Audio glitches and droputs when zoomed in Piano Roll and Track Views

[pinguinotuerto]

Hi,

I have a problem that I've experienced on and off for years (since Sonar) and am wondering if there's a setting I can change to alleviate this.  I'm still on a Win 7 core i7 machine with an Nvidia graphics card and a Line 6 UX8 interface that work very well until this issue starts happening. After I have let's say, more than 15 tracks with plugins and soft synths, and I start editing audio or midi, I start getting glitches in the audio after I zoom in to either be able to see the waveforms or midi notes and make edits. Once I hit play again the glitches start happening, so it seems to be related to graphics/video.  After that, even if it starts playing without glitches again, if I open the EQ of the Pro Channel or a graphics intensive plugin like TRacks stuff, the glitches get worse while the EQ or plugin are up on the screen. My performance meters don't show anything above 60% either for disk or memory usage and if I disable all plugins I have no glitches. Sometimes I'll come back to the same project another day, and it plays back fine or at least better. I've tried increasing buffer sizes, but that doesn't help much. Wondering if there's something I can tweak in Win 7 to help. Maybe something in the video memory/cache that needs to be cleared?  Thanks in advance. 

[pinguinotuerto]

Bumping this up in the hopes someone may have some ideas as to what the problem could be. 

[David Baay]

Does sound graphics-related and will therefore not be familiar to any user who isn’t on very similar hardware. I don’t really have any good ideas myself.

[Starship Krupa]

I've had this sort of thing happen on older systems with certain plug-ins that have animated displays but that don't take advantage of OpenGL or DirectX to render the display. This leaves it up to the CPU (by way of the audio engine) to do the display rendering.

The sure sign is that when I close the plug-in UI, I stop getting so many dropouts. Sometimes, it seems like they don't even stop their CPU eating when I close the UI.

The only solution I know of is the same as with any other resource-hungry plug-in: disable them one by one until you find the one(s) that's eating the resources.

As far as tuning your system to be more tolerant....the usual. Experiment with plug-in load balancing, extra plug-in bufs, etc.

[pinguinotuerto]

Makes total sense. Wondering if there's a setting to force those plugins to not use the cpu and use the Nvidia chip. The video card has some open GL settings, but nothing made a difference. Probably because like you said, the plugins don't take advantage of OpenGL. I'll give Waves a call. Also happens with IK Multimedia plugs like T-racks and Addictive drums. 

[Canopus]

3 hours ago, pinguinotuerto said:

Makes total sense. Wondering if there's a setting to force those plugins to not use the cpu and use the Nvidia chip. The video card has some open GL settings, but nothing made a difference. Probably because like you said, the plugins don't take advantage of OpenGL. I'll give Waves a call. Also happens with IK Multimedia plugs like T-racks and Addictive drums. 

I don’t know about Waves or IKM, but as for XLN Audio all their products have a setting called “Use OpenGL acceleration” which can be turned on or off. You can reach that setting through the Hamburger menu in the top-right corner of each plug-in and choose “UI Scaling and Settings” (in XO called “Settings”).

Edited December 17, 2022 by Canopus

[pinguinotuerto]

Thanks, Canopus. I already tried with it on and off, and it didn't make a difference, but I think I'll look at my Nvidia settings too and try again. 

[pinguinotuerto]

The culprit seems to be AD2 after I've added a certain number of plugins to my project. If I freeze it my issues resolve. Wondering if there's another way without freezing it, but if not, at least I have a work-around. It doesn't happen unless I start getting plugin happy, so it's not that AD2 always causes this issue.