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Which makes the most difference in whether a PC can handle higher sampling rates without ticks, or freezing: cpu or Memory?
Follow Ups:
CPU, you only need enough RAM to buffer effectively. It should only take a few megs if you have a halfway decent/modern hard drive.I've seen more problems with flaky sound drivers and/or bad hardware interactions than with a slow CPU or limited RAM. Those integrated video cards can also cause problems, as they eat up memory bandwidth (the video card uses system RAM as video RAM, a rather poor design.)
Recommendation: stay away from ultra-budget gear.
/*Music is subjective. Sound is not.*/
J,There is an integrated video card, but I am not using it, since I have a wireless touch screen. DO I need to disable it or something.
Lynx drivers are supposed to be solid.
SO what level of cpu would one need for upsampling to 192 using the secret rabbit code in Foobar?
ALso, my other rig has a seperate video card and is 1.8ghz but it still can't do usampling past 96.
Hi Dawnrazor,I just built a new PC using a Core 2 Duo E6600 chip and 2 gig of high quality RAM. I still can't get past 96000 upsampling with Secret Rabbit Code and Foobar. 176K bumps the CPU usage up over 50% in full power mode and causes all sorts of stuttering. Same obviously for 192K. I have another PC which has an older AMD Athlon 64 3500+ chip, and it will also only do 96K with the SRC upsampler in Foobar.
Interestingly, when I try the same using J River Media Center and their upsampler, I can get 176K and 192K without any problems. 192K upsampling drives the CPU only to about 16% in the CPU's power saving mode.
I would be interested also be interested to know what is required to do anything past 96K with Secret Rabbit Code.
Hey AJ,THanks for the info. I have a media center PC the is something like 3ghz and I am hoping that will do it, but I wish I could know if it is worth bringing in the added RF of the faster processor to upsample.
Ah well, that is what makes audio fun.
I am assuming you have played with all the priorities and buffers, and don't have any other programs running?
One idea I have is to just create files of 192 or 176 using src. That way the computer can take its time doing the upsampling and not have to do it on playback. This will totally kill hard drive space, but they are cheap these days.
You have a wireless touch screen. Does it display the full screen content? Regardless, I take there must be a driver for it which takes some resources depending on the update rate etc. Just try running without it directly from the desktop and see if this improves anything.Run a Task Manager to see what processes hog your resources. In a future the best approach would probably be to use a newer dual-core processor, say 2.2G+, this way whatever else is happening on your machine should run in parallel without any mutual interruptions.
Few other possibilities:
- faster RAM rather than lots of RAM
- faster hard drive or anything that has to do with data access speed
- bigger memory bufferI am not familiar with Lynx drivers but it is possible that some companies do a better job utilizing system resources more efficiently.
I would say processor. Make sure your sw player runs as a high-priority process. Foobar has an option for that, I am not sure about other packages.
I can do upsampling to 192Khz in Foobar without any hickups on a 1.6Ghz Amd, 512MB. I do preffer 44.1 however.
Yeah, I have 1ghz with 1gig ram, and priority is real time. Upsampling works as you say, but Secret rabbit doesn't work past 48.Is that what you are using? I tried it on my other computer wich is 1.6 amd with 1 gig, and it couldn't do secret rabbit past 96.
The only symptom of excessive load I notice is when starting and stopping tracks, when moving windows around and in Sinc mode.
I also use ASIO for EMU0404 and occasionally ASIO4All. I am not sure if this has any effect.
Secret Rabbit is probably the most processor-intensive program I've ever used when you use the option "sync best." It totally eats up my 2.4 GHz P4 and crashes my PC eventually at higher sampling rates, especially higher than 96kHz.One trick is to lower the "sync" options a notch or two below "sync best," which greatly reduces CPU usage. The next notch down sounds basically the same to my ears.
My AMD 2 GHz XP system happilly upsamples to 2496 with NO issues on sinc best. May be you have background services running.
is when I run into problems; unfortunately, 176.4 KHz is the only rate worth running IME.If you keep an eye on processor usage via Device manager, even with Sync Best 176.4 KHz, processor usage shows only 70-80% most of the time, but if you use it long enough, a spike in usage (for whatever reason, foobar or PC) can crash the PC.
Hey F,My 1.8 amd can do that too. It is when one jumps to 176 or 192 that things come unravelled.
Well, my 1.8 ghz machine (not my audio pc) cant go higher than 96, no matter what setting.One day I hope to get my 3.2 ghz pc and try it with that, but right now, the audio rig has the fanless 1ghz pc, and it doesn't do secret rabbit that well, i think 48 is the highest it can go.
I believe my older Toshiba laptop has 1.4GHz Pentium. It runs 24/96 fine with SRC. Have you turned off everything else? Try looking at running processes to see what is hogging the PCU cycles - use CNTRL-ALT-DEL.
Thanks. It has been a while since I moved, but the system is not up and running.I think though that I rmember trying to track things down, and nothing else was hogging any resources, just Foobar. But, I will look again.
Besides eac and foobar, there are no additional programs installed, and I have stopped as many services as I konw how to. But, this is good advice, and I will look into it.ALso it just dawned on me, but my pc is not amd or intel based, but uses a via processor. I remember reading that that cpu is not good at multi video apps, so maybe its performance is skewed??
It's 176.4 or above that REALLY cause problems!
In my experience cpu and latency as well as abscence of significant background program and usb activity.
Thanks Fmak.Not the answer I hoped, but the one I expected.
I am sold on upsampling thru' software over hardware src chips but not over properly designed boxes such as the dCS972 (programmed hardware).You always have the choice of upsampling thru' Audition 2 (Cooledit) prior to playing. Sounds good.
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