bladerunner's Forum Page

rather than start a new thread i thought i would post some cpu observations here as it is relevant to this thread. i have always had the cpu spiking issue discussed here. i am using asio4all version 2.9 on a vista home premium equipped pc with a core 2 duo E6550 processor and 2 gigs of ram. to try to find the cause in the past i have tried disabling all sorts of devices, disabling all but the most essential background processes, startup processes etc. but all to no avail. what i have found today is that the spiking seems to be directly related to the asio buffer size. i don’t know if this is something generally known already.

i made a simple project with 6 instances of the zynewave nucleum synth and one zynewave reverb as a send. this uses around 25% of the cpu. at a buffer size of 320 samples i am getting regular spikes (every 20 seconds or so) some of which will hit the 70% mark now and again. increasing the buffer size lowers the size of these spikes until i get to 1024 samples at which point the spikes almost disappear completely. obviously i am pleased that i have found a solution as at one point it was stopping me from starting a new project in podium. a sample size of 1024 gives me a latency of 27 ms which is not great for playing a midi keyboard but manageable. cpu usage in other hosts that i use don’t seem to be affected by the buffer size.

has anyone else found this direct relationship between the spikes and the buffer size?

this obviously lonely, bitter person has been ousted or banned from many other audio related forums. it was only a matter of time before he arrived here

@Zynewave wrote:

I’m in the process of changing the Podium default to pre-fader effects. With the new fader/meter menus or alternatively the mixer grids, you’ll be able to easily change the pre/post placement in your existing projects.

this is great news. just need to get my head around the new mixer grid now…

thanks for the workaround druid

hi H-man,

thanks for the kind words

Moon Orbit is the name of that pad, kind of an old school 70’s sounding pad. i’m very influenced by tangerine dream, jarre, vangelis etc. so consequently quite a lot of my presets will probably end up sounding like that! also hence why i like to make some of them just 3 voice polyphony for that authentic way the release is cut off when a new chord is played. glad you like them.

the quality of the oscillators are very good on this synth – its capable of some very rich sounds i think. when i get some spare time i will make some more. i will check out the osilloscope too – sounds interesting

thanks! i will upload them later this evening. i suspect i will do plenty more as i am loving this synth! its very well laid out, sounds great and is very intuitive/easy to use

nucleum is a great sounding synth – one of the best examples of a synth maker one i have come across. i fully intend to program some presets and write an all nucleum tune. in fact i’m going to make it my next project i think… would be great to have it bundled with podium along with a killer demo using podiums eq and reverb