This issue may not be related to Renoise, but I’m posting it here anyway.
I made a song yesterday that ran perfectly well in Renoise, CPU on load around 50-60% max.
Today I opened the computer, blow off some dust within the chassis, and started the computer again. During booting, the computer asks if I want to enter BIOS or run with the default BIOS settings. I choose the latter and WinXP starts as usual.
But when I load the song in Renoise, it can’t play it anymore. CPU load is always >99%. I can’t play any of my songs anymore!! (And no, there were no special settings in BIOS before – last time I opened the chassis I also choose to load default BIOS settings.)
In other softwares, this problem isn’t there. I can still run the CPU-heavy applications as usual.
My question is whether Renoise is dependent upon some external files in WinXP itself (such as WinXP’s page file?). What could possibly be the problem here, and how can it be handled?
This exact thing happened to me last fall, and then the problem seemed to suddenly disappear by itself after a few days.
I forgot to mention an important fact: When WindowsXP starts up after the BIOS has loaded its default settings, the Time settings are wrong (year 2002 instead of 2007 etc). The Virus/Firewall software alerts of several “new threats” because of this. Anyway, I fix the time settings manually within WinXP.
After some reboots, where the timing is OK - the CPU issue disappears to be a problem. So it seems that songs in Renoise have some component of their data structure overlapping with external files (maybe the page file?) that causes it to run extremely slow under some circumstances.
(Yes, the problem is gone now. My songs load as usual. But I still don’t know why this happens.)
Sounds strange, at first I thought you might have been overclocking your system, which reset after you opened the case & did your thing. This would explain the difference in CPU usage. But you say the problem is gone now so I imagine perhaps some devices were enabled that weren’t before or any bios settings (like IRQs) that were probably different from before might also have taken the OS some reboots to adjust, but that’s really just me guessing.
I would familiarise yourself with the bios anyway, I prefer to avoid using Auto settings in bios just so I know where I stand at a root level if something does go wrong.
yeah, the fact that the problem went away after some reboots is odd, otherwise another reason could have been some powersaving CPU-underclocking mechanism which was interfering with Renoise, though I have AMD’s Cool&Quiet enabled and it works fine with Renoise