With 12 instances of guitar rig, and a few waves plugs you will need to up the latency. Edit - Preferences - Device settings… Click for your audio cards asio panel, and raise the latency.
99% of the time, “up your latency,” is the answer to, “I am getting crackles and pops.”
It happens with all, “amp sim software,” too… and sometimes on windows 7 I was getting, “crackles and pops.” So I up my latency from 64 samples, to 96 samples… no more crackles, or pops…
Seriously, that is a great setup, and its something to do with your settings that you are getting, “crackles and pops.” Especially if you are using Renoise…
Cheers
Edit = emoticons to make the post more, “friendly, and suggestive.”
Regretfully, I already tried putting the latency higher. It does help but not enough. And well… it sometimes crackles and pops with the CPU meter in Renoise indicating a mere 23% usage. I haven’t been able to determine a final cause of the problem though: it occurs more and less depending on the minute/hour/day. Now, keep in mind that this is a dedicated system: nothing else is running when I do this and even the internet connection is turned off.
The irony once again is that one of my other studio computers, a 2 Core with 4GB and a Delta-66 card, runs more flawless… but only in 32-bit. Of course, I can’t push it as far as 12 instances of Guitar Rig - but in comparison, it just runs better.
I’ll continue to experiment though (while working on music) and well… maybe I’ll find the issue one day. I have noticed that the 64-bit shell by Waves can case issues (for instance with a relatively CPU friendly RVOX vst) - but it’s still not a real solution to just keep those plugs out of my projects (and it sucks cause I actually bought all these VSTs and because of Waves crappy coding, I can’t use them anymore).
Delta 66 <> RME FireFace UCX.
I believe the Delta 66 is not connected through FireWire and the Fireface is. Or is the FireFace connected through its USB2 connector?
The Delta 66 is internal (PCI Express if I remember correctly) and the Fireface is indeed external, hooked up through USB. However, the claim always was that the latency on even USB was low. And the problem is that… it is - on everything but Renoise. It still mostly seems to be a 32 vs 64 bit problem though… and a problem that started to occur now that I’m using Windows 8. My 32-Bit Ableton has no issues, my 32-bit Soundforge has tons (which is yet again something I blame Windows 8 for). External versions of particular plugins run fine… when they’re 64-bit.
I was just attracted to the subject line as I do feel that my CPUs aren’t being used in full. And with the processing power that my computer can handle, I was simply expecting something… more solid at a lower latency.
Well can’t say much about Windows 8, but Windows 8 is claimed to be another operating system with Windows 7 emulated so not suitable for music environments…
PCI devices always operate superior to USB devices. No matter how hard you try, USB devices suffer latency and this also depends cascadely on how many extra devices you connect to the same USB bus. You can connect up to 127 devices but each requires some interrupt time and slower USB devices hog up the chain as they form the weakest link.
You might be able to improve things by connecting the soundcard to its dedicated USB bus if you happen to have two USB busses, but you then also have to figure out first which set of USB ports belongs to which bus. (depending on how many USB ports you have, there can be two or six sharing one bus)
Yeah… well, I’m considering creating a dual boot and giving a 64-bit version of XP a try - but I don’t know whether that would be a definitive solution.
As for the USB buses: I have three (2x USB2 and USB3 - buses not ports, I think it’s about 10+ ports) but the soundcard is already plugged into the one that isn’t doing anything else, if I remember correctly. My dongle (Ilok) might be sharing the bus though so I’ll try replugging that somewhere else if it is.
I tried setting the latency to its highest setting and well… no crackles obviously. But it shouldn’t be the solution. I really think my system should perform better, regardless.
Ok… admittedly, at the same time, without sandboxing, the CPU gets at 3% when I run an entire 64-bit East West composition using 18 voices on 12 channels. So that’s the upside.
I haven’t seen windows 8 yet… Does it still have control panel settings for audio? On the properties for your audio device, does RME have, “exclusive control?”
Control Panel - Hardware and Sound - Sound - right click on your device and select properties.
Also… Where are you getting the latency? From a midi keyboard? a qwerty keyboard or an instrument ( guitar, bass, drumkit ), that you have connected to the rme?
Btw ( at the most, very, very most, nowadays 512 is huge… I think the highest setting is 2048. that is huge!! )
Edit = I just looked, “the most amount of buffering I can get is 1024.” so I was way off with 2048, but in recent years, I’ve yet to use more than 96, so I forgot… how high it went.
The UCX has a dedicated panel for it. And it can go as high as 2048. That’s actually what I have it on now… which is ridiculous, even with a USB Card, I know… but I need something that keeps Renoise stable. Note that any other programs run fine with a latency of 96.
This can easily be caused by having a single, processor-heavy track from what I remember. The instrument and all effects within a track are part of the same audio process and thus processed by a single core, each track can be processed by a separate core though. Or maybe that changed in some recent version???
With the amount of complaints I see about the Waves shell I wouldn’t rely on anything which uses it for testing anything but the Waves shell!
