# Audio Interface for a 200 hundred tracks orchesrtal template with multiple mics. Any advice ?



## Cormast (Oct 19, 2020)

Hello good family people !


I'm struggling with *BBCSO* to not get crackles playing a bunch of patches at the same time (ten patches or a bit more). Two mic positions per instances are loaded.

hardware : Ryzen 9 3900X + 64Go Ram + Win 10 + *Old komplete audio 6 (48hz/1024)*
Is the interface slowing the whole setting down ? Or is it just BBCSO... if the interface is the problem, which one do you think should handle this usage ?

Thanks for reading me, and have a pleasant day !


----------



## sebastiaandekwa (Oct 19, 2020)

Follow for interest, have not yet decided on an interface, currently using my internal SC. 

What kind of storage do you use? Spinning disks? Or SSD?


----------



## Cormast (Oct 19, 2020)

sebastiaandekwa said:


> Follow for interest, have not yet decided on an interface, currently using my internal SC.
> 
> What kind of storage do you use? Spinning disks? Or SSD?


3 x SSD and 2 x M.2 Nvme


----------



## labornvain (Oct 19, 2020)

I highly recommend watching this video. It's posted in the DAW form here at VI-Control.






[VIDEO] CPU Performance vs. Real-Time Performance in Your DAW


Perhaps of interest to the folks here - I've found that the difference between real-time performance and CPU performance is one of the most-misunderstood elements of DAW performance. I've discussed it a bunch of times with a bunch of folks here and elsewhere, so I thought I'd put a video...




vi-control.net





To make a long story short, you can have the fastest CPU in the world and still experience Crackles and pops if you have devices that are interrupting your audio stream. Download and install LatencyMon And perhaps it will tell you what is causing the problem.

You didn't mention what buffer settings you're using but I would try to increase the buffer settings to reach some happy compromise between playability and not hearing crackles and pops. It's possible that your buffer settings are just too low for your system.

Of course you'll want to update all of your drivers, on your video card, motherboard, and especially your audio interface.

If you decide that the audio interface is the culprit, RME Is known for allowing really low latency. Even their cheapest unit, the Babyface 2, will have more than enough performance for what you're trying to do.

Lastly, your problems might be caused by some background process so a system optimization maybe in order. This usually involves disabling background processes like the firewall, anti virus programs, windows defender, and anything else running in the background that may have been installed by 3rd party hardware device.

There are scores of guides for how to optimize windows 10 for audio use. Most of them have little effect and some are pretty much overkill so use wisely.


----------



## Solarsentinel (Oct 19, 2020)

Cormast said:


> Hello good family people !
> 
> 
> I'm struggling with *BBCSO* to not get crackles playing a bunch of patches at the same time (ten patches or a bit more). Two mic positions per instances are loaded.
> ...



The problem is clearly not your processor.
Depends on yours actuals windows settings. If you have already optimized your windows for audio processing, try to check your latency with latency mon.
I had a K6A before and i had this kind of problem, but at this time i haven't done the optimization of my windows, so i cannot tell if it was the device or not.

Depends also on your sample rate. With this kind of number of tracks you should be at 1024 settings. Improve the buffer size may reduce the drop outs.

I don't own BBSO but it is know for heavy processing, so i could come from it. Try the same cue with another library with 200 instances, then it will probably answer that question!

Changing your audio interface will surely improve your latencies and your dropouts but it depends on your budget and how many I/O you want. I can't give you an aim if i don't know your budget, there such ggod audio interface on the market right now...


----------



## cqd (Oct 19, 2020)

I would think it's BBCSO..


----------



## easyrider (Oct 19, 2020)

cqd said:


> I would think it's BBCSO..



more detail needed?


----------



## colony nofi (Oct 19, 2020)

Yeah - I doubt its BBCSO - but you never know. 

To really help, we need a bunch more info.

Is it JUST BBCSO that causes crackles?
Do the crackles happen at specific moments or at an approximate voice count (ie, often happen at a tempo jump or ramp)
How is your interface connected? Is it a MB based USB port or USB in an extension card (PCIE etc)
USB ports can be a source of all sorts of issues. There are common methods to get better performance - but beware your sound card MIGHT be the source of the problem too.

Windows throws up all sorts of issues for real time audio performance. I would highly suggest trying something like https://ameliorated.info/

If you can borrow another sound card from a friend, that could well help in diagnosing the issues.

Your processor should be fine for what you are asking your machine to do. There are some interesting AMD Zen 2 issues that have popped up, but not at 1024 buffers generally (they show around 128!)

I would hope you could run fluently at 256 or 512 buffers with your hardware.


