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Serum 2 - bad glitching


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Any Serum 2 users here?

Does it work OK?
I just bought it and it glitches badly. Freezed track plays fine but live input not so. I have tried to change various MIDI related settings in preferences but they do not change anything. All other synths work just fine.

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18 hours ago, Panu Pentikäinen said:

Any Serum 2 users here?

Does it work OK?
I just bought it and it glitches badly.

I tried the trial of Serum 2 here and it glitched badly here as well.  

I put it down to my older PC - even though, UVI Falcon 3.1.1 , Latest AAS synths (including the known CPU hog, Chromophone 3), Eastwest Opus, Kontakt 7 Full, all Arturia  synths, IKM Sampletank 4.......  well you get the picture.... all work well on my old rig.

..... ok, so maybe Serum 2 is a major CPU hog.

I uninstalled Serum 2 trial.

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CPU hog or not, Serum 2 glitches if preset is complicated. Simple presets work just fine.

CPU usage is not high in Sonar's performance module nor in Windows Taskbar, though.

I was able to reduce glitching by setting Quality to 'Good' (other alternatives: 'Best', 'Ultra' if I remember correctly) and disabling smoothing (or whatever that is) but complicated presets are still glitching.

Unfortunately I already purchased it.

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11 minutes ago, Panu Pentikäinen said:

Unfortunately I already purchased it.

Yeah that is a bit of a bummer....

Well this is the first release of version 2.  Maybe XREF will get the memo and refine the engine....

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5 minutes ago, Panu Pentikäinen said:

Other users have performance issues, too:

Some of those CPUs kick some serious derriere, and even they are having issues with Serum 2. 

Don't XREF have a BETA program that should have picked up these issues?

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Seems fine here , I've not come across any patches that cause it to glitch.

CPU use is on the higher side for sure . Some of the complex patches consume 20- 30% Engine load at 128 sample buffer playing 3 -5 notes 

( Ryzen 5950x - 16core + RME Babyface ) 

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My PC has 8 cores, 16 logical processors, running at 4.75 GHz and it's glitching.  Audio interface is RME UFX II, ASIO buffer 128-512 (same result with the largest buffer)
This is simply bad quality control from the synth manufacturer.

I tested disabling Plug-In Load Balancing - no help.

 

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"Serum 2 was built with quality in mind. Unfortunately it does have a cost. and requires a modern processor. You can set quality to Good on the global page. You can enable S1 compatibility. If you load Serum 1 presets you should see performance on par with Serum 1. We will look for further optimizations in the future however things have really been aggressively optimized, so a machine upgrade will probably be inevitable if you want to use a lot of voices."

Source: https://xferrecords.com/forums/serum/cpu-use-is-extreme-on-older-intel-processors-but-very-workable-updated-information

 

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2 hours ago, Panu Pentikäinen said:

My PC has 8 cores, 16 logical processors, running at 4.75 GHz and it's glitching.  Audio interface is RME UFX II, ASIO buffer 128-512 (same result with the largest buffer)
This is simply bad quality control from the synth manufacturer.

I tested disabling Plug-In Load Balancing - no help.

 

Have you tried a lower sample rate with the oversampling turned off in serum and Sonar? 

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Sonar: oversampling off. My sample rate is always 48k.
Serum 2 oversampling: I have selected the 'worst' option already.

I tried to tweak some buffer settings in  Sonar preferences but they do nothing for the issue.  The synth is obviously not compatible with older Intel CPUs.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Found the same here:

Serum 2 is unusable with my dual Xeon 8176... INIT patch works fine, but with more complexity there are constant audio engine dropouts. 

Cursory googling led me to compatibility issues with "some Intel" processors. 

Hope they get a fix!

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6 hours ago, shane said:

Serum 2 is unusable with my dual Xeon 8176... INIT patch works fine, but with more complexity there are constant audio engine dropouts. 

