Topic by Jake Johnson

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  • Jake Johnson
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Topic: Problem with my system

After having a virus that led me to take out my old hard drive, put in a new one, and reinstall Windows xp and all of my other apps, including my sound drivers, I'm having a problem that seems to come from my system (Windows xp, sp2) and audio apps in general, more than from PianoTeq:

When I first load an instrument, all is fine. I can play dense chords with no problem. But after about five minutes, there is suddenly a fizzing crackle, and notes take longer and longer to sound, until finally, it takes several seconds for a note to sound at all. When I open the Task Manager, it indicates that the music app is taking up a very high amount of system resources. (Often 100%.)

I don't have any other program set up to update automatically or know of anything that can be autoloading. The same thing happens whether I'm playing a vst instrument in Cantabile (which used to have a low cpu hit on my system) or playing a standalone instrument, such as PianoTeq.

I've updated all of my drivers, audio and otherwise.

The one odd thing that I notice is that PianoTeq and other instruments seem to take up more ram than they should: the new version, with the vintage ptq and the legacy ptq copied into the Add-ons folder, but with just the default PianoTeq 3.0 piano loaded, register in the Task Manager as taking up 109, 340 Kilobytes. Is this figure correct, or is my system somehow assigning too much memory to my audio programs?

Thanks for any insights. Maddening, being able to play for five minutes, and then having this freeze.

Reply by Paul

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Re: Problem with my system

Jake Johnson wrote:

I'm having a problem that seems to come from my system (Windows xp, sp2) ...

This may not resolve your problem but a starting point may well be to upgrade your win XP to Service Pack 3. I had problems loading sw/drivers (not PT) when  I was running SP2. It's a large file, downloadable from MS, but worth getting your system up to date rather than relying on the piecemeal updates that will have happened over time.

I hope somebody can be more specific (assuming the above is not the answer).

Reply by azrael4

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Re: Problem with my system

I would think more about your hardware. Maybe the new hard drive is not working properly, or check your RAM ( maybe your local PC-dealer can check it). Was it really the virus who made you change the drive?
(MBR killer?) You could reinstall all componants again (I Know not fun)

I'm using Arcronis True Image. It helped me out of many problems. Just made the first image before I started getting anything from the internet.

I'm using SP2 and everything is fine. But I switched off many system appl. in ms-config. Also in BIOS I switched every ethernet and other  controllers of.(Bluetooth LAN etc.pp.)

http://www.heinke-aussenegg.com/

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Reply by Jake Johnson

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Re: Problem with my system

Thanks for the suggestions. Just to be safe, I went in and deleted and reinstalled the audio drivers and rechecked to make sure I've made the usual system edits for audio. With the audio drivers reinstalled, I'm no longer getting the very high latency after five minutes, but things still slow down a bit.

How do I go about eliminating drivers, etc in the bios? Pressing the hot key (which varies from maker to maker) while booting up?

Reply by azrael4

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Re: Problem with my system

Godd Question! I've got a german keyboard! There it's the "delete" key while booting up. Then you enter the bios. save your currant setup if possible (some BIOS do alow to save settings) Turn everything off you don't use. I read at the TC electronics-page about having much trouble with wireless-LAN and Bluetooth turned on. So that the audio interface (drivers) didn't perform well. I've got an audio PC with no Internet conection so I switched everything off.

Another TIP:

http://www.rme-audio.com/english/techinfo/lola.htm

http://www.heinke-aussenegg.com/

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Reply by Glenn NK

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Re: Problem with my system

When I read the OP, I thought, "his system needs tuning" which boils down to turning some things off.  I did mine four years ago, and can't remember what I did except that I don't use a screen saver or even wallpaper.  All I have is a blue screen with icons.

On another music forum I've been on for six years, some guys are so anal, they won't even have their DAW hooked up to the internet.  And they have nothing but music software.  Unfortunately not all music software is compatible with one another.

A couple of sites I know about:

http://www.homerecordingconnection.com/...amp;id=253

http://www.musicxp.net/dnn/

This second one is very good (I used it), but they now extract a very small charge to get into the tuning tips.

Hope this helps.

