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2020.01 Feedback


Morten Saether

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2 hours ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

Did a few tests and the click/pop is definitely ThreadSchedulingModel=3

I had turned it on during Early Access and it seemed better (lower CPU) which is why I was using it.  I can't really verify this problem with Kontakt wasn't happening with the early access build though.  Good news is ThreadSchedulingModel=2 or ThreadSchedulingModel=1 both seem fine.

 

the new mode is completely independent of the other modes so should be fine going back. The new mode can use threads differently from prior modes since it supports task stealing. Did you also get the clicks with load balancing turned off? Maybe it exposes threading issues in that Kontakt instrument.

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8 hours ago, Terry Kelley said:

Hi Noel,

I am running Windows Pro 10.0 Build 18363.592.  I believe that is 1909.

I am also seeing crashes trying to export audio to wave 16bit. Still messing with it. I have a dump file but it's too big to attach. It's a memory access error. C00000005.

Is there a way to roll back?

Terry

 

Will send you a PM to try and get to the bottom of why you are getting a Win7 warning. Nobody else has reported this yet so we'll have to do some further troubleshooting. Regarding the crash its unlikely to be related to this release. Can you zip the dump file and upload it to any file share and send me a link please?

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11 hours ago, rv729 said:

VST scan isn't finding all plugins in the latest version. 2020.01 (it can't find my toontrack VSTi's).  Went back to 2019.12 and it finds everything without issue (no changes to locations). .   Looking at the VST Scan Log under 2020.01,  it appears to be skipping that directory all together for some reason.

@rv729 can you send me the log file please - which directory name is being skipped specifically? Where are the toontrack plugins installed?

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1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

@rv729 can you send me the log file please - which directory name is being skipped specifically? Where are the toontrack plugins installed?

Hi Noel,

It zipped up smaller than the limit. It's attached. That was the last dump while trying to export as 44.1k/16.  Blue 6.

For fun I might uninstall and reinstall and see if the Windows 8/10 warning shows up again.

Edit: I just tried the export again and it bailed out of CbB with an empty dump file. I deleted the TW16 sampler and it exported to about 50% and bailed out. I deleted True Piano and it exported all the way to the end and then crashed with the C00000005.  Blue 7.

Another interesting detail is that a song saved just before the early release version will export fine using this updated version.

Terry

Blue 6 2020_01302020_232554.zip

Blue 7 2020_01312020_084930.zip

Edited by Terry Kelley
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1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Did you also get the clicks with load balancing turned off? Maybe it exposes threading issues in that Kontakt instrument.

Yes, load balancing on or off didn't make any difference.  My Kontakt is configured to use threads through, which may be a factor.  With only one instrument loaded though I'm not sure how much actual threading Kontakt is doing.  And of course this box has a crazy number of cores and threads (it's an Intel i9-9960X). 

I'm not sure it's worth spending time on at this point.  Could easily just be my problem entirely, I'd wait for a lot more feedback before wasting any time on it.  I was just surprised because the Early Access version seemed to work just fine, but I'll admit I didn't actually do exactly this.  May have been there all along and really just be a Kontakt only thing.

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The new info in the Performance Monitor is useful, but tells me what I already know, that  I get a  lot of pops and clicks in an almost wholly MIDI project if I don't set my RME AIO Pci card  to 2048 samples.    😩  My project only has 14 MIDI tracks and one audio track.  The MIDI sounds are coming from SampleTank 3.

At 512 samples I get immediate audio engine drop  out.

At  1048 samples crackling sets in.  The new data from the Performance Monitor says  my engine load flickers between 70% and 90% followed by  a  figure in brackets of 102% to 105%  once I start Play.  Playback and record buffers are set at 512. MIDI playback is set at 200  Millisecond Buffers.

 At 2048 (46.4 ms) samples I get no crackling.  The Engine Load stats flicker between 55% and 90% with a figure in brackets of  92%.   It's out of the question for me to use an guitar processor plugins  as the required latency for 'no clicks' is unworkable for these.

 I'm seeing zero late buffers in the Performance Monitor.

Any suggestions as to  what I could change to improve things gratefully  received! 

Edited by Skyline_UK
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3 hours ago, Skyline_UK said:

The new info in the Performance Monitor is useful, but tells me what I already know, that  I get a  lot of pops and clicks in an almost wholly MIDI project if I don't set my RME AIO Pci card  to 2048 samples.    😩  My project only has 14 MIDI tracks and one audio track.  The MIDI sounds are coming from SampleTank 3.

At 512 samples I get immediate audio engine drop  out.

At  1048 samples crackling sets in.  The new data from the Performance Monitor says  my engine load flickers between 70% and 90% followed by  a  figure in brackets of 102% to 105%  once I start Play.  Playback and record buffers are set at 512. MIDI playback is set at 200  Millisecond Buffers.

