Audio Accelerator

[dabbler]

I guess it happens to all of us at some point - I'm running out of processing power! I have a 3.2GHz/2GB RAM PC running Cubase 4, PreSonus FP10 and a really lean dedicated PC setup with all unnecessary applications and features disabled, but even with a modest 16 track song with half a dozen plug-ins and effects, I am getting ASIO problems with the VST Performance indicator hitting the end stop frequently and generating glitches (my disk access is no problem). So, I am looking for an Audio Accelerator of some kind, FireWire or PCI. I've looked at TC Electronics and Universal Audio but I wondered if anyone here had any experience, advice or suggestions?

Dabbler

[brandondrury]

Is this for tracking or mixing? Are you cranking up your buffer size / latency to 1024 samples while mixing? If not, you should. It'll give you a good 30% extra CPU power. Maybe more.

16 tracks is nothing.

What plugins are you running? Do you mean a half dozen stock Cubase compressors and EQs or are we talking a half dozen instances of Altiverb?

I too have been eyeballing the Liquidmix, UAD-1, and TC Powercore for a while now and just haven't been able to scrape up the cash. They all look very good. From what I read, you can't lose with any of them.

With that said, I would look at these as "self sustaining" plugin upgrades and not so much as relief for your CPU. I just know how my brain works. If I had more CPU power, I'd just use it up too.

[dabbler]

It's during mixing, and I do increase the latency considerably. I have it set to 6mS for tracking and then increase it to 30mS for mixing; beyond that you don't see much improvement. I agree that 16 tracks is nothing. I've produced songs with more than twice this in the past without problems.

This seems to have got worse since I upgraded to Cubase 4. I don't recall having these problems with SX3. Maybe the Cubase 4 plug-ins are more CPU hungry?

I have all my vocals sent to a FX Tracks with RoomWorks Reverb and a single band compressor. I have my drum tracks sent to FX Tracks with RoomWorks Reverb and a multi-band compressor. My instrument tracks have various delays, chorus, distortion etc, maybe eight or ten simple plug-ins max. Sometimes, if I'm feeling lazy, I'll put a Stereo Enhancer, Maximiser and Reverb plug-ins on my output track, but usually I'll use outboard effects for this. All pretty standard stuff really; not pushing the boundaries my any stretch of the imagination.

[brandondrury]

Interesting. You should have a way higher plugin count that you currently do. Since I'm still on Cubase SX3, maybe Cubase 4 just uses more gas. I've never heard this, but generally the type of people that upgrade software also upgrade computers. I avoid all of that as much as possible.

The fact that you are using the stock plugins and having problems shocks me. The stock plugins in Cubase SX3 use very very little power. I figured you were using something hardcore like Altiverb or maybe using a bunch of Antress compressors.

I'd look into this further because something sounds wrong. I don't have the solution for you, unfortunately. If you get it figured out, let me know. I'm curious about this one.

Brandon

[richiebee]

If you're having problems that you didn't used to have, its likely either because you upgraded to something that requires more overhead, installed something that is somehow conflicting, or a maintenance issue. What's your disk set up? How many? What specs? How often do you defrag? I know that plugins generally require more processor power than RAM/disk access, but it's all related. If your hard drive is labouring over something, it could easily be passing off a load to your processor to handle things in a different way.

[dabbler]

I agree, this is an interesting situation and I'm digging in to it some more. I'll let you know if I find out what's happening.

As far as the hard drives are concerned, I have an internal Ultra DMA drive for my applications software, and a 1TB External Maxtor RAID drive for the audio files (USB2.0 or Firewire - doesn't seem to make a lot of difference when you're just streaming). They both spin at 7200rpm. I defrag regularly, at least once a week.

Does anyone else have a problem like this with Cubase 4?

[dabbler]

Here's something interesting. When I run msinfo32, it reports that I have:

Total Physical Memory - 2048MB
Available Physical Memory - 1.05GB

Where has the lost 1GB gone?

I know I have 4 512MB DDR modules. Maybe one is faulty?

[brandondrury]

Total Physical Memory - 2048MB
Available Physical Memory - 1.05GB

Where has the lost 1GB gone?

That's a great question. It'll take someone who knows more about the internal guts of a computer to answer this one. I checked my home PC and it said:

Total System Memory: 1,024MB
Total Available Memory: 184.37MB

So maybe that is normal.

Brandon

[dabbler]

It looks like something is really hogging your RAM - I assume this isn't your DAW.

I have my PC System Configuration set up so that the only Start Up program is my Pre-Sonus ASIO Driver, keyboard and mouse drivers - nothing else. I also disable all non Microsoft services. Under these circumstances, I would expect to have almost all of my RAM available for my Cubase. I'm sure I don't have the best part of 1GB of RAM consumed by some background application.

Still investigating.........

[dabbler]

Update - I freed up some RAM; I now have 1.55GB available to Cubase...but....it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference.....sigh!

I'm going to get to the bottom of this, but meanwhile, has anyone had any experience with the UAD-1 or TC-Electronics Powercore? I'm probably going to buy one or the other, but I can't decide which one. Any advice would be very much appreciated.