Glenn

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Reply by Jake Johnson

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Re: Problem with my system

A tip from the site azrael4 suggested seems to have solved the problem: greatly reducing the cache. Windows xp automatically sets it much too high for audio, and the site says to try 16 megs for the minimum and maximum. That works. Many, many thanks for the link.

On the other hand, when I shut down and start XP again, I get a message box saying that the cache file is too small, and that Windows is increasing the size. Gives me no choice. Apparently I'll have to manually edit it every time I want to play an instrument now, or at experiment until I find a size that both lets me play and is acceptable to XP.

In any case, I feel bad for having to post this request at all, just after the new release. It wasn't a PianoTeq problem at all--just a problem with all  of my audio programs.

Regardless, I'll be getting a new dual-core system and not hooking it up to the internet at all. Seems as though it's the only way to quit worrying about pop-up checkers and virus scanners and all of the rest.

Reply by EvilDragon

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Re: Problem with my system

Are you referring to swap file (virtual memory) as "cache file"? If so, I never let windows manage swap file size.

Swap file is best set up manually to at least the same size as the amount of RAM in your system. If you have 2 or 4 GB of RAM in your machine, 2 GB is considered as an optimal value.

Hard work and guts!

Reply by Jake Johnson

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Re: Problem with my system

Hm...Windows XP calls it the Paging file in the dialog box off of Control Panel\System\Advanced\Settings\Advanced. I had it set to the RAM size, but was getting the glitch.

Seems to work better for me, for audio, when set to a small size. According to the site that I took the "make it 16 megs" suggestion from, if I understood the issue correctly, the larger you make it, the more Windows will use it, even before its really needed. Thus making it small forces Windows to rely more on the ram, which for PianoTeq is fine.

Anyone else have a similar experience?

Reply by EvilDragon

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Re: Problem with my system

I'd like to have 16 GB of RAM and no page file, thank you very much (oh wishes...)

Then again, if you buy a small 4-8 GB solidstate hard drive and put it over SATA in your hard, and mount page file only on that drive, then you would essentially add 4-8 GB of RAM to your PC. The speed of those drives is just remarkable!

Hard work and guts!

Reply by Jake Johnson

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Re: Problem with my system

Since I'm thinking of getting a new system, I'm going to start a new thread asking what to look for, and avoid. Thanks for the suggestions so far.

(Are flash drives really that fast--as fast as volatile ram?)

Reply by EvilDragon

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Re: Problem with my system

Jake Johnson wrote:

Since I'm thinking of getting a new system, I'm going to start a new thread asking what to look for, and avoid. Thanks for the suggestions so far.

(Are flash drives really that fast--as fast as volatile ram?)

If by flash drives you mean USB sticks, no, they are limited by transfer speed of USB protocol. The only thing that's about the same as RAM memory is access time, which is almost instant, while a regular hard disk is in 4-10 ms range, and has spinup time, which also delays things a bit. Flash drives (this includes USB sticks and SSDs) have access times <2 ms, some even .5 ms which is extraordinary. Read speeds are in hundreds of MB, so you really wanna hook a solidstate drive with SATA to use it as it's meant to be.

Write speed is slower, but that's also effected by Windows - they aren't quite optimized for flash and solidstate drives now - they operate with larger chunks of data (whereas hard disks have small clusters, solidstate drives usually have several chips with memory cells, so memory is allocated differently). But, Windows 7 will improve the usage of SSDs in this regard.

One more neat thing when using SSD - NO MORE defragmentation! It's simply not needed, when you can catch any data chunk almost instantly accross the whole volume range!

But, there are drawbacks. SSDs are not champions in writing speed. They are getting better in this regard, though. The other issue, which is more serious, is cell wearing. Most today's SSDs can tolerate around 100-500k read-write operations per memory cell. This means that the cell gets worn out after that time. So, SSDs are actually better to have backups on them and big sample libraries (they load much faster from an SSD!), for the data that isn't constantly written (as is the infamous Windows pagefile, in fact OS is always rummaging something on the hard drive). They are excellent preservers of data, but if you want a more dynamic data storage (lots of installing, deinstalling, erasing, writing operations) - bear in mind that most SSDs would probably last for 5-10 years in peak shape, then things start to wear down slowly.

I must stop ranting now XD I could continue on, if you're interested, though.

Hard work and guts!