Cursory googling led me to compatibility issues with "some Intel" processors. 

Hope they get a fix!

Yes, especially for a $AU412 synth (MSRP).

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On 3/27/2025 at 4:13 AM, Promidi said:

Some of those CPUs kick some serious derriere, and even they are having issues with Serum 2

LOL. Great way to put it.

When you mentioned it, I thought "maybe drop $35 on a used i7-4770" and then I read the first several XFer forum posts and thought "maybe this is one of those developers who doesn't optimize and test enough on Windows," and THEN I saw: "I'm getting the same thing on my M3 Max MacBook Pro...."

"Not enough gun" is not the issue. I see in the system requirements that he doesn't even have a minimum processor requirement.

Released too soon?

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20 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

"Not enough gun" is not the issue. I see in the system requirements that he doesn't even have a minimum processor requirement.

Released too soon?

Or maybe no effective BETA program.   If they do have a BETA program, how could such issues have got past an effective BETA team?

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8 hours ago, Promidi said:

Or maybe no effective BETA program.   If they do have a BETA program, how could such issues have got past an effective BETA team?

Indeed, I originally mentioned that but then deleted it 'cause I wanted to keep things brief.

Does it look like every Serum user is having these bad glitching problems, though?

Even with the very best BETA team in the world, if a soft synth is causing a problem, but only a small percentage of the team is seeing the issue, and the developers are also among those who aren't seeing it, it can be a challenge to get the problem fixed. Even if the symptom is worse than glitching on complex patches.😉

The ones who are having issues need to speak up on that forum and keep doing so, make sure that the developer doesn't forget about it. Sometimes it takes being a bit of a pain in the A|A|S (so to speak).

(when I first saw this topic title, my mind distinguished between "bad" glitching, and "good" glitching, and it made me wonder how Glitchmachines, Freakshow Industries, and Unfiltered Audio manage to test their products, like "it obliterated the sound completely" is a goal with a lot of their products, not a defect. "Actual behavior: source audio sounds wider and richer while retaining its character. Expected behavior: audio should sound like it passed through a tesseract and was inaccurately recovered.")

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weird sidenote; finding: 

This week I miraculously cured a BSOD error by downgrading my firewire card driver to the legacy version, and voila: no more BSOD or other random errors. 

Going back OT, I realized Serum is somehow working BETTER than it was before. I still get audio dropouts with complex presets, but its totally usable if I just make sounds instead of scrolling through presets. I haven't been able to tell yet, but it may be the complexity of the effects; I cannot get a dry sound to cause dropouts at all.

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On 4/12/2025 at 9:13 AM, shane said:

I still get audio dropouts with complex presets, but its totally usable if I just make sounds instead of scrolling through presets. I haven't been able to tell yet, but it may be the complexity of the effects; I cannot get a dry sound to cause dropouts at all.

I'm actually not a Serum user, but I've also experienced similar with other companies' factory presets. A|A|S for example, like to drench their factory sounds in long-tailed reverb, and I noticed on my older lower-spec laptop that if I just turned off the reverb and used a 3rd-party reverb that they could play all day at lower latency without causing clicks and pops.

This was one of my motivations for buying Chromaphone and Ultra Analog VA licenses: I wanted to be able to turn off the reverb. Otherwise, using the soundpacks with A|A|S Player would be fine, as I seldom do any patch editing in them other than turning off the reverb.

I can't blame manufacturers for baking so many FX into the factory patches. I noticed after I installed the most recent version of MinimogueVA that it sounded kind of unexciting, then it occurred to me to put the simplest chorus, kHs Chorus on it to give them some stereo width. Bang! It started to sound uh-MAY-zing. So I've become used to factory patches being made HUGE through (over?) use of FX, despite the fact that I often disable them in actual use.

Maybe Xfer switched to a reverb algo that's more expensive in terms of processing power. Def. let them know if turning off the reverb makes the problem go away.

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