Topic: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

Periodically (2 or 3 times in an hour) I will hear a little crackling sound, like static when playing with Pianoteq 6.

I am running a Dell desktop computer.

8 GB RAM
640bit op. system. x64-based processor.
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40 Ghz
2 TB spinning disk Formatted with NTFS  1 TB free.

I have set my computer's power to high performance.

I have tried giving Pianoteq 6 a higher priority.

Any other ideas to help get rid of these crackles ?

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

What's your audio interface and audio settings (buffer size, sample rate)?

Hard work and guts!

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

I guess this is a Windows machine? On Linux it is important to set the CPU governor to "performance" or similar, so that the CPU always runs on full speed and avoid power saving.

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

Yeah, you do the same thing with power options and setting them to High Performance on Windows.

Hard work and guts!

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

EvilDragon wrote:

What's your audio interface and audio settings (buffer size, sample rate)?

At the moment ..... 88.2 zHz., 512 samples.

Believe me I have had it higher and lower.

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

There is a very good guide from cantabile software
for optimizing a windows machine for audio:

https://www.cantabilesoftware.com/glitchfree/

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

ddascher wrote:
EvilDragon wrote:

What's your audio interface and audio settings (buffer size, sample rate)?

At the moment ..... 88.2 zHz., 512 samples.

Believe me I have had it higher and lower.

You don't need to run things at more than 48k, honestly.

What's the audio interface? Is it built in on the motherboard, or a separate device (external over USB or whatever)? If it's integrated on the motherboard (it sure sounds like that to me), that could very well be the cause of problems - these things aren't quite made for low latency audio processing.

Last edited by EvilDragon (26-02-2018 13:59)
Hard work and guts!

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

EvilDragon wrote:
ddascher wrote:
EvilDragon wrote:

What's your audio interface and audio settings (buffer size, sample rate)?

At the moment ..... 88.2 zHz., 512 samples.

Believe me I have had it higher and lower.

You don't need to run things at more than 48k, honestly.

What's the audio interface? Is it built in on the motherboard, or a separate device (external over USB or whatever)? If it's integrated on the motherboard (it sure sounds like that to me), that could very well be the cause of problems - these things aren't quite made for low latency audio processing.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i4  with Focusrite USB ASIO driver

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

That one should have at least decent performance...

Hard work and guts!

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

EvilDragon wrote:

That one should have at least decent performance...

It does.

These glitches are very intermittent.

They could be thought to be almost random occurrences.

However, they never occur immediately after getting started and they never occur close together (within 1 minute).

One might think there is some sort of "build up" of an issue that finally results in the glitch.

I can live with it.    I just play at home, mostly for my listening pleasure only.

But, I thought I would see if anyone had "the answer".   LOL ....

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

Try running LatencyMon and see what happens when you get the glitch. Might be some driver acting up (graphics, network/wifi, power management)...

Last edited by EvilDragon (26-02-2018 16:11)
Hard work and guts!

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

I have a Windows Surface Pro that is running an external Steinberg audio card and had similar problems. I found my answer is via a website called Surface Pro Audio. There were some videos there where the gentleman who runs the website showed how to make a few registry changes and then get the processor running full time at about 98% of its capacity rate, and shut off any attempts to see if it could go to sleep. That completely helps me, and I have far less crackles and other problems.  Apparently, even when the processor looks to see if it can go to sleep or slow itself down, that causes problems playing live music.

Read my post about it here:

http://www.forum-pianoteq.com/viewtopic.php?id=5167

Perhaps your Dell is having similar issues.

- David

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

I am afraid to say it seems to be a Windows problem.
This operationel system is not 100% stable for realtime audio.
Some processes start to run some times and cause audio dropouts.
I never could correct that even after a lot of optimisation.
You could use a process monitor to try to identify what happens when these glitch occur, and then try to disable these processes. I gave up after some attempts.
If you just want to play Pianoteq, you could use a system based on Linux, way more stable than Windows. Or use a Mac

You will find a lot of posts about audio glitches en Windows,

Good luck.

Last edited by stamkorg (27-02-2018 09:35)

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

These problems seem to have become very worrying with the latest versions of Windows 10.
That's why I keep Windows 7 on my dedicated music PC.

