself in DPC priority is either disabled or de-prioritized. TheWinterSnow already said this, but isochronous events like audio need large buffer space to appear seamless while handling both soft and hard interrupts. A lot of this can be handled easily by disabling drivers for devices you won't use. Even better is disabling them in BIOS since then the system won't setup their PCI config space and there's no DMA causing NMI's.

XP appears better than Vista/Win7 at handling this because its less agressive at pwrmgmt. C-state resumes kill isochronous traffic. Vista/Win7 have a better multi-thread scheduler.

 

[TheWinterSnow]

This is generally true. Cache more so than clocks. A fetch from cache is in the range of 10-80 clocks, a fetch from main mem is in 700-2000 clock range.

Kind of "nerding" out herem but for anyone who cares, Cache is a hell of a lot faster than RAM, but it is much more expensive. Because Cache is placed inside the CPU therefor giving the CPU's internal memory, it takes few bytes of opcode (or whatever they are called in processors). The fewer bytes of information that is needed to execute a task, the faster that memory will be, on top of that cache by nature has lower latency compared to RAM and between those two things, allow it to do more and faster than RAM. This is what the buffer is, more or less an allocation of how much cache you will be using for audio.

I know off hand that there are some VSTi manuals that explain the determination of the buffer size, something along the lines of decreasing the buffer size will put more strain on the processor, but is better if you do not have a lot of RAM, and increasing the buffer size will put more strain on the RAM, which is good if you have a slower processor.