I would like to know the real hardware requirements for running renoise with full vst support (many effects and soft-synths combined with lots of midi-tracks, playing at once) without any (cpu, sound and timing) problems.
The description in the help-file (800 Mhz works well…) does not help in that case.
I have a PIII 700, 256 MB Ram, and e.g. the demo-song “On my mind” is not played correctly at all (There are very heavy sound-gaps every second).
I am new to the software-side composing, so I don’t know what hardware is needed; I am coming from midi-hardware setup and I would like to focus more on software and consequently would like to upgrade my system.
I think there are many advanced users out there, can you tell me your setup please, and what you can do with it?
When I tested out renoise with only 3 tracks at once, all using simple samples (bass, hihat, snare), I noticed that there are randomly short “click” and “clack” error-sounds. I guess this is because of my poor soundcard (Soundblaster live), but it is really annoying me because of 3 simple tracks only which is nothing, to get such error-sounds.
Does it appear because of my soundcard or has it another reason? What soundcard can you recommend?
you need something around 3ghz, a P4 3ghz will be fine, and quite a good deal of memory (512Mb or better 1Gb).
as for an example i made a music using FM7/Absynth2 Vsti, 16 vsti at the same time + some FX and it’s eating 75% of my 2.4ghz, i intend to upgrade it to somewhere around 3Ghz, because i know there is some effects that is eating a lot of cpu and i want to use them .
using a 2.66ghz p4 northwood /w 512MB PC2700 and am longing for betters, since i’m way too often limited in creativity by hardware limits.
some VST fx also seem to create a lot of cpu overhead even when not in use - they somewhat fail to idle unless being deactivated manually or by pattern command.
what i was always wondering about since the introduction of HyperThreading - is it supported or will renoise / vsti’s benefit of hyperthreading aka virtual CPUs?
anyways, if you’re really want to get some decent performance out of renoise you just can’t have enough CPU / RAM clock.
i’d go for a P4 2.4c, Asus P4C800-E deluxe, 2x512MB PC3500 Mushkin Level-II and some western digital 10k rpm raptors for sata raid-0 @ICH5R (hd transfers no longer stress the PCI bus).
then get some reasnonable cooling like some alpha/swiftech hsf and overclock the hell out of that 2.4C by upping the FSB.
you can reach 3ghz and more with ease using such a setup.
if you’re not into overclocking and money isn’t a limiting factor, get the p4 3.00c - you won’t be disappointed.
and btw, some might argue about that - but i’d definately not consider buying an AMD based system, since neither the new VIA chipsets nor the NVIDIA chipsets are known for their maturity - there still are PCI transfer issues and memory performance is way better using dual channel on a i875p chipset when comparing with nforce2.
I’m usig ReNoise with a P3 733 with 512MB RAM and a Terratec EWX24/96 soundcard.
you problem, Cie, is probably due to a misconfiguration in buffers.
Go to Config=>Audio and try lo raise the “processing buffer size” and “outlatency” values.
Also, if you’ve not done this already, try using the windowed mode by clicking on the middle button of these three: .
ohmymind2.rns can be played in most of its parts with no problems on the PC I use in my office (P2 500 with no-brand soundcard).
If you want to use VST with no limits, anyway, the suggestions given by the other users are good. I use VSTi’s myself (mainly Kontakt, SampleTank, Triangle II) with my p3733, but a faster PC (possibly with 1GB+RAM) would make me happy. I’m currently waiting or this one to die, so I will be finally forced to swtich to a new one
Yes, this betters the playing enourmously. But you can’t work with a outlatency of 50-100ms seriously, because if you like to record a track while playing the song, you are everytime out of the beat. This makes working with renoise senseless.
Its weird that you should need like a 3 GHz P4 to run Renoise with VSTs, obviously the faster the computer the better. But large sequencers like Cubase, Sonar, etc, with all their graphics and so on can run quite well on a 2.4 Ghz.
Cydonia:
the main difference between ReNoise and “main sequencers” is that ReNoise does not support multitimbrality, so it needs an instance of the VSTi for each program you want to play at the same time.
by the way, if you read my post, using a P3 733 you can run up to 6 Kontakt instances, one SampleTank, and a couple of Triangle II.
you may also wanto to check out this threadfor some CPU-load related tricks.
it still depends on how much your system can handle:
a fast system with a good soundcard can have 1-5ms of latency.