Last edited by Gaston (27-02-2018 09:56)

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

stamkorg wrote:

This operationel system is not 100% stable for realtime audio.

Incorrect. I have zero problems with realtime audio on latest version of W10 Pro. Perfectly stable system. In fact, the most stable Windows ever. It is NOT true that you ABSOLUTELY must go to Linux or Mac for decent audio performance. That's just false.

Gaston wrote:

These problems seem to have become very worrying with the latest versions of Windows 10.
That's why I keep Windows 7 on my dedicated music PC.

W10 is actually quite a lot better for audio than W7. I get better performance than I ever could on W7, with the same audio interface.

Last edited by EvilDragon (27-02-2018 10:19)
Hard work and guts!

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

EvilDragon wrote:
stamkorg wrote:

This operationel system is not 100% stable for realtime audio.

Incorrect. I have zero problems with realtime audio on latest version of W10 Pro. Perfectly stable system. In fact, the most stable Windows ever. It is NOT true that you ABSOLUTELY must go to Linux or Mac for decent audio performance. That's just false.

Strange,
Some seem to have success with Windows, some others not.

I tried 3 soundcrads (Focusrite 6i6, Zoom UAC-2, RME HDSPe AIO) with a powerfull pc (W10 Pro, Core I5 7600k, 16Gb of RAM, SSD + separate SSD for the programs, Z270 motherboard) without success. It played well but I had some random glitches that I couldn't avoid even after hard optimisation.
Since I installed Librazik (Linux based distro), 0 audio glitches at 48Khz/64samples on the same hardware...

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

Dunno! I did nothing special. I didn't even try to do "hard optimization", as you say. It all just works very nicely. Looks like I chose very good components. Using an i7-6700K CPU over here on ASRock Z170 mobo, running at 4.5 GHz. RME UFX+ as audio interface connected via Thunderbolt - works splendid and RME drivers are the best in the industry. 64 GB of RAM, SSD drives... the usual business

Usually LatencyMon finds the culprit for dropouts: it's often a graphics card or network driver introducing too much DPC latency, which doesn't bode well for audio.

No problems running things here in whichever sample rate and buffer size I want. Glitch-free at 96k and 64 samples


My advice would be not to try TOO hard with "hard optimization". That is not really necessary with W10 anymore (like in W7 where you'd disable a great number of services to squeeze out better performance - doing the same thing doesn't yield the same benefits in W10, you just get marginally better results, it's not worth it). You may disable stuff like Cortana and so on, but it's more important to get the drivers in order rather than mess with services, and make sure that power options are at high performance, and that CPU doesn't get throttled and cores don't get parked (disabling SpeedStep and C-states in UEFI, and core parking is a registry tweak). Oh and of course: DO NOT use W10 Home, use W10 Pro and defer updates as long as possible. Or just keep the computer offline if you absolutely must.

Last edited by EvilDragon (27-02-2018 11:04)
Hard work and guts!

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

EvilDragon wrote:

Usually LatencyMon finds the culprit for dropouts: it's often a graphics card or network driver introducing too much DPC latency, which doesn't bode well for audio.

I did run LatencyMon and it did report possible issues using the same terms you mention .... network driver, DPC Latency, CPU Throttling.   I am not knowledgeable enough to attempt fixes so I will put this on the back burner until my son (computer guru) visits in a few months.     I happens very infrequently so I can live with it for now.

Thanks for your help.

Last edited by ddascher (27-02-2018 19:52)

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

I have tried Pianoteq in Windows 10 Home without any problems.
For me, although I have the pro version and my rig supports a sample rate of 192kHz, I always have at 48kHz and it sounds perfect! I use Pianoteq mainly to play live, so I rather have higher polyphony than to put a higher workload on my pc to process at high sample rates which my ears can’t reach…

Did you change the power settings so that you have your CPU always at full speed?
Win key + R then type:  powercfg.cpl and click OK.  Select High performance and then “Change plan settings”. Click on “Change advanced power settings”, go to “Processor power management”; expand “Minimum processor state” and put at 100%.

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

maybe try this.
Tweaking Windows 10 for Audio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxtkEyGih2g

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

That video was very good overview. Nothing more needs to be done on W10 - no need to mess with services etc. Just follow what that guy said and it's all good.


