Audio / DSP performance?

Okay, so I do a lot of music production type stuff. I'm on an older FX processor and I use my PC for professional means when it comes to audio. Is audio production more focused on multi-threaded or single-threaded performance? I can't seem to find anything on the matter. Would be great if someone could give me some insight. I use Cubase and Protools (Windows).

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youtube.com/watch?v=zeoN7PfFdzY
gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/618474-audio-interface-low-latency-performance-data-base.html
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Might want to look into latency checkers first. I don't have much experience into pro audio but I think most have dedicated interfaces that take care of audio processing and the computer just records.

yes, to some degree I understand it's the drivers and the interface but unless you have dedicated DSP interfaces such as the UAD Apollo (software is coded specifically for the hardware), I think most of the processing is done by the CPU. That's why I'm curious as to what I should get in terms of the CPU. I'm willing to go all-out. A lot of the heavy projects that I work with seem to be limited by the CPU/DSP.

It's all about latency when it comes to audio. You can have multithreaded apps but, again, it all comes down to latency.

Not sure why you're asking this Q.

audio dsp is ideal for multicore - i down convert 24/192 to 24/48 alot and it lights up all my i7 cores and is blazing fast

but it if you are producing - most daws arent prograed to take advantage of multicore. 2 light up at most when i rendering something in renoise for example

also most daws dont use much cpu unless you have crazy chained fx and once again its not optimized for multicore.

just focus on ssd and disk io tbph - i do all my music prod on a 2011 MBA and leave my desktop beast at home

Yes but I'm not talking about throughput performance. That's all down to the soundcard too. I'm talking about mere processing power of projects with many plugins.

I use a lot of heavy plugins for processing and my projects usually have 60+ stems which all have their own plugin chains on them. As you can imagine, it uses a lot of DSP/CPU and it makes it difficult to make indestructible changes.

>I'm talking about mere processing power of projects with many plugins.
get the fastest CPU you can get. forget about cores... speed trumps # of cores.

So basically pure IPC over cores. Something like the 7700k? I'm willing to spend what ever.

yep. get an i7.

k, thanks man.

have a picture I took.

nice pic user!

>single or multicore

Something else entirely: latency. That means acknowledging user input as soon as possible. It means making your OS give the audio application high priority.

Audio encoding can greatly benefit from multicore processors though.

I'm not doing encoding as much. Just production. I manage large project sessions with many hundreds of plugins and need the horsepower for it. There are a lot of techniques such as freezing tracks and consolidating audio stems but I need the flexibility to work indestructibly at all times. I currently have an RME babyface. I think my CPU is starting to lack though.

>latency
This the same retard shitposting in the /hpg/ about USB DACs having lag?

>autism
>conspiracy theory
>insantiy
t. post

You're very vocal about it and never show any data to support your claim.

you're going to need to do some slogging through gearslutz and tomshardware. it's a jungle out there for building audio computers.

i use and recommend dual 8 core xeons. out of all the setups i've had it's the one that i'm most satisfied with. i know lots of guys use this setup. it's the workstation configuration. you probably don't need that many cores until the end of the project, but, you also don't need a super high clock. most plugins with the exception of convolution reverb that i've used run just fine on 1.2ghz xeons.

if you get a nice pci-e interface with a DSP chip you can also offload a LOT of processing. even my old EMU 1212M card from like fucking 1998 can handle a LOT of the projects processing. sounds great too, different from VSTs. you gonna get an RME or digigram?

some surely do. USB is capable of what, 60gb/s? but there's a significant difference between an RME babyface and a 99 dollar saffire box.

one of those areas where you have to pay for quality. takes some R&D to program and build a high quality USB device.

also, you might have a shitty USB chipset or outdated drivers on older motherboards.

lots of things to learn about when trying to assemble a 'perfect digital audio workstation'. too much, really, you need some luck too. or just enough money to get parts until it's satisfactory.

And you have zero evidence to support his claim like the other guy I assume?

This is like back in the late 90s/2000s when the USB mice were getting popular and retards said USB had lag compared to PS2.