 At 2048 (46.4 ms) samples I get no crackling.  The Engine Load stats flicker between 55% and 90% with a figure in brackets of  92%.   It's out of the question for me to use an guitar processor plugins  as the required latency for 'no clicks' is unworkable for these.

 I'm seeing zero late buffers in the Performance Monitor.

Any suggestions as to  what I could change to improve things gratefully  received! 

@Skyline_UK This is caused by excess load being consumed by SampleTank. This has no bearing on your audio interface directly. If you have a single audio track feeding the synth this means that all the work is being done by a single core. If it takes longer than the deadline to process the buffer you will hear pops and clicks. Smaller buffer sizes mean there is a shorter time limit to process buffers and if the synth takes longer it will glitch.

>>my engine load flickers between 70% and 90% followed by  a  figure in brackets of 102% to 105%  once I start Play
The figure in brackets is the MAX engine load since playback started. So if its > 100% it means that some buffers took longer than the max allotted time. You should be seeing late buffers reported for this case.

One thing you can try in this use case is see if plug-in load balancing helps. Load balancing will use extra cores to process the plugin buffers so it should help in the case when you want to work at 512 or 1048 samples. Assuming that the plugin is well behaved with multiprocessing of course.

 

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Thanks Noel.

"If you have a single audio track (? MIDI?) feeding the synth this means that all the work is being done by a single core. "  I have one instance of SampleTank loaded and 14 separate MIDI tracks outputting to a MIDI channel each in SampleTank.  Is there a better way to set this up so that more cores are used?  E.g. more instances of SampleTank?

"One thing you can try in this use case is see if plug-in load balancing helps."  

I always have that ticked.

My PC spec should have no trouble with such a relatively small project.  It's puzzling.

------------------------------------------------------------

EDIT:

It seems I may have been using samplers like SampleTank incorrectly for years... 

 I tried loading two instances of  it and directing the MIDI outputs of the  MIDI tracks half to each and the crackling stopped when using 1048 samples.   I then split the load between three instances of SampleTank and could  achieve 256 samples with no crackling.    At 128 samples there was    slight crackling, an engine load of  c.108% and  late buffers.

 I always  thought that as     SampleTank   is multi channel/multi timbral it was  more efficient to load one instance of it and direct all my MIDI channels to separate channels in SampleTank.    Now it seems (I'll try it tomorrow) that the best way (in terms of the PC's multi-processing engine that is) is maybe to load a separate instance of SampleTank for every   channel, each instance handling only one channel!

This new tool has already given me a revelation! 💁‍♂️🤫

 

Edited by Skyline_UK
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44 minutes ago, Skyline_UK said:

Thanks Noel.

"If you have a single audio track (? MIDI?) feeding the synth this means that all the work is being done by a single core. "  I have one instance of SampleTank loaded and 14 separate MIDI tracks outputting to a MIDI channel each in SampleTank.  Is there a better way to set this up so that more cores are used?  E.g. more instances of SampleTank?

"One thing you can try in this use case is see if plug-in load balancing helps."  

I always have that ticked.

My PC spec should have no trouble with such a relatively small project.  It's puzzling.

 

 

The MIDI tracks themselves don't take any significant processing load. When processing the audio track is where the actual plugin processing takes place.
If you have a single synth all the processing work gets done on one core. So your PC specs wont guarantee no glitches since only a single core is being utilized. If that one core cannot complete processing (the data from all 16 MIDI tracks) then you will get late buffers and glitches. There is no way around that other than the synth doing some work on their end.

How you can utilize more cores is by creating separate SI tracks for of Sample that each handle a single part. Though this is not as memory efficient it will significantly reduce the load for any core. Also each instance of ST will be processed by a different core in parallel so it will be a lot more efficient. Try it and let me know if it solves the glitches.

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20 hours ago, D Chance Gold said:

Thanks but track inspector is not part of my work flow. Most DAW's use a track inspector to access controls for the selected track. I've never liked that paradigm. One of my favorite features of Cakewalk has always been having everything right there in the track header.

Until this feature request is implemented, you can still right-click on any instrument track header and select "Split Instrument Track" to get the separate MIDI and Audio tracks for that particular instrument. Then if you don't like the resulting extra MIDI channel strip in the Console View, you can right-click and hide them as desired.

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5 hours ago, Skyline_UK said:

Thanks Noel.

"If you have a single audio track (? MIDI?) feeding the synth this means that all the work is being done by a single core. "  I have one instance of SampleTank loaded and 14 separate MIDI tracks outputting to a MIDI channel each in SampleTank.  Is there a better way to set this up so that more cores are used?  E.g. more instances of SampleTank?

"One thing you can try in this use case is see if plug-in load balancing helps."  

I always have that ticked.

My PC spec should have no trouble with such a relatively small project.  It's puzzling.

------------------------------------------------------------

EDIT:

It seems I may have been using samplers like SampleTank incorrectly for years... 

