Hey guy, I a relatively new custom pc with an i9 water-cooled processor 64 GB of RAM and a solid state hard drive. I figured building this would put an end to my CPU issues within reason. I was wrong lol. I am still unable to finish a track in Ableton without wanting to punch a hole through the screen by the time I'm 75% done with it. That being said, I do use quite a bit of CPU intensive instruments and effects. Once I start stacking kontakt instruments on top of each other and playing everything at once I can barley hear what I'm doing. The odd thing about this is some days the clicks and pops are manageable (or non existent) and other days that same track is just one big glitch that will barely play at all. I noticed the longer I leave my PC on (sometimes days at a time) usually the better it runs. I'm pretty sure I've done all optimizations for music production to my system to save as much CPU power as possible. This is technically a "gaming PC" someone told me in another thread that "gaming PCs" were not built for music production and he had to learn that the hard way. As far as I know all computers have the same components and work the same way. Anybody have any suggestions/ advice? Thanks.

 

Start raising the buffer size once you're mostly done with the song. The latency will annoy you if you're still trying to record tracks, but if the clicks and pops are that annoying it'll still be a vast improvement.

 

With Live 11 you can see which track eat up the most CPU power, maybe freeze those ones?

 

A good idea against constantly appearing dropouts due to too small buffer size, but against this too

?

 

once i'm done recording i like to mix with the buffer size set to 1024. i keep all my software instruments and impulse responses stored + running off of an SSD external HD, and i keep my audio stored + running off of a second SSD external HD. this leaves my CPU to handle just my DAW and whatever plugins i have running

another (less expensive) option would be bouncing down some tracks that you think you have sounding right and flying them back into your session as pure audio. my DAW has a freeze function where it locks the tracks from being edited and just reads them as a simple audio file, which is a nice (and less committal) in between

 

There's really not much you can do about it other than raising the buffer size or freezing tracks. I also hear some clicks some clicks and pops on larger projects with my 3970x, but it's okay with buffer size of 128 samples. Freezing tracks also helps tremendously, although it can be pain in the ass of a thing to do.

 

My buffer size seems to be locked to 192 samples in live 11. There's no option to increase or decrease it.

 

I mean I kind of know which ones those are. Which usually are the most important ones that I usually want to make changes to making freezing stuff a pain in the a$$. How can you see this though? I have live 11

 

I'm confused can you explain this?

 

What's the other gear in your computer?

GPU? Audio interface?

 

Gaming pcs should have good spec & Kontakt has purge so you dont use so much ram etc... or look at your audio, make sure your using asio drivers! other from that put the pc in performance mode

 

Last edited: May 15, 2021

check buffer background processors etc and also not all pcs are the same amd CPUs especially the ryzan cpus work different from intel cpus, in the way they calculate the processing needed for each task. Intel cpus seem to want to push the workload on to one core first then spared it all out once that first core is maxed ryzan splits the task on to the cache first then across all the cores evenly.
Hence why with ryzan you generally need faster ram. Also dont go off the daws cpu load counter as that mainly goes off audio processing little tip open a project then look at the daws cpu gadge and then open task manager and look at the cpu counter in that, id say 90 percent of the time they will be different.

 

I shit on Ableton since being. they did not managed to utilize all CPU cores at max while working. So u have to use 3rd party programs like this one.

http://uploaded.net/file/99la6k4p

 

core parkings not an issue in new builds of windows 10 you can check it in power management settings advanced core parking

 

Maybe something interesting here for you...

https://audiosex.pro/threads/life-a...n-10-pc-audio-issues-just-had-to-share.59032/

Stable drivers (LatencyMon), less third app background processing, Process Explorer pause if running, good cooling and last but not least Energy Profile set to High Performance.

And sure if the DAW eats more and more CPU power for audio processing it can help to increase buffer size from the ASIO driver.

 

Check LatencyMon
BIOS update
Disable ALL CPU throttling : Always Full Speed

 

Which 3970x do you mean? The 6 core i7 or the 32core amd TR?

 

That would suggest the "other days" Windows is doing something in the background you're not aware of..

BUT there's crucial information missing to be able to help you, like:

..you should be able to change buffer size (in the DAW and/or interface SW)

Can you give an example like - when you load X instances of library Y, the dropouts occur (Do you use one or separate Kontakts). Or, when you use X instances of (some CPU-hungry) VST(i) ..It would be easier to help you

I think Ableton CPU meter is not reliable. Better look at the Task manager>Performance or other diagnostic tools

 

Threadripper

 

The one tweak I would advise, that has the biggest impact without overclocking for audio production is disabling C-states so that cpu doesn't randomly decide to go to a lower power state. This nearly eliminates random audio pops and cracks, that do not correlate 100% to the cpu usage on busy passages or loading a heavy vst on master track for example. Clicks and cracks will still occur on busy passages, and kind people already gave the most common solutions here, like raising buffer size or freezing/bouncing.
Hope you find this helpful, and good luck in your music production!