In the past they did not have multithreaded options, now they offer it. You can toggle it on or off. You can spread instruments and the mixer over multiple cores or not.

Vst's are slower to offer this option, but resource intensive ones like serum and diva offer it.

so mostly single core, but most modern software offers multi as an option.

Been using FL Studio and ableton for over 8 years. If you have any more specific questions feel free to ask.

?

It doesn't matter if headphones have "lag" whatever the fuck they meant by that. It's a simple playback device.

It's something else entirely if you have something ridiculous like 100-300 ms of latency between playing a note on some input device and having the software record it and/or produce matching audio feedback.

And you have supporting evidence to show the USB standard is the cause?

What the fuck are you talking about, no one mentioned "usb standards"


t. not that guy

So no evidence just random claims?
>t.
And underage,

you're replying to a mentally ill nutjob. don't do that. just report &ignore.

Hey lads not OP but I've got an i7 6700 (non k) I purchased last year that really seems to struggle with audio production. On almost every project (FL studio) I'm maxing out my cpu at 100 and it becomes impossible to work without bouncing down to stems. This annoys me as I much prefer to work with my midi until I consolidate the project.

I'm thinking of picking up a ryzen 1700 with 3200mhz ddr4 ram (16GB), do you think that would give me a lot more to work with or am I just wasting my money? I will probably overclock it as much as I can.

do i have evidence that shitty USB interfaces have more latency than high quality ones? (especially as your i/o counts increase?)

are you fucking retarded? nobody questions that. because anyone whose done anything in audio with USB interfaces has seen it firsthand. and i've used a lot of different stuff. plug in 2x2 on a saffire box. you might get 15ms latency if you're lucky, up to 35-45 if you're unlucky. try that with an RME babyface. sub 5ms with every i/o stream utilized. why? because it's programmed and designed better. has nothing to do with USB itself. people used to think firewire was faster than USB and recommended it for digital I/O. it wasn't. the devices at the time using firewire protocols were just better at firewire than USB at that point.

i can see that now.

see, i've had the same experience. i get better results from high core counts. hence my recommendation for dual xeons.

Are you cleverbot or something? That's a a cleverbot-tier non sequitur. If you're a person kys for being this retarded. My dog can follow a conversation better. You literally asked people to defend a premise they never even brought up.

this is why you you don't do drugs and support abortion

nobody is claiming that there's an inherent problem with USB itself.

What in the fuck are you talking about? Nobody cares about "headphone lag" or whatever that is. They do have "lag", nothing in this world is instantaneous. What matters is whether that time affects the functioning of the device. USB standards have nothing to do with anything. It's an implementation property.

The truth is modern computers are nothing like dedicated hardware that's powered up and then dedicates 100% of its circuits to performing the function you're employing them for at all times. No -- modern computers are platforms for software. They run hundreds of programs, and operating systems are designed to run them in a way that's most fair so they can all use the CPU.

That means one shitty program can't hog the processor, but it also means your program can suddenly stop executing at any time with no warning and no guarantee of when it's gonna get the processor back.

It's not a real time system where you can make a hard guarantee like "if you play a note on your keyboard, the software will react in less than 50 ms". That guarantee doesn't exist. Last time I checked, that kind of timing is crucial in musical applications involving direct user input. It doesn't matter if you're programming the sounds, but if you're recording them, fuck yeah it matters.

I have a much shittier processor and work with really large projects with no problem, I'll assume you know how to open control panel and check and see if something else isn't taking all your cpu's processing power up.

Makre sure muttithreadeding is on in FL studio, and you don't have 50 instances of massive all with 50 voices each.

Here's a video
youtube.com/watch?v=zeoN7PfFdzY

>more claims
Nice!
You really convinced with those hot opinions.
At least one "person" is.
And you have evidence to support that the hardware or software is to blame?

Because USB is capable of far less than 50ms inputs. That is a fact demonstrated by numerous tests,

>Because USB is capable of far less than 50ms inputs

and you know what else? it's also capable of far fucking more depending on how badly it's implemented, and how much you demand of it. why are you asking for evidence of something that you're saying yourself? you're obviously aware that USB interfaces have widely varying success in achieving satisfactory latencies.