 I tried loading two instances of  it and directing the MIDI outputs of the  MIDI tracks half to each and the crackling stopped when using 1048 samples.   I then split the load between three instances of SampleTank and could  achieve 256 samples with no crackling.    At 128 samples there was    slight crackling, an engine load of  c.108% and  late buffers.

 I always  thought that as     SampleTank   is multi channel/multi timbral it was  more efficient to load one instance of it and direct all my MIDI channels to separate channels in SampleTank.    Now it seems (I'll try it tomorrow) that the best way (in terms of the PC's multi-processing engine that is) is maybe to load a separate instance of SampleTank for every   channel, each instance handling only one channel!

This new tool has already given me a revelation! 💁‍♂️🤫

 

It's a hot topic here

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I've gone back to 2019.12 for a bit. My experience with 2020.01 included momentary buzzes during playback; at least one Dropout Code 13 when attempting to start recording; and a very odd incident of recording drums where my MIDI track suddenly sent notes to a piano VST instead of the drum VST. Never happened again but boy was that disturbing.

2019.12 has been the most stable EVER so to experience these odd quirks immediately after upgrading to 2020.01 is a bit unfortunate. I'll retry the update after I'm satisfied that 2019.12 is continuing to be as stable as it appeared to be.

Obviously if I can get a repro situation I'll log a bug report.

update Feb 4:

I've re-installed the 2020.01 update this morning. So far, so good. Obvs. I'll report back here if I encounter any problems again.

Edited by Colin Nicholls
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Apart from  making the Audio Engine dropout immediately after hitting apply/OK in preferences, everything runs smoothly after resetting the ThreadSchedulingModel value to 2.

I´m testing with ThreadSchedulingModel value to 3 and Load Balancing off, which seems to work so far.

The current 25-track project doesn´t use any software instruments, PC and Boz on all tracks and some Izotope plugins on the buses.

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4 hours ago, Steev said:

I'm REALLY liking the multi outputs on the instrument tracks!

Same here; looking forward to a fix when they all open in one folder if the folder option is chosen.

For years I have thought about a multi-timbral VSTi I have that allows for up to 19 stereo outputs.  This new feature will allow me to open up to 38 mono tracks at once. I plan to create at least one new template based on this wonderful new feature! Thanks to the devs for implementing it!!

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17 hours ago, Skyline_UK said:

Thanks Noel.

EDIT:

It seems I may have been using samplers like SampleTank incorrectly for years... 

 I tried loading two instances of  it and directing the MIDI outputs of the  MIDI tracks half to each and the crackling stopped when using 1048 samples.   I then split the load between three instances of SampleTank and could  achieve 256 samples with no crackling.    At 128 samples there was    slight crackling, an engine load of  c.108% and  late buffers.

 I always  thought that as     SampleTank   is multi channel/multi timbral it was  more efficient to load one instance of it and direct all my MIDI channels to separate channels in SampleTank.    Now it seems (I'll try it tomorrow) that the best way (in terms of the PC's multi-processing engine that is) is maybe to load a separate instance of SampleTank for every   channel, each instance handling only one channel!

This new tool has already given me a revelation! 💁‍♂️🤫

 

Depends on what you mean by more efficient :) Having a single instance is more memory efficient obviously. However its not the most CPU efficient since the DAW has no way to process each channel on a different core. If you are running into bottlenecks splitting it up into individual synths will give you a lot more CPU headroom.

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On 1/31/2020 at 11:42 AM, Terry Kelley said:

Hi Noel,

It zipped up smaller than the limit. It's attached. That was the last dump while trying to export as 44.1k/16.  Blue 6.

For fun I might uninstall and reinstall and see if the Windows 8/10 warning shows up again.

Edit: I just tried the export again and it bailed out of CbB with an empty dump file. I deleted the TW16 sampler and it exported to about 50% and bailed out. I deleted True Piano and it exported all the way to the end and then crashed with the C00000005.  Blue 7.

Another interesting detail is that a song saved just before the early release version will export fine using this updated version.

Terry

Blue 6 2020_01302020_232554.zip 723.7 kB · 1 download

Blue 7 2020_01312020_084930.zip 844.16 kB · 0 downloads

@Terry Kelley your dump files indicate heap corruption. I see that you are running outdated Microsoft runtimes for the VC redistributables.

Here are the time stamps you have:
mfc140u.dll    *C:\Windows\System32\mfc140u.dll    14.16.27024.1    11/7/2018 1:49 PM    
VCRUNTIME140.dll *C:\Windows\System32\VCRUNTIME140.dll    14.16.27024.1    11/7/2018 1:35 PM    

The ones we redistribute are from a later date so your system isn't up to date.

The versions from the Cakewalk installer are as below:
mfc14u.dll 14.20.27508.1 3/8/2019 
vcruntime.dll 14.20.27508.1 3/8/2019

Please do an install of the latest VC redists by following this link. After ensuring that you have more current versions of these files please redo the test and see if it crashes. I'm not sure if your crash issues are related but having old redist files can definitely cause crashes and other incompatibilities.

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