# A question about RAM



## WelshMikey (Feb 11, 2021)

My VST pianos never sound as good as they should, I get far superiors quality and response from my onboard sounds. 

I have a fairly capable system (I can play games on ultra settings and have a Motu M2 sound card) but I only have 8gb ram. Despite this, even when using my vst's I never go above 6gb ram usage. So is there any benefit to upgrading my RAM?


I don't think it is relevant but just in case, my graphics card also has 8gb.

Sorry for noob question I just see everyone reccomend 16gb minimum so not sure if I am missing something here. I normally use a buffer of 128-256 whilst practicing giving me a latency of around 2.7 but the sound always feels muffled and I get some crackles.


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## widescreen (Feb 12, 2021)

I'd say (as an IT specialist) if you do not use more than 1 or 2 VSTs at the same time you won't benefit of more RAM (given the information that's here).
What's missing: Which CPU do you have? Do these crackles vanish if you go to a 1024 buffer? Which piano VSTs do you use?


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## WelshMikey (Feb 12, 2021)

widescreen said:


> I'd say (as an IT specialist) if you do not use more than 1 or 2 VSTs at the same time you won't benefit of more RAM (given the information that's here).
> What's missing: Which CPU do you have? Do these crackles vanish if you go to a 1024 buffer? Which piano VSTs do you use?


Thank you for the reply. I have an AMD Ryzen 5 3400G processor, I use two piano VST's native instruments the gentleman and xlns addictive keys studio grand. Of the two the gentleman is far worse, I can improve the muddiness with velocity responses but then it loses all its warmth and bass. Both pianos crackle.

With regards to buffer size playing above 256 makes it unplayable for me. Anything above 3ms delay just frustrates me. I know technically less than 10 should not be noticeable but either it is to me or my system is not reporting latency correctly. 

During mixing I use 4096 buffer size and that seems ok unless I have too many tracks or attempt to change the buffer size without closing the application first. I use cubase elements.

I may have to play around some more as I only realised the other day that alot of the other issues I have were cause by me changing the buffer size without first closing down cubase.


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## widescreen (Feb 12, 2021)

CPU seems good enough. But muddy sound comes either from speakers/headphones, soundcard or the instrument itself. It should not be a performance problem.

I have the Gentleman in my NI Komplete 13 UCE included but never use it. I'm no piano pro, still in my early lessons (I can already play some easier stuff with both hands, not more), but they have still a decent role in my compositions. I mainly use The Grandeur, The Giant, Una Corda and Noire then. In know the sound of The Grandeur best as it's my main practice intrument.
They never sound "muddy" in my ears if not especially made so through wanted effects.

I don't have Addictive Keys, so I cannot say anything about it.

Perhaps piano cracks like @doctoremmet can help better with piano problems?


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## doctoremmet (Feb 12, 2021)

Specs-wize your Ryzen CPU should not bottleneck anything. I bet it is the RAM, 8Gb really fills up quickly. That, paired with your preference for pretty low latency settings, is bound to give crackling.

The NI piano samples have a couple of mic positions, pedal samples, etc. so in no time you will have a lot of voices building up, bottlenecking your volatile memory, which in turn leads to popping, crackling and dropouts.

First thing I’d try is doubling the RAM. Even with 16 Gb I’ve had sampled instruments saturate my system


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## WelshMikey (Feb 12, 2021)

Thank you wide screen. I have akg k92 headphones, they are not great but work much better on my digital piano and listening to the same pianos on YouTube. 

I do have krk vtx4 studio monitors too but at the moment they are not hooked up to my pc as I have some cabling issues to sort out. Maybe I will buy some new cables and see if that sorts the issue out.


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## doctoremmet (Feb 12, 2021)

The mudiness is something that appears alongside crackles, yes? That’s why I suspect it is not caused by your cans or speakers. The lack of warmth could very well be samples getting purged out of memory. 8 gigs just don’t cut in these times. Don’t expect miracles from 16 either...


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## WelshMikey (Feb 12, 2021)

doctoremmet said:


> The mudiness is something that appears alongside crackles, yes? That’s why I suspect it is not caused by your cans or speakers. The lack of warmth could very well be samples getting purged out of memory. 8 gigs just don’t cut in these times. Don’t expect miracles from 16 either...


