Having lots of dropouts. Time for upgrade or am I using too much crap in my project? ?

[Myriad Rocker]

So I'm getting lots and lots of dropouts. On my current song, which I'm hoping to use it as a mix template of sorts going forward, I have quite a bit going on in terms of plugs.  I have Melodyne on about 4 vocal tracks as region fx. Looks to me like it instantiates one instance per track, so I figure it's 4 instances. 

Then I have about 4 instances of Brainworx SSL channel going as well as a bunch of Slate stuff for virtual channels, EQ, compression, etc. Then the busses have some delays for sends, verb, etc. Then some glue compression on busses. Master buss has a whole mastering chain going with compression, EQ, and other special sauce. 

This all seemed to really go down hill when I added Scheps Parallel Particles to my master buss. It's a recent purchase and I wanted to use it mostly for the harmonics section. But I assume that it's fairly process intensive due to the parallel nature of all the stuff it's doing. 

Now I'm not saying that it's all the fault of the Scheps plug. It's definitely the culmination of everything. I can certainly get more detailed with what I'm using if you guys like, but I didn't want to bore anyone to death. 

My current PC is a 10 year old i7 with 32GB of ram. I've been told that should be perfectly fine since it's still an i7. But I almost feel like I'm pushing this thing to its limits and I don't feel like I'm asking too much from it. Maybe I am. 

So I guess my post is two fold. Am I undersized for what I'm trying to do or do I have unreasonable expectations regardless of specs?  Additionally, are there things I could be doing to make things more efficient?  Do I need to bounce all the Melodyne things? I'd like to avoid freezing tracks, but I can't give a good reason why. I just feel like I should be able to do what I'm trying to do. 

Thanks!

Edited September 21, 2021 by Myriad Rocker
Typo

[scook]

Dropouts generate a toast message with a code and a link to the help. This may be useful in diagnosing the cause of the dropouts.

As a rule, committing Region FX clips ASAP  is a good idea. 

If one is unsure of the Region FX changes, archive a copy of the original track. Then there is something to fall back to if the Region FX changes need to be undone.

 

[Rickddd]

1. Freezing tracks is a bit of time and work, but it's the only thing that will flatline track demands. I have a pretty high computer, 32 Gig I-9700 running on SSD's, and I have to resort to freezing rather quickly normally.  My current song data is also on an SSD.   

2. If you use the "Upsample" feature for 64 bit vst's, I keep mine at upsample on render only.  Never upsample on playback.

3.  Be strategic about how you apply "common elements"  like reverb.  Having a single reverb bus and using a send (while adjusting how much signal is sent from any calling track) can reduce VST load, and has the advantage of have one unified "voice" instead of many.

4.  Definitely, some VST's are much more resource intensive than others.  For me, I like to use Waves Abby Road Plates a lot and that drags my system down quickly; so I think long and hard before I use it.  Again, freezing can be your friend.  

5.  I'd much rather freeze a melodyne track then bounce it for obvious reasons.

6.  Shutting off all effects ("FX" button") of course will often make a mix sound a lot different, but you can turn on the effects for specific tracks, thereby reducing load.

7. Sometimes, when I have pushed my system to it's limit despite freezing tracks... OR if I want to add additional tracks while having FULL FIDELITY... I will output the song as is, create a new project, and have that file pulled in the new project.  I then can add whatever I want in full glorious fidelity, and then have to bring it into the original project.  It is a multi-step approach, but it does get around any resource limitations.

 

Hope this helps.

Edited September 21, 2021 by Rickddd

[Myriad Rocker]

23 hours ago, scook said:

Dropouts generate a toast message with a code and a link to the help. This may be useful in diagnosing the cause of the dropouts.

As a rule, committing Region FX clips ASAP  is a good idea. 

If one is unsure of the Region FX changes, archive a copy of the original track. Then there is something to fall back to if the Region FX changes need to be undone.

 

Thanks.  It's the "1" code, which is the audio processing taking longer than buffer.  I'm already set at max in the RME settings.  I also rendered all of my Melodyne Region FX and that helped a bit.  Still getting the drop outs.  Read it might be auto saving.  I turned that off but it didn't help.  Checked fragmentation on the disk.  It's 0% fragmented. 

