Benchmar test: How well does your DAW play "Floating - Cori Yarckin"?

This is a good bencmark project as there are a lot of tracks and PC is all over the project.  I'm a laptop user (my setup requires it) and my current laptop cannot smoothly play this song - It has crashed X1 a couple times for me, and the audio is very choppy with CPU at 90 to 100%.  I'm running duoCore 2.2Ghz Win7 32bit with 4gb ram.  I know my pc is below minimum requirments, but the fastest new laptop I would buy now is 2.6GHz i5 Win7 64bit.  I'm not sure this will be fast enough.
 
Can you run this project and tell me your results and list your specs?  Thank you!

It is on the Additional Content download.  If you installed it, by default it puts it in this folder: C:/Cakewalk Projects/Cori Yarckin.  Once you unbundle the file, be sure to save it as a normal file otherwise it will unbundle it everytime you open it.

I can't get either to play smoothly on my system and I had no trouble at all with the 8.5 demo project.

Danny Danzi

Stock Dell i3, 2.93ghz, 4 GIG RAM, Win 7 64, Sonar X1 32 bit with Realtek stock card, ASIO4ALL drivers running at 2048 samples at 16/44. Total RAM used for the project 3.0 gig. Screen shot of the meter:
 
All of this done as audio was playing, replying to this message with IE open, Drop box running and using the Win snipe tool for the graphic. Not one drop out, issue or crash.
 
Same project in S 8.5, same machine. Here's the meter shot:
 
So if I can run it without issues on this VERY basic machine, you should be able to also. You may just need to tweak some of your settings. But no problems at all here on this machine. My real recording box has much better numbers I'm sure, but I haven't installed X1 on it because I don't want it on there just yet.
 
 
 
 

Danny - Thank you!  That is encouraging.  I'm hoping a 2.6ghz i5 will do as good as your 2.93ghz machine.  I think it would.  (My 2.2ghz Win7 32bit is really choking!)
 
Geno
Udate - I did change the samples to 2048 from 512 and it helped a lot.  It still doesn't run smooth but the CPU came down from 90% to about 70%

running fine at 256 samples,..
running at 128 samples but with some crackles..

Q6600@2,4GHz, 4GB Ram, Win7x64, X1-32bit (!), RME Fireface 800

For some reason that song was not installed in my installation, the other demos were but that is no where to be found, weird. 

I'm just figuring out that some of what I thought was popping is due to high level and extremely sharp attack on the "Snare Top" track;  the thing's going almost 15dB into the red. It's on the output, so it's not "clipping" per se, but it is sending that hot signal to the Drums bus.
 
Disabling the Shaper section on PX64 on that track brough the level way down in addition to softening the attack so it doesn't sound so much like a pop. Need to play with the Shaper controls and see how the Drums and "Drum Crush" buses are being used to fully understand what's going on, but its sounds bad to me.
 
EDIT: Hmmm... think I figured it out, and it looks like a bug in PX-64.  When I touched the Attack control in the Shaper, it didn't move, but the popping immediately went away, and the value showed it was at 153.7%. I turned it up to see what would happen, and when it's set very high, the level goes way up, and sounds just like what I was hearing. It seems PX64 was running the attack parameter at max internally though it was displaying the value that was intended. Not good.
 
EDIT 2: And what's with that High Guitar "twang and slide" at 57:02:813? Sticks out like a sore thumb. It's at the end of a clip that's hidden behind the next clip. Wonder if it was meant to be slip-edited out...?
 
 

guitartrek

Danny Danzi

Stock Dell i3, 2.93ghz, 4 GIG RAM, Win 7 64, Sonar X1 32 bit with Realtek stock card, ASIO4ALL drivers running at 2048 samples at 16/44. Total RAM used for the project 3.0 gig. Screen shot of the meter:
 
All of this done as audio was playing, replying to this message with IE open, Drop box running and using the Win snipe tool for the graphic. Not one drop out, issue or crash.
 
Same project in S 8.5, same machine. Here's the meter shot:
 
So if I can run it without issues on this VERY basic machine, you should be able to also. You may just need to tweak some of your settings. But no problems at all here on this machine. My real recording box has much better numbers I'm sure, but I haven't installed X1 on it because I don't want it on there just yet.
 
 
 
 

Danny - Thank you!  That is encouraging.  I'm hoping a 2.6ghz i5 will do as good as your 2.93ghz machine.  I think it would.  (My 2.2ghz Win7 32bit is really choking!)
 
