Massive clipping on score session

TimCox said:

Hey all, I have a score I've completed except Friday all was well, then after New Year (happy New Year to all by the way) suddenly I can't get through playback on the cues. I was running my session at a 512 buffer and I had to switch to 2048 to solve the problem.

Or so I thought.

This morning I was trying to record the stems of the final cue and even at 2048 I can't even play back anything. I'm not sure what has happened between then and now, there haven't been any updates to Windows or Digital Performer or VEP. When I looked at my usage in Task Manager my RAM is hitting 99%, so obviously that's the culprit but I can't figure out why. Why would that be happening when it wasn't before and there have been no changes to the session!

For context I'm running mostly Kontakt instruments and one instance of Play and another single instance of LABS.

My system should be plenty powerful, 64gb of ram and again, it was running totally fine at 512 last Friday.

If anyone has run into something similar I would love any advice or tips

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Happy New Year to you too!
Might be worth double checking the settings for the pre-load buffer sizes in the various players. If RAM is the bottleneck and the buffers are set pretty high, that would be the easiest potential fix.
If that doesn't solve it, I would take a look at how much RAM is being used by other applications or parts of the OS.

But maybe the RAM is at 99% usage because windows is using every free bit of memory for caching and the RAM isn't the culprit? Are you certain that the situations you have issues with now (recording stems for example) are the exact same circumstances that you have managed without issues before? Depending on how the routing and recording affects how processing gets distributed over the CPU cores, it would be conceivable that even a small change can be the reason for big performance issues. I have encountered such situations in Reaper when I record arm a certain track that then forces too many new plugins to be processed in the real-time processing thread. That interferes with balancing the load across CPU cores and can have a huge impact depending on the situation.

I don't know your DAW at all, but if the feature is available, you could try if freezing tracks one by one helps.

MartinH. said:

it would be conceivable that even a small change can be the reason for big performance issues.

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This right here.

I solved the problem and it was a weird one:

I use a PreSonus Audiobox 44VSL which means I also have PreSonus's "Universal Control" running. When I checked it, my interface wasn't there and UC was saying "no device found". I restarted and still no change so I had to re-install Universal Control and then it located the interface and all is back to normal.

What's peculiar is that Digital Performer was using the interface as normal but for some reason, oiutside of my DAW if UC isn't working then the interface seems to bottleneck everything. Not sure why but if anyone is using PreSonus stuff and suddenly has massive performance issues check Universal Control to make sure it's locating your hardware!

MartinH. said:

I have encountered such situations in Reaper when I record arm a certain track that then forces too many new plugins to be processed in the real-time processing thread. That interferes with balancing the load across CPU cores and can have a huge impact depending on the situation.

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Hi Martin,

I just went through several days of audio stuttering issues on a PC I built six months ago. Resolved the problem with some basic performance tweaks in BIOS and Windows 11 plus two apps made the most significant and immediate difference: ParkControl & Process Lasso.

Your statement above caught my interest. Is it generally a best practice regarding optimal CPU use to only record arm tracks that aren't routed to (or have inserts of) significant effects plugin chains? It hadn't occurred to me to break out whatever track I'm currently recording into so that it's routed in parallel to the mix bus of all other session tracks, which would seem to prevent the record-armed track from triggering real-time processing of its audio through the mix bus processors. Is that correct or am I off course in understanding how this works?

Thanks for any clarity!

Pete

I had a similar issue with a graphic card on one of my pcs. Suddenly Premiere couldn't playback my 4k videos. I even got a new card because of that only to find out later with a technician the problem was that Windows didn't recognize the graphic card from one day to the other anymore. The new one was a good upgrade anyway but shit can happen with Windows out of the blue I learned.

pete_crum said:

Your statement above caught my interest. Is it generally a best practice regarding optimal CPU use to only record arm tracks that aren't routed to (or have inserts of) significant effects plugin chains? It hadn't occurred to me to break out whatever track I'm currently recording into so that it's routed in parallel to the mix bus of all other session tracks, which would seem to prevent the record-armed track from triggering real-time processing of its audio through the mix bus processors. Is that correct or am I off course in understanding how this works?

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Sounds to me like you are understanding the principle correctly, but I'd be careful with treating that conclusion as a "best practice". I think the best practice is a comfortable uncomplicated workflow that works most of the time. And when you hit a wall in terms of performance you can consider re-routing for recording as a possible workaround, but I think on a 6 month old PC this probably should not be a regularly occurring thing, so you did good with finding solutions outside of your DAW first.

In Reaper you can also try activating "anticipative fx processing". I use it on these settings:

MartinH. said:

Sounds to me like you are understanding the principle correctly, but I'd be careful with treating that conclusion as a "best practice". I think the best practice is a comfortable uncomplicated workflow that works most of the time. And when you hit a wall in terms of performance you can consider re-routing for recording as a possible workaround, but I think on a 6 month old PC this probably should not be a regularly occurring thing, so you did good with finding solutions outside of your DAW first.

In Reaper you can also try activating "anticipative fx processing". I use it on these settings:

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Thanks for that tip, I'll try it. Anticipative FX processing is a Reaper option I haven't investigated before.