----------



## Sunny Schramm (Oct 19, 2020)

Cormast said:


> Hello good family people !
> 
> 
> I'm struggling with *BBCSO* to not get crackles playing a bunch of patches at the same time (ten patches or a bit more). Two mic positions per instances are loaded.
> ...



are all these loaded instances/tracks "active"? that would crush every cpu/ram. with this kind of template you have to set the interface-driver to a high sampler-buffer (1024 or 2048) but with that its not really possible to play in real time because of the increased latency. or - as most people do - just activate the tracks in your template you really need at the moment of writing. a new interface will just help "a little" in better latency but not with your main problem. for that kind of workflow with big templates you have to combine several pc´s together like big composers do.

windows itself is not the problem - when something makes trouble its the energy-saving options in windows and the bios. set the energy-setting to "max/highest perfomance" and in the advanced settings set the minimum cpu-clock to "100%". I dont know how all of the folllowing things are called in the amd-universe but with intel you have to deactivate things like "EIST", "Intel SpeedStep", etc. and all the other things which will clock your cpu, usb- and pci-power down when the performance is not needed - so it has to get back to higher clocks and power for that when its needed. this up and down is not fast enough under load and with many tasks to do. and dont forget the os has to do things here and there in the background. all this is also the cause for (micro)stuttering in games most of the times. 

also check your ram in the bios and with cpu-z under windows if its running with the correct speed. If you have ram with 3200mhz this should be seen in the bios - on most ram today you have to use the xmp-profiles which will often be forgotten from the bios itself. under cpu-z it will show you the half of the real mhz - so if your ram is set correctly to 3200 cpu-z will show you 1600. that happens because its "double data rate" (DDR). also check if your ram is in the correct slot to use dual channel. if you have four slots and you have two ram-blocks you have to use slot A+C or B+D. A+B or C+D will not work as dual-channel.

sorry for may bad english and maybe something useful for you in there. good luck


----------



## MaxOctane (Oct 19, 2020)

I don‘t see where the audio interface would matter here. The summing of tracks is done by cpu and audio interface only gets the final summed audio for each output channel (which I assume is just two for you)


----------



## Cormast (Oct 20, 2020)

I really appreciate all you details answers !


I've done a bit of cleaning up : desactivated Firewall / non-essentials windows services and usb device / push a bit the buffers on the audio interface, and it seems to be good for the moment.



colony nofi said:


> Is it JUST BBCSO that causes crackles?
> Do the crackles happen at specific moments or at an approximate voice count (ie, often happen at a tempo jump or ramp)



Not all the 200 instances were activated at the same time. Just the whole BBCSO (50 tracks). But, I was only trying to play big chords on sustain patches with 15 tracks at the same time to check if it can handle it.

I'll check that : https://ameliorated.info/


Thank you for time !


----------



## Pictus (Oct 20, 2020)

Cormast said:


> I'm struggling with *BBCSO* to not get crackles playing a bunch of patches at the same time (ten patches or a bit more). Two mic positions per instances are loaded.



Check: 






Nvidia Driver, no latency anymore?


Hi all! We all know that AMD drivers have from far, less latency than Nvidia drivers, and for that reason we all recommand an AMD graphic card for audio working. But recently i have dealt with a new install on a PC with an Nvidia graphic card. And when i updated to the latest driver i saw an...




vi-control.net









__





Introduction


This guide is intended to help musicians optimize their Windows PCs to process audio as fast as possible.



gigperformer.com


----------



## Heinigoldstein (Oct 20, 2020)

MaxOctane said:


> I don‘t see where the audio interface would matter here. The summing of tracks is done by cpu and audio interface only gets the final summed audio for each output channel (which I assume is just two for you)


That´s what I thought too. As long as you do not use outboard equipment and stay inside your computer, the audio interface shouldn´t matter at all. Or did I get something wrong all this yeras ?


----------



## colony nofi (Oct 20, 2020)

Audio interfaces DO matter.

But they might not be the problem. That's hard to diagnose from afar. I'd def be looking at NVidia drivers (great call @Pictus ) if needed...

An example for differences in performance for interfaces. 
On a rather beefy workstation here, our test bench project shows a 50% reduction in kontakt tracks playing when using an old focusrite USB interface compared to RME UFX. And thats just 2 in / 2 out being used on the interface. Indeed, the UFX beats out our DANTE system by a fair margin - but we need to use dante for other reasons.

The biggest differences are seen at ultra-low-latencies. 64/128 samples. This is all on a very beefy HEDT 10920X. The 10920X outperformed a 10940X on some tests due to the higher base clock of the 10920X - not by much, but there you goi! Every little bit of CPU helps for us - we need to balance massive CPU intensive reverbs for a 24 channel immersive system (which scale well for multi-core) against real time audio (0-core) performance. And it seems than with 0-core performance, the USB implementation for different interfaces makes a massive difference. 

There are very good explanations as to what is going on around the place. Mattias over on the RME forum has written about the RME implementations quite a bit. A friend who was working on RME drivers for Linux also had some interesting things to add and I'll let him know about this thread if he wants to chime in. Lets just say RME implements their own custom USB stack...

I just ran a test for shits and giggles of BBCSO on my mac pro 6 core cylinder here - which is getting very long in the tooth. Buckets of ram and a fast sample drive system.

I was able to have a repeated spiccato / staccato section running with all instruments (V1,V2,Va,Ce,Ba, one each of all brass, all woodwinds and all percussion) on an RME babyfacePro 8th notes at 120bpm with a buffer size of 512. It was on the edge, but all ok. I know this means little as all tests come down to how they are setup / there's tonnes of testing methodologies at play which mean there can be huge differences between different tests / results. We have our own tests here because we have specific requirements. The DAWBench tests usually are pretty good for understanding if your system is working as well as similar tested systems / figuring out if you have a problem or not.


----------