Maybe I will have to bite the bullet and give it a try. Is there any reason though why my pc is saying I'm not using more than 6gb if it is indeed the ram that is the issue? According to my system monitor my VST is only using 1.5gb of ram (and system total not more than 6gb)


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## Technostica (Feb 12, 2021)

If you are only using six of your eight gigabytes then I doubt this is a RAM issue. 
I suggest that it's more likely a system settings issue such as power management. 
If using Windows, turn on the high performance power plan so that the CPU is always running at full speed. 
That can resolve some crackling issues. 
The muddy sound is a strange one though. 

It's worth while learning how to monitor your system so you can keep an eye on various performance metrics such as CPU load, clock speed, storage bandwidth and memory usage, so you can identify bottlenecks which can be causing issues. 

When seeking advice, it's worth listing the hardware specs of your system.


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## WelshMikey (Feb 12, 2021)

Thank you for the advice everyone. As ram is fairly expensive I will leave that as a last resort for now. I will see if I can dig out some other headphones or buy new cables to connect my pc to the studio monitors first and see if that changes anything. I will continue to play about with more system settings too. Thank you.


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## doctoremmet (Feb 12, 2021)

WelshMikey said:


> According to my system monitor my VST is only using 1.5gb of ram (and system total not more than 6gb)


What about CPU usage?


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## WelshMikey (Feb 12, 2021)

doctoremmet said:


> What about CPU usage?


If I recall it was something ridiculously low like 6%. I have never managed to stress the CPU so pretty sure that isn't the issue unless it is an incomparability issue. As for ram just opened up my pc seems that if I need to I only need to buy an 8gb module of same brand as only one of the slots is in use so not that expensive to upgrade actually.


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## doctoremmet (Feb 12, 2021)

WelshMikey said:


> If I recall it was something ridiculously low like 6%. I have never managed to stress the CPU so pretty sure that isn't the issue unless it is an incomparability issue. As for ram just opened up my pc seems that if I need to I only need to buy an 8gb module of same brand as only one of the slots is in use so not that expensive to upgrade actually.


Pointless post.


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## d.healey (Feb 12, 2021)

doctoremmet said:


> It may not be a RAM issue, but still an upgrade wouldn’t hurt imho


It's pointless to add more RAM than you need. If you have 2GB you're not using then adding more won't do anything for you.


WelshMikey said:


> My VST pianos never sound as good as they should


What do you mean by as good as they should? Are you basing this on demos you hear for the libraries you've bought?


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## doctoremmet (Feb 12, 2021)

d.healey said:


> It's pointless to add more RAM than you need. If you have 2GB you're not using then adding more won't do anything for you.


Ah ok. Deleted. Thanks for pointing out the pointlessness!


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## GtrString (Feb 12, 2021)

Try putting an EQ on your piano track, and dip it 3-5db to taste in the 350hz region to see if the muddiness goes away. 

It may be that you just don't like your samples as is, and need to to create a better monitor mix for yourself while playing.


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## WelshMikey (Feb 12, 2021)

d.healey said:


> It's pointless to add more RAM than you need. If you have 2GB you're not using then adding more won't do anything for you.
> 
> What do you mean by as good as they should? Are you basing this on demos you hear for the libraries you've bought?


By "good as they should", i mean they are quiet and muddy sounding when playing live, not to mention much less responsive compared with my rd700nx inbuilt soundd. I can turn velocity and volume all the way up to compensate but my headphones will peak and the sound is harsh.

There is also crackling, and very occasionaly a note will drop out or keep repeating but the note drops and repeats seems linked to me changing audio settings without closing cubase so isn't a big issue. It's the thin, quiet, muddy sound and the crackles I am looking to fix. 

Anyway it seems I have to just do more testing and see if I can isolate the cause of the problem. I appreciate everyone's input and will try some different things over the next month and hopefully find a fix.