>proof! claims!

tip your fedora somewhere else. asking for proof isn't a fucking argument. calling statements claims isn't clever. it's an anti-intellectual attitude. furthermore it's a known fact that USB devices have varying quality and latency, which you seem to be aware of.

>At least one "person" is.

fucking who?

I'm not claiming anything with regards to USB. I didn't even bring it up. I just said latency is important.

*tips
Show me an example of a competent setup with lag and what component of the chain is causing the lag.

???

You want an extremely simple example? Play guitar hero in a modern TV with its shitty built-in upscaler turned on. It will completely screw up your timing.

It's fine for the intended usage of those TVs since they were designed for playing back broadcast signals. Some delay in that case doesn't matter. However, it completely fucks up soft real time systems such as video games.

>guitar hero
I asked for evidence of lag in audio production not more evidence that your underage. And no guitar hero is not audio production.

there's no practical difference between a studio and guitar hero when it comes to latency. guitar hero literally is 'audio production'. you're fucking retarded. you've been given an example. leave.

>there's no practical difference between a studio and guitar hero

>when it comes to latency

evidence that there is? it's a fucking signal chain that can create latency. no practical difference.

What, I'm supposed to simulate a high load computing environment and profile it's input latency just to appease some difficult internet person who's asking me to prove things I wasn't even arguing to begin with?

Nah, I'm going to go see my girlfriend

Because shitty hasbro controller to shitty chink game console over a shitty chink hdmi cable to a shitty korean TV is the same as having an audio interface that uses USB or firewire.

Slayed me kiddo.

>uses USB

how well?

you know what, you're fucking trolling.

Do realize that video games are soft real time applications? Game consoles have way less latency than general purpose computers. Due to things such as only being required to run a single program per session.

Try emulating video games if you don't like guitar hero or something. The lag is noticeable.

no, dumbass, there's no such thing as latency because you can't prove it to me scientifically, last i checked there's USB ports on xboxes and so they're not going to have latency.

>
I have the same CPU, ableton with large projects rarely goes above 10% CPU usage.
Something is fucked with your setup.

The display is lagging not the game as far as PC games go.

Have you never seen someone use a tablet before? And no I'm talking about the thing you play minecraft on, champ.

not talking*

>displays can 'lag'

lag is not the right word, btw. it's latency. latency is what it's called.

>it's not the input

>other things can't 'lag'

of course.

It's the same concept as "play note on keyboard, 500 ms later the software produces audio" you fucking dumbass.

Many things can lag, kiddo. In your example the worse offender in the chain would be the TV.
Yes and you can rule out firewire and USB as the cause of the lag.

Lol guess what? I never said USB was the problem in the first place! Fuck...

You're not the only user in this thread snowflake.

you're talking to at least 4 different people.

you mean the usb chipset, the usb drivers, the usb device, or the usb device codec, or the usb software?

Right back at you dumbass. Don't reply to me as if you're continuing a retarded conversation you started in the autistic audiophile general.

Any decent modern mobo wont have any part of the actual USB part the chain be a major contributing factor to lag in the chain.
The USB HID protocol supports 1000hz with USB 3.1. See gaming mice and tablets which support out of the box at least 125hz polling rate.

It literally (not the meme) takes you multiple times longer to push a piano key down than it does for the data to get across USB.
Consider not posting.

this is a person who feels comfortable speaking as if they're authoritative on something they have no experience in.

>1000hz

>192kbps audio streams

clueless

>It literally (not the meme) takes you multiple times longer to push a piano key down than it does for the data to get across USB.

lmfao

I have lots of experience dealing with retards saying USB is laggy trash. Hence this shit being a repeat of when USB mice took over as I said. Audiphiles are retarded.

Back in the day it was CRTs so people had to bitch about something causing lag I guess,

>I have lots of experience dealing with retards saying USB is laggy trash

i was talking about audio production, specifically involving USB interfaces - not experience in arguing on Sup Forums.

