Popping, skipping, freezing. (Not an MX issue)

[MikeDVI]

Hi all,

When using MX on more "demanding" songs, IE lots of tracks, clips, melodyne on multiple tracks, mix of midi and real instruments, all of that, PC likes to act up by popping, skipping, and (seldom, but sometimes) freezing up for like one second during playback and recording, so I have learned to disable a bunch of stuff for sessions.

Please see my system specs in sig if you want.

What I do prior to recording:

PC is taken offline. It is hardwired, so WIFI is off as well, bluetooth off.
Screen saver off
All USB set to stay on.
High power mode, where nothing goes to sleep etc.
Disable Antivirus (Malwarebytes in my case) and windows protection.
Disable auto scans for update in programs like adobe, dell updater, more
I am not running RAIR or any real time backups.


I really have nailed most of the problems but wanted to see if anyone else has any specific things they are aware of that I might not have thought of?

Askling, as I still occasionally battle this, and although it is not bad enough to mess up a session badly, it has thrown invited vocalists and players off at times. Task Manager does not show much but I do try to monitor things when this happens.


Thanks as always - Mike

[Ray Cube]

Higher sample and bit rates tend to tax systems more.
How many tracks typically do you use when running into trouble?
Do you freeze any tracks using MIDI instruments or effects in the channel? They can be unfrozen if further work is required.
If you first reopen a project, try playing it through once before you start work on it again, as I also tend to get the odd hiccup on the first play through but I think playing it through must load an amount of the data required to ram.
I find ticking the 'Keep cursor centred during playback' can be problematic playback wise.
Make sure there is plenty of spare room on the C: drive for the program to write and read temp files it will produce during editing.
Are your sample rates and bit depths set the same with the interface and Mixcraft?
I am finding large projects frequently use more than 10GBs of ram even with most other stuff not running.

[zakk]

It's often not a DAW problem but a PC problem. It got a lot better with Win11 but is usually more problematic when you're on laptop.
A few main suspects usually are asio drivers, graphics card drivers, battery services (when you're on laptop). Also c-states of your CPU can also create problems.

What you could/should do is download little free utility called "latencymon" and use it - there you can find if there's something causing problems.

[Ray Cube]

It's often not a DAW problem but a PC problem. It got a lot better with Win11 but is usually more problematic when you're on laptop.
A few main suspects usually are asio drivers, graphics card drivers, battery services (when you're on laptop). Also c-states of your CPU can also create problems.

What you could/should do is download little free utility called "latencymon" and use it - there you can find if there's something causing problems.

Hi Zak.
If you look at the computer specs it's a tower case not a laptop. It's a very similar system to my own. The nvidia card he has is almost as capable as my own and not I think a problem of itself other than the way Mixcraft seems to use graphics capabilities of the GPUs. I haven't even bothered with configuring the USB ports or drives to remain on in my system. There is no discernable activity of any drives once a project is loaded and played.

Mixcrft performance.jpg (491.41 KiB) Viewed 1026 times

It hasn't been of benefit personally. There could be something in not having the drivers not up to date for the audio and video interfaces but from the video side of things they would have to be over a year out of date. Not sure about the audio interface drivers.
All my drivers on my system are kept up to date due to the amount of Video editing I do and yet I can still can get problems on lager projects with mixcraft when reaching 60 tracks of audio or more and I don't tend to run tons of plugins or vst instruments. They can be real processing hogs left in use in real time. Also I find using the 'Copy files to new folder' and running the project from the new folder which would include any audio files produced from freezing tracks (along with any vst's running) to be of benefit. Using two monitors can put a strain on the graphics card and I find best to put one monitor on the nvidia card and the other to use the inboard Intel HD 630.

Mixcrft performance 2.jpg (901.37 KiB) Viewed 1026 times

I will look for your recommendation of getting latencymon to see if it tells me anything I haven't thought of.
[Edit] Odd site, lots of download buttons none of which appear to lead to the software.

Ray.

[jwarv]

One thing I've noted is, if too many tracks have Melodyne on them simultaneously, sparks begin to fly. Finalizing as many tracks as possible might mitigate some of that. I've recently had issues that I can easily trace to Melodyne. She gets fidgety and turns into a gremlin.

[MikeDVI]

Some great tips here everyone! Too many things to quote but...

Ray Cube:

Normally at about 30+ tracks the issues starts. Not every song tho and very dependant on things like melodyne tracks, multiple midi tracks of the same VST (IE - Superior drummer drum track, superior drummer latin instrument track) that sort of thing.

On freezing tracks, I need to get going on that. As a track hoarder, I do not delete tracks such as scratch VOX, and instruments that end up not wanted in the song but move them to the "bottom" of the track list and mute. There have definitely been times closeting this stuff has paid off by stealing clips from old takes. But, again, in reality those should be frozen. Not to mention customers change their minds alot (shock) - - OK, so do I

Root drive is about 65%, I have a new 4 T SS drive sitting here but have not gotten it installed yet

My sample rate etc are set to 44.1 Block 512, MX shows latency of 11.6 ms. -- Sample and bit are the same.

jwarv - agreed, on melodyne I have noticed that also - the more tracks that have it, the harder to tame. I just upgraded to 5 studio, that opened a whole 'nother can of worms. There is another thread going on about that.



zakk - Going to look into latencymon! And I do agree this is a pc/os issue, not MX. So much crap running in the background and asking for interrupts.



