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Getting the most out of your DAW?


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So I have a pretty nice computer IMO, definately capable of producing. Its an AMD Athlon 64 Dual-core 4200+, 2 GB of RAM, and an Audiophile 24/96 sound card, yet I always seem to have trouble with my CPU levels in Sonar. Anyone know why this might be happening? When running one instance of Kontakt in Sonar with the Steinway D piano preset that came with it the CPU meter will leap up to 100% whenever I hit even 3 notes at once. Do I have to do something to run both cores at once? Are there some tips on how to free up some SPU and RAM?

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I'm going to try and youtube that amazing PC optimization video that we watched at norg's place.

"Yeaugh, now ama get into some o' dis complicated ass shit, so if ya'll muthafuckas don wanna fuck up yo shit, be careful. So first, we gonsta type in regedit...."

But make sure you've configured Sonar to use only the drivers you want to use. Kontakt is a CPU hog, maybe the reverb/EQ/etc. settings on the presets you're loading are too much for Sonar. Yes, I know I said SONAR and not your CPU. Fact of the matter is, when I was using Sonar, I had a ton of strange problems where one seemingly harmless plugin or effect would completely cripple my system.

Turn your latency settings up? down? whatever is not as fast... and configure the shit out of Sonars audio engine and all that jazz.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Something is definitely wrong...

In Sonar 3 and 6, I can mix up to 5 live streams _with_ effects, with <=10ms latency. My audio machine is an Athlon XP 2800+, with an Audigy 2 ZS Plat Pro.

As suggested, make sure you're using ASIO, and have all the buffer sizes set properly.

Also, updated drivers?

Cheers

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  • 2 weeks later...

Oh yeah, I found out what was wrong, one of my settings in Kontakt has a setting where it'll cutoff as soon as CPU hits its max, and there'd be a couple of CPU spikes in playing the instrument but overall it'd float around the 10% mark. Thanks for the link though Overcoat, that was the sort of thing I was looking for.

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Just as sort of a follow up to this Q, what is better; a larger or smaller buffer size? I'm having the same problem as Doomsday, but i know why... i have shit-tons of stuff going on. But any way to make it run faster is good advice for me. :D

Longer buffers will be easier on the cpu.

You should upgrade to Live6 so you can have deep freeze. Freeze shit but you can still edit the track. Wowoweewow! 6 runs smoother than 5 in general too.

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