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Posted by T-Soma on Aug-01-2005 02:20:

CPU utilization

Im very sorry if this has been asked and answerd before but its something thats realy buggin me and its stopping me from working on a song.
My computer is nothing good its only P4 1.5 running XP, 256 ram and my soundcard is a numark dxm01 usb mixer. The problem is that in fruity loops theirs one melody that even when i play alone on the vanguard synth nomatter how high the buffer is i get tons of underuns.
If i split the melody into two and run it on two different instances of vanguard could that help? Also, what other ways are their of fixing this. Im hopefully gettin a realy good laptop soon so that would fix it but untill then

Posted by chillsonic on Aug-01-2005 03:54:

make sure your drivers are up to date (look into http://www.asio4all.com/). for a little extra boost in performance switch 'smart disable' on for instruments and vst effects. errr... hope that helps, but the problem seems to lie in the processor and limited ram.

in addition, be sure to toggle your settings. hardware buffer on/off and polling on/off are notorious for helping stop underruns on some systems but degrading the performance other systems.

Posted by supersonik on Aug-01-2005 04:35:

Vanguard uses alot of cpu power on my 2.6 ghz , 1gig ram. Sounds like you just need to upgrade.

Posted by Axolotyl on Aug-01-2005 05:15:

I've got no clue what an under run is. Sounds painful.

Turn your voices in Vanguard down. 1 for mono basslines, 3-4 for leads with long release or delay, more for pads etc... bottom right corner of the gui...

Posted by gr8ape on Aug-03-2005 00:54:

Does adding ram increase max pcu usage? or is it Mghz?

Posted by DigiNut on Aug-03-2005 01:56:

quote:
Originally posted by gr8ape
Does adding ram increase max pcu usage? or is it Mghz?

It's neither really. More memory is good when you're doing a lot of sampling - if you don't have enough memory then you have to stream from disk and that limits your polyphony. But if you're not using any soft-samplers, then 1 GB ought to be enough for most producers.

Having a faster CPU won't necessarily help either though. I doubt you'll find much difference between a 2 GHz CPU and a 4 GHz CPU with all else being equivalent (there's not even that much of a difference between my old Athlon XP 1800+ and my new Athlon 64 3200).

Ultimately, you'll get to a point where the only way to really squeeze out more CPU power is to add more physical processors or workstations (or use hardware instruments/effects). Until then, all you can do is freeze/render.

Axolotyl, how can you not know what an underrun is? It's when your buffer runs out and you get the stutters/clicks/pops.

Posted by T-Soma on Aug-03-2005 08:10:

I lowerd the voices and that helped abit and i ended up just reprogramming the synth for a different and much better sound wich also uses up alot less cpu usage. Thanks for the help.

Posted by slyfoxark on Aug-04-2005 04:29:

ASIO4All works like a dream for me!!! Thankyou chillsonic!