CPU usage / loud crackle and pops

martin-smith wrote on 7/15/2023, 12:39 PM

im experiencing loud crackles and pop as use more plugins. i am using a buss for instrument group and vocals in hopes cutting down on CPU usage. how can you tell how much CPU is being used? are there particular plugins that are more likely to cause this problem? i using waves, toneboost and melda in addition to stock magix plugins

 

Device name    DESKTOP-4URH2KF
Processor    Intel(R) Pentium(R) Gold G6400T CPU @ 3.40GHz   3.40 GHz
Installed RAM    16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable)
Device ID  Removed by Moderator
Product ID Removed by Moderator
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch    No pen or touch input is available for this display
 

Comments

SP. wrote on 7/15/2023, 1:11 PM

@martin-smith You can try to render all unmuted tracks with the Render to new Track option in the Tools menu. Then mute the original tracks. This might save some processing time. MIDI tracks can also be frozen which will convert them to WAV files so you save processing time on the soft synths.

If you don't use an external USB audio interface with ASIO drivers (highly recommended) usually the audio chipset is the bottleneck. In most consumer computers it's a Realtek Audio chipset.

You can try to change the audio driver in the program preferences to something like ASIO4ALL, FL Studio ASIO or FlexASIO. You can get them from here https://asio4all.org/ https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio-download/ https://github.com/dechamps/FlexASIO/releases/tag/flexasio-1.9

These drivers allow you to increase the sample buffer size in the driver settings. A larger sample buffer will increase the latency but you'll get less crackling and pops.

FlexASIO is a little bit more complicated to install because you also need https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/thank-you/runtime-desktop-6.0.16-windows-x64-installer?cid=getdotnetcore and https://github.com/flipswitchingmonkey/FlexASIO_GUI/releases/tag/v0.35