Soft Synths + Crackle = Audio card or CPU issue?

Just wanted to voice my similar issue and support. So far I've not found an answer. 

I have noticed the problem even, with complex patches, in the z3ta+2 Microhost. 

I also have a fairly robust system and want some more clarity on how to solve this or understand what limits we are facing.

ggg

I can almost guarantee that it's the Audio card. Interfaces have pretty much phased out the Audio card. I believe it may have something to do with Interfaces running independently of soundcards. 

Did you try to disable Multiprocessor support in Kontakt when using it as a plugin?
This solved my issues with crackles and clicks.
Kontakt -> Options -> Engine:  Multiprocessor support off (VST-Plugin).

Best,
Klaus

I can almost guarantee that it's the Audio card.

And I can guarantee it's not.


Even with a lot of RAM like you have, large sample libraries still incur a great deal of disk I/O. If the drives can't keep up it'll result in dropouts as if it was your CPU that was maxed out. Your best bet is to add another disk drive and spread the load. In the meantime, freezing synths will help.

hard disk transfer rate seems a likely culprit here.  definitely check your DPC latency.  don't rely on Sonar's CPU meters, use task manager performance pane instead.  Sonar doesn't always show kernel activity correctly.

Key to understanding these kinds of problems is that inside the computer, once anything - disk, CPU, memory bus, PCI bus, soundcard, whatever - starts getting more than light usage, other things start waiting for it.  Adjusting the audio latency really just builds in more time for things to wait before not getting what they need becomes an audible problem...

The problem isn't the PCI bus per se rather the chipsets used to provide (what is now considered legacy) support for PCI cards are about as flaky as is often found with onboard Firewire chipsets.

More and more MOBO's that still have a PCI slots suffer form this.

In recent weeks ther have been about a half dozen or so threads on the subjec of crackles and pops and the one thing in common is the use of PCI cards, M-audio's Delta range of sound cards and modern MOBO's.

Jim Roseberry explained how this issue has come about in a recent thread - when I find it I'll post a link.
 
edited to add link:
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?&m=2569824&mpage=1
 
Read Post 4 by Seth Perlstein then Post 40 by Jim Roseberry. Of course if you're inclined, read the whole thread to get the context but this has now come up several times.

I can try to answer the question - how many synths should a stout modern setup be able to handle, but I don't think the answer is a number so much as a way to sort of gauge it for yourself on your system.  First, though, let me say that while I've been posting more recently, I've been reading these forums for several years, and Bitflipper is a guy I listen to.  He probably knows as much as I do about computers, and a lot more about DAWs, music stuff and their use there.  Point is, I'm mostly just underscoring his point here: the disk drive is the most likely bottleneck.

Think about it like this - in a computer, everything is electronic, and everything happens basically at either the speed of the processor/buses, which is measured in billionths of a second, or the speed of light.   Disk access, on the other hand,  still has a mechanical component - the spinning disks and the moving read/write heads. Here things are talked about in milliseconds - thousandths of a second.    So disk stuff is basically a million times slower than anything else in the machine. 

Sample-based synths work well when the majority of the samples used in a particular song can be cached in memory, which happens automatically as you load and use them.  The more synths you use, and the more sample-heavy they are, the less likely you are to have enough memory to store them all in (remember, Sonar is stored in memory too along with all kinds of windows components and audio drivers, graphics stuff,  and such).  So you end up having to move them into memory from the disk as you need them, and whenever this is happening, things are slowing down in a critical way,

To counter this, use the fastest drives you can if you do sample intensive stuff.  7200 RPM drives are probably a requirement for supporting the kind of load a big, modern computer can run, and 10000 RPM is better, some might say they are necessary.  Also, multiple drives to distribute the load is important.  And don't fill up the disks - keep lots of free space, because it's when the heads have to move to around the disk to find stuff hat they really slow down.  Really, IMO, the power of a modern I7 almost begs for a SSD to get the most out of it if you use samples a lot.  

Your observation that the crackling and such seems more distributed across the samples rather than intermittent interruptions really makes it sound more like disk stuff, too.   Wireless/video/networking conflicts seem to be more irregular sometimes. 

It could also be the PCI bus clashing with the timing schemes of the new mobo chipset, like mudgel and jim have pointed out, I haven't seen that myself and don't really know how it  behaves. But if the problems show up as you add synths, it smells a lot more like disk.

If I had this issue, I would start freezing/removing synths one by one and see if that made a difference. If it did then disk is your best suspect.  It could be an esoteric situation there inside the box where increased bus traffic exposes the PCI issue, but that'll probably show up whether the samples are traveling in from disk or memory. 

Also, one other thing - I don't think you should run any other programs, even in the background, while producing music, and should not have an active network device.  I rarely connect my DAW to the web, preferring to keep another computer nearby with a flash drive for any downloads or searches I need to do. 


And FWIW, I try to limit the number of  synths I have live at a time - freezing and bouncing are my friends - and never record with an active synth (unless its the thing I'm recording, and I avoid that if I can, like with an external drum machine to hear my work before switching the midi track over to Superior or Session Drummer later).

I don't know how much others will agree with this approach, it's pretty conservative, but it seems plain to me that the more synths you run, even with an optimized multi-disk setup, the greater latency you'll introduce and more chance of problems you'll have. 

I hope this is useful...

My guess at this point is that maybe I'm just trying to do too many "live" soft synths at once. I'm entire dependent upon them now that I don't use my Triton's sounds anymore, and I'm used to having 16 tracks to play with. I often adjust soft synth settings after I've recorded the performance, so I'm not in the habit of freezing. Maybe 16 live soft synths, some of which are "big" Native Instruments drum kits, are just too much?
p.s. I downloaded LatencyMon, and ran it while uploading, backing up, and listening to music. It didn't show any problems.