Now, it seems like I’ve seen this issue before, but I spent about 20 minutes searching the forums and couldn’t quite figure it out.
First, system specs: Sony VAIO notebook w/Nvidia 7600GT Go display adapter, 2GB RAM, 2.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Vista Ultimate, running Renoise 2.5b8. Audio interface is an RME HDSP Multiface/Cardbus. It’s wired to a BNC WordClock network, but is providing master clock.
My issue is, when the transport is engaged, and the pattern editor is in view, I get crackling and popping out of any VSTs that are currently making sound, so essentially, there’s display redraw-related glitching. I don’t see this with Renoise sample playback, just VSTs. If I switch the main view to something doing fewer or no draws to the screen (like the mixer or sample editor), the issue goes away. It’s interesting to note that even say, a sequence of 64 notes being drawn out on the piano keys in the instrument editor is enough to cause the glitching (albeit it’s not as extreme as when the pattern editor is engaged).
Something tells me there’s likely a system setting somewhere that might make this go away, but I went through and turned off a bunch of unnecessary crap and the problem remained. Note that this issue occurs when the latency is 46ms or 6ms, so doesn’t necessarily seem tied in with the ASIO buffer settings.
That might also be a combination of the frame-settings in the GUI preferences.
It is set to 60 by default, but perhaps setting them to 30 or 20 will be sufficient.
It saves some CPU resources at least to probably make the crackling go away. If you go lower than 20, the GUI responsiveness may start stuttering or feel clumsy so you have to find a balance somewhere in there.
Is the problem new, new in Renoise 2.5, or have you set up a new system?
It’s new to Renoise 2.5, the system is 2 years old and I’ve been running Renoise on it since I got it.
Does lowering the framerate settings in the Renoise → Preferences → GUI make any difference, or switching any other settings there?
It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, but I guess I’ll play around with it a bit more. Seem strange that a single VST playing a loop from memory on a 2.3GHz Core 2 Duo w/an nVidia 7600GT would be suffering poor performance due to load issues, but it is Vista I guess. BTW, Aero and all that crap is turned off too.
How does this crackling sound like, is it related to “what you see” aka, does maybe your GFX card interfere with the audio output?
Not related to any noticeable GUI activity, sounds like when you’ve got a bad audio cable that pops and cracks as it makes and breaks the connection; it doesn’t occur when there’s no sound, only when there is. The video card is on it’s on PCI-Express bus, so it’s not a PCI Latency issue. Just to be safe, I bumped up the latency on my RME card to no noticeable improvement.
Does this really only happen with Renoise, with no other audio app?
It only occurs with Renoise. It’s there, but barely noticeable with Renoise 2.1. With 2.5 the issue seems to be much more pronounced.
Disabling GFX hardware acceleration help:
Yeah, I made sure of that before posting. I’ll see if I can replicate it on the same hardware but under Linux.