I’m having problems with multiple instances of renoise and line-in devices. I’d like to use two instances of renoise for live sets and I use a few hardware synths so I have a few line-in devices in my sessions. But whenever I run two instances of renoise, as soon as I add one line-in device to any instance i get bad latency-like crackles on the input sound of the line-in device. I guess its to do with the two renoise instances sharing resources of the i/o. I tried disabling the audio input in the prefs of the one of the instances but no luck. I’m on Mac os.
As a workaround, instead of using the line-in devices I could monitor the synths outputs through the latency free software mixer (my interface is a profire 2626) and then i can simply trigger the MIDI through renoise. This may be a solution for some but in my case will not work for me as I often run automated effects in renoise after the line-in device.
I also tried changing the audio prefs of one instance so that I was routing the outputs to Soundflower, and then in Soundflower I routed back to the Profire outs, but as soon as i did this the crackles come back. same with aggregate device.
You might be able to reduce the crackles by raising the buffers, but that will for sure also add latency.
Unfortunately, more latency is sometimes required to compensate the incapacity of the audio device or platform that requires more resources than can be handled.
Usually hard to circumvent other than upgrading the system or closing other resource eating apps and processes you don’t currently need.
hmm ok, you may be right but… I’m not convinced that it would be the specs of my machine, (quad-core intel machine) - because it happens even on the most cut down of sessions. the cpu monitors on each instance are low, and the sound on normal tracks is fine - the crackles only come from the line-in device track.
i’ll try up-ing the buffers and killing some non-essential processes and see if it helps
Low CPU profile does not necessairly mean your buffers are large enough to handle the incoming content.
device-sharing might also be a problem (sharing the same device between multiple apps.)
If you get the same crackling results using two instances of another recording app both using the line inputs, you know enough.
Multiple tests that can be executed to narrow down problems.
I see. I’ve tried a few tests now. Experimented with increasing latency (to max!) to no avail. And I had the same thing when I loaded up reaper/renoise. I’m not sure but from what you say I think it must be to do with how the driver works. However, I seem to have found a solution for what I want… I managed to get it all working using Jack OS X! I can now have two Renoise sessions open both with line-in devices and it works just fine.
Also it’s very handy for doing live mixes and recording stems into other software. I can send my line-in devices from Renoise (with renoise fx) into Reaper with no problems (not possible with Rewire).
Jack is cool - audio can be routed back and forth between apps = win!