With my system (p3 733, EWX24/96 with medium-high VST usage), I’m set on 60ms at 44khz.
Consider that, using DirectSound, I have a comparable quality (i.d.: no click/pop/glitches) at about 300ms of latency.
The unintuitive fact about ASIO is that the higher is the frequency, the lower is the latency, so I would have less than 30ms at 96khz, if only my CPU could hold the increased processing power.
Though Creative does not produce any ASIO driver for its soundcards, the Kx-project site has some good free ASIO drivers for SoundBlaster.
Maybe someone of the users who receive that latency, could post his system (cpu, ram, etc. and soundcard)? I then could use this as reference to upgrade my system.
I have 1ms-5ms in latency (with ASIO). I have a AMD XP 1800+, 1GB DDRAM and an M-Audio Delta Audiophile 2496 audio-card. I often use about 10-15 VSTi’s in the same song without problems.
In some massive parts of my songs (when I use 13-14 channels at the same time) the CPU sometimes tops and the sound starts to click and pop, I will fix this by buying a faster processor soon…
I have a SBLive 5.1 with kxdrivers and a 2.6 Ghz AMD and I have 10ms Latency. If you are not playing stuff using your MIDI-Keyboard, a Latency up to 25ms wont bother you at all. only if you care for live-changing or live-recording of midi-notes you should care about this.
Since I have the demo version, I was wondering when rendering the wav/s of a song how does it come out as? This probably sounds stupid
Just a single stereo .wav file or
Multiple stereo .wavs (one for each track), giving you the option of outboard eq’ing each one separately.
Look in the manual for a screenshot of the render dialog. There is a choice for rendering the entire song or each track to separate files. Then you can also select sample rate 22/44/48/96kHz and 16/32 bit.
I used KX drivers for a while , renoise was running fine but then some games I had played crashed so I went back to Audigy drivers.
I configured renoise to use creatives ASIO drivers with a low latency and I am happy now.
My system was a PC800 Deluxe , 1 GB RAM , 2.8 CPU , Audigy …
Now I am changing my motherboard to Asus PC800-E Deluxe and also audigy.
Actualy I am thinking to get an Audigy 2 platinum … I know that creative sound cards sucks … but I saw some revies with audigy 2 and seems that creative did a good work…
I’m very satisfied with my M-Audio Delta Audiophile 2496, it is a pro audio card that doesn’t cost much more than a gamer-sound-card and on top of that it has real good drivers (both WDM and ASIO) that gives you ultra low latency . What I have experienced the drivers are very stable and they also work very well together with games and things like that, I have played lot of games with my card and haven’t had any problems so far, but I’m no pro-gamer so I maybe have missed some, for me unknown, advanced game-audio-features (is there any? if there is I can’t realy confirm that this card work together with thouse )
(to be over-explicit I have to say that this is my subjective opinions and experiences, some people seems to have some trouble to understand this and I do not want a flaming thread upon my neck again just because I this time happen to say that I think an audio card is good, and therefor I say it very clear this time: If you decide to buy this card and of any reason wont be satisfed with it I will not take any responsability for your purchase, when you buy this card you have to observe that it is your and only your decision to buy the card, not mine, and therefor you have to aware that noone but yourself can be held responsible for that… If you of some reason want to ask why I have this opinions, ask it nice or send me a private message, do not flame me , or anyone else that have the same opinion as me, in a public forum, please )
@ Twilek, but I can understand. I heard the Audiophile was a good card but I think the Terratec DMX-6 Fire is in the same price range and can be compared to the audiophile performance wise. Though I have none of these cards, I’m stuck with an Audigy player at the moment (which will do the job for now anyway).
The DMX-6 got a little higher review rating than the audiophile in Computer Music Magazine. I think because it had some more features or a more software or something like that.
I think you should search around a bit on internet.
.
)
@ Twilek, but I can understand. I heard the Audiophile was a good card but I think the Terratec DMX-6 Fire is in the same price range and can be compared to the audiophile performance wise. Though I have none of these cards, I’m stuck with an Audigy player at the moment (which will do the job for now anyway).