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## WelshMikey (Feb 12, 2021)

GtrString said:


> Try putting an EQ on your piano track, and dip it 3-5db to taste in the 350hz region to see if the muddiness goes away.
> 
> It may be that you just don't like your samples as is, and need to to create a better monitor mix for yourself while playing.


Eq'ing around there certainly helps the muddiness. But then it sounds I dunno, fake/thin/lacking in character. Not sure what word I am looking for. When I hear other people people play the gentleman on YouTube they retain the pianos character but still have clarity in the base. Anyway I will keep playing about with things and see what I can do. Thank you for the input.


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## cloudbuster (Feb 12, 2021)

As long as you have 1 gig of free memory (even less) all Addictive Keys instruments should run and sound just fine, even with more than one microphone active, at least that's what they did on a less than stellar Asus tablet (Win7) with an i3 ULV processor and 4 gigs of RAM some years ago, no matter if I used the internal sound or an external audio/MiDi interface.

BTW, what ASIO drivers are you using? If in doubt I'd give Asio4all a try and see if it helps.to improve things.









ASIO4ALL Official Home


Universal Windows ASIO Driver - Freeware - News and Updates




www.asio4all.org


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## SupremeFist (Feb 12, 2021)

What kind of drive are you running the samples off? If it's a slow hdd that may explain crackles. The Gentleman is naturally quite a dark-sounding piano.


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## WelshMikey (Feb 12, 2021)

SupremeFist said:


> What kind of drive are you running the samples off? If it's a slow hdd that may explain crackles. The Gentleman is naturally quite a dark-sounding piano.


It is on an SSD, hardware wise I think it can only be ram or the motherboard that could bottle neck my system, consensus seems to be that it isn't the ram. I don't remember what motherboard I have but I know it is a cheapy one sadly and I would be unwilling to make a change at this stage.

My guess at this stage, bases on everyone's input, is that it is some sort of driver issue which might take some time to get to the bottom of. I will also try different headphones, or my monitors once I sort out the ground loop issue. I can't see why the headphones would be the cause unless cubase is doing something different to YouTube but it is worth a shot as I have another pair kicking about somewhere I just need to find them.

Although I do not think ram is the issue I did manage to find the exact same one that is in my system (1x8gb) for £35, so I thought it was worth a shot and have just ordered one. Probably a waste of money but atleast my pc stats will sound cooler. Definitely wasn't willing to pay for two ram modules though.


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## Synetos (Feb 12, 2021)

Disable real-time antivirus, or at least create exclusions for anything related to your VSTs/DAW?

You can never have too much ram, period. 

Video card drivers are a common source of trouble for many. In general, you gaming spec has nothing to do with a machine tuned for DAW. If you are running all that 3D driver and HDMI audio stuff, it can cause hiccups. I usually run a stripped down setup of just basic video card driver.

If you are using a USB interface, make sure you disable the suspended power junk. 

There are posts here for how to Tune a Win10 DAW machine. It makes sense to do all those things, no matter what you find to be the ultimate issue.


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## widescreen (Feb 12, 2021)

Another approach wthat made me nearly insane when I had no clue about audio issues and ASIO drivers: Do you mean with "muddiness" that it sounds a bit like compressed mp3-files (128k or less)? In the beginning Windows fooled me by setting sampling frequencies of the system by itself to some "standard" settings I did not want, mismatching to those of the DAW/sampler. I had for example 44.1 kHz/24 Bit in DAW, while Windows was set to 48 kHz/16 Bit. It sounded terrible then.
It's worth checking that at least and play around with the settings.


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## Solarsentinel (Feb 13, 2021)

Hi, before purchasing anything, search on youtube " windows daw optimization, "or "windows settings for audio". There are a ton of videos.
Make the adjustements and see if it its better or not. You'll have to tweak your bios too.
If it doesnt change anything,Try a latencymon scan to see if the problem is due to a driver or not.
Are you on a laptop?


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## WelshMikey (Feb 13, 2021)

I feel like a bit of an idiot now but is spent some time playing about in ways people have suggested. I am still not 100% happy with the sound but I did find one of the major issues:

My sound was peaking causing the headphones to distort. Asio meter was fine but the Motu has a sound meter on the device and I noticed that peaked during distortions. All I had to do was turn down the volume on each vst instrument in its own window (I had previously tried the cubase master volume and on the Motu M2 but never managed to achieve a decent balance of decent volume without distortion, using the vst volume controller gave me more of the desired effect).

