Renoise, Asio And Latency With A Usb Interface.

Hey guys.

Before I started using Native Instruments products and other synths and FX. I enjoyed many years of using the lowest latency possible. With my M-Audio Fast Track Pro I was always getting 2.7ms at 48khz.

Now that I’ve been sharpening up on my mixing, using more FX and better and bigger Instruments, I’m obviously hitting my CPU.

I recently upgraded to a Core i7 2600k, which is quite a beast of a CPU!

With my previous CPU, a Q6600 I had to set my latency in ASIO to the highest buffer possible, giving me about 40ms :( With the current CPU I can go down to approx 10ms and sometimes it crackles and I either have to re-initialize the ASIO driver or increase the buffer.

I’m quite sensitive to latency, I find anything higher than about 7ms I notice and it irritates me, it’s more of an OCD thing than a practical thing, mind you ;)

So anyway, since Renoise lacks the ability to tell me how much CPU usage FX plugins are using, I’m wondering if I’m the only one here that is pushing the CPU to its limits?

I already use a lot of send tracks, which does help to save on CPU load, but there are times when I need 5x sessions of Guitar Rig playing at the same time etc;

Maybe this thread can have lists of examples and suggestions ot optimising workflows.

If it helps, render some sections to sample just for a temporary cpu lowering and mute the particular tracks with the plugin until you are needing to render your complete song, then disable the pvreview tracks.
Lowering the framerate in the graphics settings also shuffles more cpu time towards audio processing.
If you use any samples, you could change the interpolation to none which also saves some cpu cycles.
Lowering samplerate also does it but below 32Khz ain’t sound reasonable anymore, plus plugins should support it. (most don’t go lower than 44Khz).

Yeah that’s way too much effort ;) What i’ve resorted to now is just muting tracks I don’t NEED when jamming.

Changing sampling rate is not practical, some synths really, really hate me for it.

That"s why it is also the last suggestion. But if one is that desperate…