LAST SIDE NOTE: I have the Duck Duck Go browser installed and noticed it is always jumping around in the processes.

Mike

[Ray Cube]

Yeah, I think if you are having to use Melodyne a lot that may be at the base of the problem. That's going to be using a lot of CPU processing.
What does Task Manger show on CPU usage?

[zakk]

I haven't done big projects in Mixcraft yet and I probably won't in near future (because of lack of detailed zooming into waveform and some other quirks I don't like, I wrote here about Mixcraft misbehaving with plugins on my system with multi monitors, also there were sidechaining problems) but I do like to use it for fast ideas testing (I don't have Ableton Live so that's a nice substitute).
Reading your posts I start to think that it can in fact be a Mixcraft problem and not the windows problem. Because if you do a lot of video editing and everything is fine than DAW should work even better. Hmmm…

Latencymon is a well known utility and worth checking because it can show conficts in the system. If latencymon shows no problems and yet Mixcraft is still misbehaving than it's probably Mixcraft fault. But testing with latencymon should be a first thing to do.

Also Nvidia had problems with their drivers which conflicted with real-time audio, please take a look at this blog post from plugin creator Bluecat Audio:
https://www.bluecataudio.com/Blog/tip-o ... n-windows/

One can start Mixcraft in "high priority" mode (can be set in Task Manager or via simple startscript), but I think Mixcraft by default uses its sound engine in "high priority". Also testing WASAPI and Asio and maybe Asio4all or FlexAsio if that makes a difference.

In general I think that unfortunatelly on windows all Daws need a bit of system tweaking.

[MikeDVI]

I tried some of the other tips here with good results. The most noticeable improvement was made by freezing tracks, and also letting the song play through once after loading it up before starting to mouse around. I also disabled, then completely unplugged my usb computer speakers. Normally I just disabled the onboard sound. Not much difference but every little things can add up.

A couple folks mentioned 2 monitors, which I have. At this point I am trying to avoid going to one but plan to test this with my most challenging song. Still working on Latencymon and high priory startup. Been too busy on a project to dig further. Will though!

Overall, things are definitely improved with the tricks above, skips are reduced and go by pretty quick. Hope things stay that way!

Side Note - - I am very suspicious of my audio interface since it is old, and the software is outdated. That might be my next step...


Thanks everyone for jumping in, it is greatly appreciated!

Mike

[Ray Cube]

I tried some of the other tips here with good results. The most noticeable improvement was made by freezing tracks, and also letting the song play through once after loading it up before starting to mouse around. I also disabled, then completely unplugged my usb computer speakers. Normally I just disabled the onboard sound. Not much difference but every little things can add up.

A couple folks mentioned 2 monitors, which I have. At this point I am trying to avoid going to one but plan to test this with my most challenging song.

I don't remember you saying anything about using usb speakers before. I have never used those, just a normal external amp / speaker arrangement. So I have no experience with such a setup or know what possible effect it could have to comment.

As for using two monitors. If you have both plugged into your nvidia card try plugging one into the motherboards monitor output and having it activate the CPU's HD 630 graphics chip. It's quite a capable CPU running a normal monitor and will help having the additional 3D rendering processing power to share the 3D graphics burden while running a project in Mixcraft.
I've also been playing around with some of Mixcraft's settings and found turning one of the settings off that is normally set to on by default on the program and the playback performance has improved slightly.

Use high priority.jpg (64.5 KiB) Viewed 862 times

It really looks like it should be turned on but my projects seem to run better with it off. Your mileage may vary but you have the same amount of processing cores as I do. It may be worth trying. The main difference I noticed while playing the project and using Task Manager to monitor performance was with that setting turned off more data was transferred directly to be read by the ram. I personally find that to be a good thing. Maybe that setting is supposed to help systems with less ram available, I don't know. but the amount of extra data loaded to ram for the same project was around 4GBs.

before and after.jpg (195.45 KiB) Viewed 862 times

I finally found the correct site for the LatancyMon app which is www.respendence.com but seems a bit of a chocolate teapot in use. By that I mean if you give it a project that plays OK to monitor it tells you your system is lovely and can cope. Give it a project that doesn't play nicely and it tells you the opposite with suggestions of altering settings including possibly one or two in the bios, which unless you are very computer savvy I personally would not suggest touching.

Chocolate teapot 1.jpg (518.91 KiB) Viewed 862 times

These are just my personal observations concerning what I see using my projects on my computer. They may help or not.

Ray.

[dstebbins]

Just throwing it out there, I had one track that constantly popped when I rendered it to mp3. Was random, but always seemed to occur at the same place in a measure. Several times during the song, but not every instance of that bass guitar/line.

Took me a while to figure it out, but I had tweaked one bass note higher than I should have in melodyne and that was causing the pops. Brought it back down to a reasonable level +3.0db, and the popping has stopped (glad I caught that I typed "pooping" before hitting submit).

Maybe volume automation in some areas was kicking it just over the threshold and that's why I just heard it now and then?