Monitoring Latency & Disk Load

Nod · Post by **Nod** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 6:19 pm

Got a weird issue here I was wondering if anyone else could confirm there's either a) a problem or b) that I've missed something obvious and hence a complete idiot

On projects where I'm doing serious tracking and production, ie typically in excess of 40 channels of audio (drums, vox, synths and multitracked instrumentation), I'm noticing that as the project gets larger, regardless of CPU load, I'm getting increasingly bad monitoring latency response from my VSTi's. Even with my ASIO buffers down as low as the project can smoothly run at, typically 256, I'm getting something like 100ms latency.

Now at first I thought this was merely a CPU issue - but the CPU isn't even above 50% on most projects once stuff's been frozen. I even tried loading up a fresh live set, with no audio tracks, and just added as many different VSTi with monitoring 'in' as I could until just before the CPU crapped out - but even then the monitoring latency, for a 256 buffer was correct and totally playable. Hence I'm beginning to think that heavy disk load is actually the culprit.

Can anyone help? Anyone working on projects of the same size that can test this?

Sys: WinXP SP1a, P4 2.6C, 512Mb DDR400, 120Gb SATA and 200Gb Firewire. Audiophile 24/96 PCI. Live 5.03.

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 1:58 am

i am interested in where is the best location for vsts. which of your drives are yours on? have you tried storing them on the other drive? is there any difference in performance? etc

Nod · Post by **Nod** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 6:21 pm

longjohns wrote:i am interested in where is the best location for vsts. which of your drives are yours on? have you tried storing them on the other drive? is there any difference in performance? etc

All my apps/vsts are on my fastest drive: one of the SATA partititons...ie: C:/Windoze , D:/ Live 5.03 & D:/ Live Custom Plugs. Everything is 'clean', working & defragged regularly - including the page file. The Firewire drive is partitioned in 10Gb chunks and is used to record to.

Never had any probs with disk throughput unless the song is really massive - in which case pulling it over to another completely clean partition, on the faster internal SATA drive, solves the problem. I tried your suggestion and took my VST plugs folder over to the Firewire drive - just to see if the slower drive actually made things worse or more noticeable.

Exact same result: low disk load/low used RAM,and the VSTi monitoring latency was spot on. High disk load, high RAM usage and the VSTi monitoring latency is all over the place (+100ms). To be clear I'm not talking about the MIDI recording latency - the Abe's fixed this in 5.03 so that the recording of MIDI notes was now correct. The problem I'm having is that it's all very well having that but only if I can actually hear what I'm playing

Nod · Post by **Nod** » Sat Feb 18, 2006 5:57 pm

*bump*

No-one else experienced this? Basically once I get into a high channel count scenario playing VSTi's with monitoring, even with the lowest buffers available & plenty of CPU to spare, becomes a total impossibility and your left with programming...

muthafunka · Post by **muthafunka** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 8:57 am

Very much noticed and trying to investigate http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 537#440537

genomerecords · Post by **genomerecords** » Fri Jun 29, 2007 4:02 am

Anyone ever figure out this issue? It's such a big one I'm suprised it's not at the top of the list.

I've been having to look into syncing 2 computers together just to record some guitar tracks, even though the CPU and everything is fine - just because of this wierd problem. Rewiring Live into something like ProTools for tracking would be a possible workaround, but since you can't use VSTs that's useless.