audio drop outs on beefy machine

[amiracam]

beefy enough, i7 , 12 core, 64 gb of ram , SSD for recording drive, SSD for OS

Strangely i hear it during playback and not while I'm recording.
I have my Apollo interface set a buffer of 2048, I record using Apollo's internal console , so no discernible latency.

My gut feeling is that its somehow related to real time GUI updating.

I don't seem to get this with StudioONE but I seem to be gravitating to making Reaper my one and only DAW and well this gets in the way.

BTW, I have gone thru all the online videos as to how to maximize Reaper settings for performance and I have those set but yet I still get this issue which is of course disrupting while mixing. I do have UAD plugs but I have two Satellites with a total of 12 UAD cores , plus an internal PCIe card with a Solo i.e. just in case it might be associated to UAD although its not strictly UAD plugs.

Any thoughts ?

thanks

[Fabian]

Originally Posted by amiracam

My gut feeling is that its somehow related to real time GUI updating.

Nvidia card? Nvidia's drivers have been know to interfere with real-time audio playing.

Run the Resplendence Latencymon (https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon) and see what it says.

[MiddleC]

Originally Posted by Fabian

Nvidia card? Nvidia's drivers have been know to interfere with real-time audio playing.

Really? I've had nothing but nVidia cards since I don't remember when but I've never experienced that... I'm surprised.

[Stella645]

Originally Posted by MiddleC

Really? I've had nothing but nVidia cards since I don't remember when but I've never experienced that... I'm surprised.

Yes...it's well known and measurable that Nvidia card with stock settings can cause high dpc latency. The main issue is the adaptive power saving mode. Switching to high performance is a simple tweak that may lower your dpc latency or fix spikes.

[MiddleC]

Awesome! Adjusted.

[karbomusic]

For NVIDIA it depends. It doesn't happen constantly so if you run one of the latency monitors you may have to let it run for minutes before the offending DPC call actually occurs.

I don't have much issue with it but I do think I'm slightly less performant than when I had my ATI card but I needed the NVIDIA for various reasons -but unless the project is complex enough and I'm record-arming tracks, it's a non-issue.

For the OP. It could be something like the above, but it could also be that the core the main audio thread for the sound card lives on is saturated. Meaning you could have 11 cores way under 100% and that one core hit the ceiling and the audio will glitch, because it is the audio-servicing thread. This is the one aspect of DAWs where lots of cores don't help. You can see if that's it by right-clicking reapers performance monitor window and enabling showing RT CPU, under/overruns. RT CPU = the thread handling the audio to the sound card.

[amiracam]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

For NVIDIA it depends. It doesn't happen constantly so if you run one of the latency monitors you may have to let it run for minutes before the offending DPC call actually occurs.

I don't have much issue with it but I do think I'm slightly less performant than when I had my ATI card but I needed the NVIDIA for various reasons -but unless the project is complex enough and I'm record-arming tracks, it's a non-issue.

For the OP. It could be something like the above, but it could also be that the core the main audio thread for the sound card lives on is saturated. Meaning you could have 11 cores way under 100% and that one core hit the ceiling and the audio will glitch, because it is the audio-servicing thread. This is the one aspect of DAWs where lots of cores don't help. You can see if that's it by right-clicking reapers performance monitor window and enabling showing RT CPU, under/overruns. RT CPU = the thread handling the audio to the sound card.

k, but I don't understand what would be the cure ?

[amiracam]

Originally Posted by Fabian

Nvidia card? Nvidia's drivers have been know to interfere with real-time audio playing.

Run the Resplendence Latencymon (https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon) and see what it says.

yep, I do have a nVidia card, I'm willing to switch it, its a pretty basic i.e. it just supports two monitors

[amiracam]

I found the culprit or at least a great contributor to the issue, apparently putting two Eventide SplitEQ plugs inline , pushes Reaper over the top, I had one on the main lead vox, but also had one on a Vox FX bus that was being fed from the lead vox as a send.