Consider killing yourself

Do you not know what kbps stand for?
Sup Forums wasn't around back then, kiddo.

we've been baited.

None of the previous anons. But yes, if you're doing live recording either voice or instrument, there is an issue of latency between when the note is played vs when its heard when using software. It has nothing to do with USB. This exact same latency would be perceived when using the on board audio, as it had to go through the operating system before being played back to you. The only way around this is through a hardware audio interface where you plug your headphones/speakers directly into the device you are inputting to. This bypasses the software entirely and is instantly routing the analogue signal to your output while also sending the digital signal to your computer for recording. You don't even have to pay a shit load of money for this.

But as OP was asking about mixing and whether or not software utilized multithreading so he could have an optimal cpu to improve his experience. This is completely unrelated to the actual question at hand.

Shouldn't have used the term "instantly" as I seen someone note that nothing is instantaneous. But there will not be a percievable latency. To add to this, an incredibly simple way anyone doubting can test this is to simply use their on-board audio and set the microphone to playback. Start talking and you will notice that your headphones will playback your voice slightly later than when you said it.

>Older FX CPU
Complete garbage for audio since they do integer operations fast and that's it.
Audio work is very float heavy.
Worse yet, because of the ICC being tailored to mostly improving float performance, lots of older plugins still use code from ICC. Using AMD for audio is painful, and I hate Intel with a passion for it, but I'm just trying to make music. There are many smaller companies that have gone so far as to offer apologies for doing so but give no solution.
The dual 8 core xeons thing is real, they don't have a terrible single thread perf but give you lots of threads. Anything more and you're looking at losing single thread perf.

>How threads work tho?
All your generators (plug in synths basically) get their own thread.
All your mixer channels get their own thread.

Single thread performance issues happen when you're sending a few dozen mixer channels into your master, since combining the channels and then doing all the processing is likely a single thread. Using bussing and a lighter master chain will get the most performance out of your box.

>Muh latency
USB interfaces are fine if you're not primarily doing live tracking and can handle ~30ms latency towards the end of a project. I can switch my interface into a low latency mode for live stuff and get 5ms round, but no chance it can handle a full project that way. You should be picking an interface on feature sets more than latency anyways. Keyboard players won't be offset by it, everyone else will. If you're running a heavily outboard studio (like myself) then the lower latency operation is meaningless because it will at least double the latency and won't sync proper with the rest of the track once you send it out. Once you throw a limiter/comp with lookaheads or true peak awareness you can easily end up with another 60ms latency in a channel anyways, rendering the low latency mode meaningless again. For live tracking though, you better have the option to comfortably run below 10ms.

Got the 2i2 with my hackintosh and an i5 4460 running ableton.
I cannot get under 3,5ms input latency (isnt even roundtrip) even with 32 samples selected
Is this considered "normal"?
Would upgrading to an i7 4790k help much?
Cpu usages is fine my in projects. It ranges from 20-30% for like 30 midi tracks
I just want the lowest possible latency to play in drums live
>tfw I'm considering buying an mpc just cause no lagg

There's nothing out there you'd probably be considering buying that's gonna run below 3.5ms. Don't track through your interface.

on my FF UFX a 32 samples buffer measures 72 in and 40 samples out (1.5+1ms roundtrip on 48kHz) which is the absolute fastest I've seen any USB ASIO device do, so you're probably not too far off since when playing live via pad controller the output latency is the only thing you need to worry about and anything sub 3ms (which it is very likely, the input latency is normally way higher) is good

Sigh, so there's no real merit in buying a new cpu or interface really?

I wouldn't call USB laggy trash, it's certainly usable, especially with good drivers.
But it is inferior to every other connection when it comes to audio latency.

cpu no, a faster cpu will pretty much only affect the workload it can handle at that given buffer size before it starts to throw that crackling dropouts around and you have do up the buffer
interface yes, there's faster ones but a really good USB interface like the UFX is 20x the price of the 2i2, PCIe is another a bit cheaper option that can be extremely low latency but will require you to get external preamps, AD/DA and headphone amps to have the same functionality as a all-in-one-box USB interface, so not really cheaper in the end

Why is american time Sup Forums so full of retarded underage shitposters?