I do have an antivirus (AVG) running in the background, but I don't wanna disable that.  And it's never caused issues before.  I don't really have any other background processes running.  Waves Server deal and BandLab Assistant.  That's pretty much it.

So I guess I'm just simply at...I'm using too many damn plugins and need to upgrade if I want more power.

I may try the solution of saving as a bundle file and then re-opening and saving again as a cwp.  I'm skeptical that would do much, but never know I suppose.

[Jacques Boileau]

16 minutes ago, Myriad Rocker said:

Thanks.  It's the "1" code, which is the audio processing taking longer than buffer.  I'm already set at max in the RME settings.  I also rendered all of my Melodyne Region FX and that helped a bit.  Still getting the drop outs.  Read it might be auto saving.  I turned that off but it didn't help.  Checked fragmentation on the disk.  It's 0% fragmented. 

I do have an antivirus (AVG) running in the background, but I don't wanna disable that.  And it's never caused issues before.  I don't really have any other background processes running.  Waves Server deal and BandLab Assistant.  That's pretty much it.

So I guess I'm just simply at...I'm using too many damn plugins and need to upgrade if I want more power.

I may try the solution of saving as a bundle file and then re-opening and saving again as a cwp.  I'm skeptical that would do much, but never know I suppose.

Anti-virus, at least on my PC, take a non negligible bite in CPU cycles.

You may want to try disabling your anti-virus on specific folders you know are safe. Of course you must be careful, there is some danger excluding folders to virus scans. If you are not comfortable, you should not do it.

Personally I have also excluded the Cakewalk folder, VST folders, Sound content folders. What I do if I install a new version of Cakewalk is run the anti-virus on that folder just after the install. Same with the VST folder when I install a new VST. For me it has made quite a difference. Cakewalk loads much faster, VST scans are much faster, loading a project is much faster and I have more CPU when I mix.

[Myriad Rocker]

15 hours ago, Jacques Boileau said:

Anti-virus, at least on my PC, take a non negligible bite in CPU cycles.

You may want to try disabling your anti-virus on specific folders you know are safe. Of course you must be careful, there is some danger excluding folders to virus scans. If you are not comfortable, you should not do it.

Personally I have also excluded the Cakewalk folder, VST folders, Sound content folders. What I do if I install a new version of Cakewalk is run the anti-virus on that folder just after the install. Same with the VST folder when I install a new VST. For me it has made quite a difference. Cakewalk loads much faster, VST scans are much faster, loading a project is much faster and I have more CPU when I mix.

I disabled AVG in a test.  It might have made a slight difference.  I wasn't getting any full fledged drop outs but was getting some significant stuttering.  That may also have been the fact that I was on a fresh start up of the computer.

[Noel Borthwick]

21 hours ago, Myriad Rocker said:

Thanks.  It's the "1" code, which is the audio processing taking longer than buffer.  I'm already set at max in the RME settings.  I also rendered all of my Melodyne Region FX and that helped a bit.  Still getting the drop outs.  Read it might be auto saving.  I turned that off but it didn't help.  Checked fragmentation on the disk.  It's 0% fragmented. 

I do have an antivirus (AVG) running in the background, but I don't wanna disable that.  And it's never caused issues before.  I don't really have any other background processes running.  Waves Server deal and BandLab Assistant.  That's pretty much it.

So I guess I'm just simply at...I'm using too many damn plugins and need to upgrade if I want more power.

I may try the solution of saving as a bundle file and then re-opening and saving again as a cwp.  I'm skeptical that would do much, but never know I suppose.

Are the dropouts actually impacting your work or is the message and audio stopping bothering you?
If so you can turn off the dropout detection here:

[Myriad Rocker]

1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Are the dropouts actually impacting your work or is the message and audio stopping bothering you?
If so you can turn off the dropout detection here:

That's hard to answer a bit. They were to the point where when they started to occur, I could only get about 5 more seconds of play back before another happened. That's pretty impactful. At this point, after rendering all my region fx, I'm only getting them every minute or so. It just interrupts critical listening at this point. 

Im not sure what that setting does that you're pointing out, but I can try it and see.