Geno
Udate - I did change the samples to 2048 from 512 and it helped a lot.  It still doesn't run smooth but the CPU came down from 90% to about 70%

Geno, just for sh!ts and giggles...what do you have your I/O options set for in options/audio? I've got mine set to 512. See if that helps you any. Also...and I know it would suck if you had to do this, but have you ever tried ASIO4ALL drivers? It's usually best to use the asio drivers that come with your card...but I can't tell you how many times they have made a difference even with cards that have their own asio drivers. They really do work well. As a matter of fact, I had a friend using some card (I forget the name...pretty well known) having issues with Sonar with clicks and pops. He grabbed the latest drivers for his card and it still didn't help. I told him to just try the asio4all drivers to see if they made any difference at all. He called me on the phone and offered to buy me dinner. LOL! It totally fixed his problems. So it may be worth a shot for you to try them and check on that I/o setting as well. I know the default is like 256 or something...but for a project like that one we're benchmarking, on some systems you may be better off with 512 in both of those boxes. It won't hurt anything to try either of these methods. But for sure, you should have no problems playing this file on the system you have. Good luck...and let me know how you fair if you try any of this stuff. :)

Darn, still not helping you completely though eh? How many running processes do you see when you bring up task manager? I try my best to keep things at about 38 running processes...but of course when I was replying to you I had a few more than that going. I'm usually ok with 48 tops on this net box. If you're in the 50's and above, I'd say that's probably your issue. My lap top gets a bit choppy at times...when I check my running processes it's at 53 or more sometimes and that's when it chops up. Then again, that drive in that box is 5400 rpm. So it actually helped a bit when I changed the I/O to 512 as well as when I added the checks in those boxes...which mentions in the help that it's more for older or slower hard drives. It seems to have made a difference in my playback and recording on that machine.

Dude, I'm sitting here typing to you and reading you, and all of a sudden...the way you spell your name "Geno" sets off an alarm! I just clicked on your soundclick page....I had no idea who you were! Hahahahahaha! Oh man, how you doin brother?! ;)

Danny - I'm doing great! - I'll send you an email.

You haven't helped completely - no - just from not being able to run it at all to running about 95% glitch free!  That's like 300% better than before! 

I just checked, I'm running about 25 processes - a couple IE's, the Volume mixer and Snagit.  My laptop has dual 7200rpm sata drives.

guitartrek

Robin Kelly [Cakewalk
]

The file was constructed on a Dell M4400 Quadcore (2.5GHz) laptop running (gasp) Vista 32 and 4gig of RAM using a VS-700 and A-Series.

Mixing was done on another machine that was a PCAL, sorry I do not have the specs handy. The finished project runs fine on my machine which is the one mentioned above.

Hope that helps in defining a baseline.

Robin

 
Robin - that is very interesting.  (Vista32?? - here I've been telling people to upgrade to Win7)  Your Quad core 2.5 is quite a bit more horespower than my DuoCore 2.2, but mine is running much better now.

That's what I have on that machine, it's going win7 ASAP. I prefer win7. It took me a while to get Vista in a good place to work with Audio (SONAR) and video (Vegas). Win7 is much easier to manage.

Robin

On a Dell XPS420 with a Core 2 Duo 6400 @ 2.3 Ghz , 4 gig RAM WINXP SP3 and NVidia 7300 Le, Focusrite Saffire 56 at 512 samples  then only way to play the project is to freeze all the tracks with FX, unload the soft synths and track FX.
 

Robin Kelly [Cakewalk
]

The file was constructed on a Dell M4400 Quadcore (2.5GHz) laptop running (gasp) Vista 32 and 4gig of RAM using a VS-700 and A-Series.

Mixing was done on another machine that was a PCAL, sorry I do not have the specs handy. The finished project runs fine on my machine which is the one mentioned above.

Hope that helps in defining a baseline.

Robin

Robin,


I'm running SONAR X1 (64-bit) on an i7. I'm having minor problems with the Cori Yarckin project that appear to be related to the effects that were used. On loading, I get an error regarding the Cakewalk Tempo Delay which is not being found on X1 64-bit. I also discovered that the Guitar Rig 4 instances are not actually loading any presets and appear to just be passing the audio thru untouched. 


I was really excited to see the automation on the tracks working out my VS-700's faders, but the guitars are all out of wack and are pretty much killing the tracks vibe.


Is there anyway that you could upload the correct presets for Guitar Rig? I'm also wondering if the tempo delay is supposed to function under X1 (64-bit) or if maybe there is a problem with my install?


-e.B

guitargeek... they are in my signature

Well, My material is a bit outdated, Vista64, Athlon 5000+ Dual Core, 2Go RAM, E-MU 0404.
I tried to play Cori's clip this afternoon :  drops, cracks, meters all orange, till it stopped alone.

Then I read this thread and afterwards I decided to try Asio4all. I never had problems before with my E-MU ASIO drivers, but in this case, I was curious to see if it would get the playing better.

Well, it worked wonderfully, I could hear the whole clip without any drop, any crack, and the two meters never went higher than 70%.

So, thank you for beginning this thread and thanks to Danny for evoking that !