I am still not completely happy with the way it sounds or responds to my touch but think I am more into tweaking the velocity curve, eq, and fx territory now than a technical issue.


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## shawnsingh (Feb 13, 2021)

WelshMikey said:


> During mixing I use 4096 buffer size and that seems ok unless I have too many tracks or attempt to change the buffer size without closing the application first. I use cubase elements.


I'm not convinced that it's more RAM that's needed. Usually if you run out of RAM, your system will slow to a crawl and maybe crash.

Crackling, I think is a sign of buffer underruns, which I think would usually be a cpu problem. It's not that ryzen is slow at all, but at very low latencies and if there's a lot of voices and some fx going on, it may be stressing single thread performance. it's the realtime low-buffer requirement that CPUs have a hard time with, even if it seems like they can sustain the fast throughout when rendering offline.

With 8 gb, maybe you are streaming from disk more, so you may want to check if you have any antivirus program that does things down. Usually you can label your sample library directories or disks and exclusions so that antivirus doesnt slow down the disk...

And another thing to check before buying more RAM is if there are any other programs that may be disrupting realtime cpu ability. I'm not totally sure a good way to really know what's using your CPU other than heuristically with windows task manager but I'm not sure that will tell you comprehensively. (Sorry for the incomplete suggestion)

Also look up the issue of DPC latency that may affect realtime audio performance, maybe you can judge whether that's something affecting you, and supposedly (I have not particular experience about this myself) there are latency checker tools that can find some problems.


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## shawnsingh (Feb 13, 2021)

Ah, missed your last reply before responding  Glad it may be improved for you, hope you can get it as ideal as possible. 

As another side note, personally I've come to accept higher latency of larger buffers - in Cubase, ASIO Guard helps make selected tracks (which might be ones you're playing on the midi keyboard at any given time) work with lower latency, while everything else can still use a larger buffer and keep CPU down. I think some other DAWs have similar features. With ASIO Guard, I don't feel I'm suffering much due to the feedback lag.

Cheers!


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## WelshMikey (Feb 3, 2022)

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but just upgraded my processor and wanted to share that that has made a difference.

Upgraded from a Ryzen 2600 to a Ryzen 5600x and it is now crystal clear with no muffling delays or sensitivity issues.

That said my "The Gentleman" piano, the only paid for piano I own in full doesn't sound as warm and rich as when I hear it on YouTube.
Maybe it is the pieces I play?

I rely on a good reverb to get a natural sound from it so not sure why that is but the processor upgrade has made a big difference (I did overclock my ram to 3200mhz too).

That said I recorded a midi file of me.playing several different songs before, sent it to many different piano vst sellers to turn into an MP3 for comparison and have only found one vst piano that I feel really works. I will buy that one one day (vsl bosendorfer upright).


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## CATDAD (Feb 5, 2022)

WelshMikey said:


> Sorry to dig up an old thread, but just upgraded my processor and wanted to share that that has made a difference.
> 
> Upgraded from a Ryzen 2600 to a Ryzen 5600x and it is now crystal clear with no muffling delays or sensitivity issues.


While it’s great that it’s working for you now, I would like to make it clear that with your MOTU M2 and a healthy system, a Ryzen 2600 should have been more than enough to run any VST piano at a buffer of 128 or less at 44.1kHz or higher! Assuming of course that there are no other instruments involved and you aren’t maxing RAM.


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## Nigel Andreola (Feb 5, 2022)

WelshMikey said:


> Sorry to dig up an old thread, but just upgraded my processor and wanted to share that that has made a difference.
> 
> Upgraded from a Ryzen 2600 to a Ryzen 5600x and it is now crystal clear with no muffling delays or sensitivity issues.
> 
> ...


Try lessening the dynamic range a bit in your "The Gentleman" instrument. That will bring up the volume of the lower velocities a bit and make a warmer, softer, and slightly more compressed sound. It is likely what the YouTuber's are doing.


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