How much does your cards perfrom?

petri

Hi!

I´m a little curious about how much a SBLive, Audigy etc. with KX drivers can "perfrom". I know this is a very difficult question to answer because all systems are so different but any hints would be helppful.

Im running an original SB Live with the latest KX drivers on a Intel Pentium 4, 2,4ghz cpu with 1gb ram and new modern fast IDE-drives.

I´m using Windows XP and mainly Logic 5.5.

Usually I make music with just one software sampler for drums and quite a lot of audiotracks, mainly just for songwriting (as opposed to actual song recording) but a while ago I did some more serious recordings where I used 24-30 tracks of audio and mayby 30-45 plugins and a LOT of mixing automation.

I was quite suprised how well this worked. In the end as the song grew "bigger" I hade to bounce a few tracks. I had to set the latency to 21ms for it to be able to work. If I had it lower it would crackle and make unwanted noises.

Right now I´m working on a song where I´m at the moment using (only?) 5 different softwaresynths and 8 tracks of audio and I get a lot of crackle. Does this seem normal or should I be able to use more stuff?

Now to my (stupid) questions: Is it that the lower the latency is set, the "harder" it is for the soundcard to work? How much of the "power" I have got is related to the soundcard and how much to the CPU or memory.

I know it´s also very dependent how Windows is set. Right now I have standard settings, and yes, I do have backgound processes going such as antivirus, ICQ and stuff like that. But I also have a different startup-partition with another version of WinXP that I can start when I want to work more seriously and that one is totally clean of everything apart from the KX drivers, Logic, the plugins and software synths but quite frankly there´s no big difference (if any) in performance.

So if go out and buy another soundcard which is 5 times more expensive than the soundblaster, will it give me more "power" for more tracks and synths or is it mainly dependent on the CPU? (Though my computer isn´t the latest it still feels fairly new but compared to my friend who uses a MAC G4, he can run 10 times as much stuff on his machine)

What is your experience?


Thanks a lot

Petri

dj_stick

the lower the latency is set, the faster the sound data has to get to the card… if it is too small the card runs out of sound data and stops, causing clicks and pops
and as for buying a better card, that will not reduce the latency at all as it is due to the CPU, memory and PCI bus speeds and available bandwidth.

dj_stick

another tip for low latency… in the system control panel, under the advanced tab, click settings under the performance heading, go to the advanced tab, and set the computer to be optimised for background services, as that is what ASIO is. i hope that helps you.

ROBSCIX

When you say clean partition, Did you turn off ALL non esential background services? XP By default runs alot of them.... XP is a nice system but you need to take off the training wheels. I optimized mine for audio a long time ago. You don't need a seperate boot partition. You can set a different hardware profile. Then go through services, turn off everything you don't need.....themes, help&support..blah..blah, when you are done and you log into that new hardware profile...you will notice a difference. Try turning off extra ports, defrag the disks, get a memory manager...when XP is tweaked properly it runs great. As far as your freind goes with the Mac, I used to work for apple, I would never,EVER trade my machine for a mac.....
you can check toher audio forums, search engines, Xp Optimization for audio...has been talked about man,many times..hope that helps..

petri

Hi!

Thanks to Dj Stick and Robscix!

The thing with optimizing for background processes instead of programs helped a little. What does suffer from that though? Will e.g. calculating an image in Photoshop be slower?

And, no I havn´t really turned everthing off in XP, I think I did only set down the graphic hardware acceleration, but I will give it a try.

So again, thanks!

Petri

thomasabarnes

When you do music production, select background services, when youre doing anything else select programs. All you have to do is switch between the two.

Sincerely, thomasabarnes

miguel

in logic you should only enable as many ins and outs as you need. that's key to high performance. Also some of the emagic instruments are just as cpu hungry as their HQ sound indicates. Check that you're not running out of cpu, because no audio card (well maybe creamware, protoolsHD) can save you from running aout of cpu cycles