I will just say regarding page file: it should be 50% of the amount of RAM you have. So if you have 16 GB, set it to 8 GB. If you have 64 GB, set it to 32 GB.

Hard work and guts!

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

EvilDragon wrote:

That video was very good overview. Nothing more needs to be done on W10 - no need to mess with services etc. Just follow what that guy said and it's all good.


I will just say regarding page file: it should be 50% of the amount of RAM you have. So if you have 16 GB, set it to 8 GB. If you have 64 GB, set it to 32 GB.

thank you EvilDragon.
I have 16 GB of RAM. I set the paging file to 4096 minimum and maximum (like in the video).
are you for sure saying I should change it? (and guessing change it to 8192 for minimum and maximum?)

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

I think the suggestion is yes, and I'd be inclined to make that change to 8192 ddascher.

Not using a paging file here and seems better to me - YMMV of course.

Had noticed over time that the paging file was not utilized greatly with adequate RAM onboard - I'm often working with many tracks/instruments/samples/plugins at the same project. Have often found paging to be a part of the problem with Win glitches in DAW (not just instruments).

Other culprits might include security software, persistent "update" checking programs and things trying to phone home randomly - disallow un-needed things from starting up.

I have tried many things over time but will point to advice about not going too crazy to change system level stuff. If you know what you're doing, do it. Don't just follow every list of fixes as good as many might actually be.

Not that I like this, but as EvilDragon mentioned, hands off and defaults is probably right.

Your Win machines will probably run better if you let it do updates and run all your defrags and etc. etc. overnight at least - let the machine catch up with its own housekeeping don't just shut it down before it can check itself thoroughly and such. It's often overlooked but allowing the machine to run idle isn't time wasted, in terms of a healthy machine.

If I am too quick to shutdown after booting up (too often over a given time period) I can garantee that more odd things occur (eg. like task bar not auto-hiding and a million other boring little annoyances) but if I leave the machine UP for days and weeks (maybe hibernate here and there) there's less annoying real time hands on maintenance for me to baby sit it through.

Pianoteq Studio Bundle (Pro plus all instruments)  - Kawai MP11 digital piano - Yamaha HS8 monitors

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

Of course, don't defrag at all if all your computer has are SSDs. That'd just be not cool.

Hard work and guts!

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

Hi there,

I come back after a clean install of Windows 10 and I made all the tweaks suggested in the youtube video posted above.

I still have some crackles (not very much) every 1-2 hours.
These seem to be associated with a sudden and brief increase of CPU and Disk charge. I see that in the Task Manager.

Anyone else having this kind of trouble?
Any solution or idea?

Thanks,

SK

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

You should try to see which process is accessing the disk at those times. I'm pretty sure it's not Pianoteq, because it doesn't stream anything from the disk

Hard work and guts!

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

stamkorg wrote:

Hi there,

I come back after a clean install of Windows 10 and I made all the tweaks suggested in the youtube video posted above.

I still have some crackles (not very much) every 1-2 hours.
These seem to be associated with a sudden and brief increase of CPU and Disk charge. I see that in the Task Manager.

Anyone else having this kind of trouble?
Any solution or idea?

Thanks,

SK

I have some older PC and sure "something" happens "sometimes". Yes, some crackles. Unless they happen once every minute I don't bother. I suspect Google Chrome having some activity, or some Windows services, checking updates, whatever. You may want to try to disable your Ethernet controller.

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

Evildragon and AKM,
Thanks,

I identified a process called "Windows modules installer worker" starting to run sometimes and causing high cpu and disk use.
After some research, it seems to be related to windows updates. It is strange that this process starts even with the wifi and ethernet off...
So, I switched the windows updates process from automatic to manual.
I hope this solves my problem.
We will see.

SK

Last edited by stamkorg (18-03-2018 10:50)

Re: Crackling during play of Pianoteq 6

Sounds to me like a frequency throttling issue (your CPU switching frequencies to cope with demand). Best if you can set this in BIOS: turn turbo boost off and turn intel speed-up off (intel speed-up is a misnomer, it's actually intel slow-down). If you cannot do that in BIOS you will have to do it in software. Sorry, I don't know how to do that in Windows.

3/2 = 5