Voxengo Span Vst Overloads And Tends To Crash On Cpu Spikes

I’m getting many audio warnings because of using too much CPU as of late, sometimes even a quite small arrangement can make my computer spike, and sometimes I can’t even press reset and make it play again with less tracks unless I close and reopen Renoise. Also Voxengo SPAN crashes quite often when the audio engine stops because of too much CPU usage.

[details=“Click to view contents”] Warning Message: The audio engine was stopped because it used too much CPU for a quite long time.
Warning Message: Note: You can disable this behavior in the audio preferences pane…

VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN’ crashed in its audio process function!
VstPlugs: Will stop logging errors from this plug now to prevent flooding the log…

Warning Message: Ouch. The VST plugin ‘Voxengo: SPAN (from Voxengo)’ crashed in VST event/function: ‘Process’, Thread: ‘Audio’
Warning Message: IMPORTANT: This is a fatal error. Please save the current document under a !new! name to prevent losing important data. Renoise will silently ignore any following errors from this plug-in.
Warning Message: DO NOT IGNORE THIS ERROR; DO NOT CONTINUE USING THE PLUGIN. THIS CAN DESTROY YOUR SONG OR CAUSE OTHER RANDOM CRASHES AND PROBLEMS!
Warning Message: It’s most likely that this is a bug in the VST plugin, so please report this problem to the authors of this plugin in order to get the problem fixed!

Application: Saving ‘ocean hey2.xrns’…
Application: ‘ocean hey2.xrns’ was successfully saved. [/details]

Please post here your environments, about CPU/RAM, OS (32/64bit), Renoise (bit), plugin (bit).
And actually how many spans do you use in the song? applying something special settings?

Just tried span and it seems no problem at all. There is no cpu spike here.
(Core2Duo 2.2GHz / RAM 4GB / Win Vista / Renoise 2.8rc2 / span 2.4.1 / all 32bit, regardless of sandbox on/off)

I have just one Span 2.2 instance working in hi-res on the master track, damn I thought it was uptodate, let me update Span to a newer version and report back. I just read the Span 2.4 release notes and “Memory usage optimizations implemented” sounds like a fix to me.

My notebook is identical to yours except that I only have a 2GHz CPU.

It’s still crashing, but this time it added a new line in the LOG file. Don’t spend time on this, it’s probably my system, but you could try to see if you can provoke it to crash by creating a too high CPU load.

I’ve simply tried

  • loading one of demosongs
  • insert Voxengo Span to the master track
  • start playing and rizing the value of BPM & LPB gradually extremely (so cpu spikes)

then just only this message appears. No crash here.

Just want to confirm: your OS is Win Vista 32bit?? (renoise and span are 32bit too?) :huh:

About the LOG, I cannot understand what it means. We need to wait devs comments.

I don’t know if it’s related, but I got this message twice this weekend:

Warning Message: The audio engine was stopped because it used too much CPU for a quite long time.
Warning Message: Note: You can disable this behavior in the audio preferences pane…

Once during setting up/sound checking and once during the live performance… almost got through the entire song. CPU usage seemed normal, around 20% perhaps. It did not happen even once at home during my preparations. Even though I had been using RC1 for a while.

I’ll have to investigate more before drawing any conclusions.

When using very high FFT block sizes, any spectrum analyzer will start peaking the CPU usage to the roof. Same thing happens in Renoises spectrum meter too.

I also can’t replicate the crashes with SPAN here, but please check the settings of SPAN. Probably the instance you are using somehow got broken. Try reloading it (delete SPAN from the DSP list and add it again) and if you can replicate the crash, then please do let the plugin devs know about this. It’s very likely that this is a problem in SPAN and not in Renoise.

@Satobox: Everything is 32bit. Since we have pretty similar system, havn’t you noticed any weird CPU spikes?

This is actually not because of Voxengo SPAN it just crashed because of some weird CPU spike, and I’m definitely running into many more CPU spikes than ever before. Right now I’m sitting with a fairly simple 8 track song with only one VSTi, and it spikes, and now that I play again after I started typing this message it’s back down to just consume 30% of the CPU. I have no clue to what is actually going on, but it feels like it “bubbles up” at times.

Also no cpu eco mode setup to conserve power? That could also cause enormous spikes when sudden power-demand is requested from the CPU and most laptops, power consumption efficiency is usually turned on by default. CPU powermanagement should be on full power always also during idle-times. This can be either set in the BIOS or in the power-management of Windows.

Thanks for the tips. I don’t use power saving. Anyway I’ll try pin-point it better, right now the suspects are: Z3ta+ 2, Slim slow multiband compressor and maybe the Exciter device.

Today I found a SPAN related post in KVR.
It seems that Voxengo devs discovered some bugs.
Had better wait the next update, maybe.