I didn't really want to bring this up but feel I have to now...

>tracking drums
>2i2

What the fuck is your mic set up?

he's not tracking, I guess he wants to finger drum on pads, hence the mentioning of MPC

>MPC
>"live drums"

Yeah was confused there.

I can manage sub 2ms but I don't really need it so I use bigger buffers to reduce cpu usage.
Also theres the checkbox for multi processing if that helps (cubase 5).

I mean play in drums live on your midi controller as opposed to clicking in midi notes

Yeah, their Firewire models aren't that bad.
But the USB Focusrites have the worst ASIO drivers out there.

Either your reading from a slow disk or your shit is fucked. Reformat. Depends on what plugins you're using too.

Really depends on your particular driver. 2i2 drivers are trash but the Saffire drivers are good- you get what you pay for.

Your music is gonna suck anyway you fucking nobody's so why the fuck do these small differences matter?

8 core Xeons just for audio production? Are you for real? Isn't audio production supposed to be cheaper and cheaper? Xeons... Surely a bedroom musician can afford one of those.

Older Xeons are very cheap. But no, you probably don't need that. Even a decent dual core will work fine for most people. As always, depends on your use case.

I thought that most DAW plugins aren't really equipped for dealing with high-core count and rely mostly on IPC.

Depends on what DAW you use as to whether it supports multi-thread properly or not.

ProTools has only recently got 64-bit multithread support so unless you have an HD12 or 13 system ($$$$$) it's still single thread bound and takes fucking hours to render anything. You'll need to check support specifically for the software you want to use.

Also even if the DAW software supports it, a huge number of VST's don't support multi-threading, again this is only verifiable on a case-by-case basis depending on what you use.

If you use many plugins they will be spread out among the cores.

I hope I won't need a Xeon for home guitar recording and production. I'll buy a Scarlett 2i2 soon, though my CPU is bad - AMD Phenom II X4 B50. Would I need a new one?

>I'll buy a Scarlett 2i2
Why? Pretty much anything else you buy will have better drivers.

Because it's affordable? Can you recommend something for my needs in the same price range?

You'll probably want to upgrade your CPU but you won't need Xeons at all. 6th gen i5 or i7, which ever you fancy. You'd definitely want to get some fast storage though if you're going to be tracking many layers.

It's true the Scarlett 2i2 has terrible drivers. UR22 is a good interface for slightly more.

Probably something from Roland/Steinberg/Yamaha.

Read this for some more info on latency
gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/618474-audio-interface-low-latency-performance-data-base.html

Anything Intel in my country is going to set me back a lot, so much so that I don't think I can afford used ones. And I'll most likely have to get a new motherboard, if I decide to get an i5 or an i7. I don't think that will work. By faster storage, you mean father HDDs? As far as audio interfaces go, UR22 isn't out of my range.

SSD I mean. even if you buy a cheap one as a scratch disk for projects that you're currently working on and then just use your HDD as backup for when you're not actively working on them.

Definitely recommend Intel for music production, AMD are absolute trash when it comes to realtime DSP. See

Thank you. Though I must say, I'm really discouraged at this point. Could you also recommend affordable studio monitors?

Stick with KRK's if you don't care about mastering

That's assuming for a high end rig yeah. A normie i7 is way more than enough to produce on, even professionally. Though to be fair, a modern dual 8c xeon build is on the cheaper side compared to most pro audio equipment.

>Stick with KRK's if you don't care about mastering
Well, should I? I want to record guitar and program other instruments in Reaper or Logic.

Don't do audio on windows. Not only does windows have horrible asio drivers, add in horrible ram managment, no ecc ram or error checking xenons, and windows is known for audio latency issues. The fact that you use pro tools on windows just proves your not a professional engineer

KRK's are fine.

>t. assmad person with that realizes he will never make great music