As The Title sais, i have a big problem with my Fl Studio...

while my Fl Cpu Meter is 99-101% with crackling all the time, in Task manager is no more than 40%

i've done all optimization possible for both my Computer & FL Studio, i even set the buffer to 1024 on my Audio interface's Asio.

and this is driving me crazy, losing interest in Music cause each time i try to work on a project this happens...

please if someone have a solution or something share it with me or us in case someone else is having the same issue...

Fl Studio : 12.2 Build 3
Intel i7 First generation 870.
16Gigs of ram.

 

whats your PPQ set too? try lowering it if you dont need the precision. Otherwise youll have to bounce out all of the spire instances, im assuming they are taking up all your CPU.

 

What do you mean by PPQ ? and the problem is in task manager, Fl Studio is barely taking half of the CPU Power, even with all my google chrome's opened window i'm only using the half of my CPU...

i don't get it.

 

is your CPU or memory set at higher frequency's then stock? did u disable power savings futures of windows?

 

https://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/app_opt.htm this helped me

 

i Had this problem, i overclocked (downclocked my rams before overclocking CPU so i made sure my rams wont run into problems) nothing really changed so i downclocked it back, now nothing is overclocked, Power setting are set to Maximum performance...

 

PPQ is the timebase that FL operates at, it uses more CPU the higher the number is. Because its doing sample point checks at a higher frequency. It defaults at 96 and can go down to 24 (Max 960).

https://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/songsettings_settings.htm

Keep in mind Spire is a bit more CPU intensive than other synths

 

my PPQ is at 96, i changed it to 24 literally no differences in performance.

i don't actually care about spire being CPU intensive... my problem here is that FL Studio isn't using all my CPU power available...

 

Check your individual core loads, you'll probably find that one core is maxed.
Audio doesn't and can't effectively distribute work load over multicores resulting in most of the real processing happens on one or two cores, and all the little "supporting" calculations happening on the rest.

One tip from my years of using FL has always been going to tools>macros> switch smart disable for all plugins every once in a while.

 

Create multi-core compatible projects - Make sure that your highest CPU using plugins are routed to independent Mixer Tracks without shared 'Send' Channels. Multi-core CPUs need computational tasks that can be run simultaneously and so split across cores. Each Mixer Track represents an 'opportunity' to create these independent, parallel, processing paths. Each unit in the audio chain from the instrument through to the Mixer track and the effects must be processed in sequence on the same core. If one mixer track is linked to another, then all the instruments and effects on both Mixer Tracks now have a dependency and can't be split across cores efficiently. Symptoms of this situation are audio glitches as individual cores max-out and cause underruns while the overall CPU load still appears to be low. In summary, here is how multi-threading works:

1. Generators will be processed in multiple threads (if 'Allow threaded processing' is activated and the plugins allow it).
2. Separate mixer tracks will be processed in multiple threads (if 'Allow threaded processing' is activated and the plugins allow it).
3. Mixer tracks that depend on the output of other mixer tracks will be processed after those other mixer tracks and probably on the same core.

Testing - If you are testing and comparing CPU loads it is the number of plugins and/or effects that can be processed without buffer underruns. The FL Studio internal CPU meter best reflects this measure (see above). Don't obsess about how cores are used, particularly at low CPU levels, since the Scheduler will try to reduce power consumption by parking (switching off) cores at low CPU load and then turn everything on and even out this distribution as CPU load approaches 100%.

 

i've been using this tip for like all time, didn't really change a thing, it may be useful but not all the time.

@wuzzle i don't really understand what do you mean by create a multi-core compatible project ?

 

I have the M-Audio Fast Track MkII (smaller version of yours) and had similar problems. When my RAM is about 1/4 in use, my CPU goes crazy.

My usual solutions to boost performance are:

- Disable applications that open ' On Start-up' (Like Windows 10 update etc)
- Restart and run a disk cleanup
- Remove audio interface and reconnect it.
- Only have FL Studio running when working with big projects (eg close Chrome and VLC)

A while ago I updated my drivers (check Avidforce for updates), now FL can handle a lot more. Keep monitoring your RAM when you're doing other things as well just to check if its not just FL, recent Windows updates seemed to fix a problem of mine where my RAM would ALWAYS be around 30% and would hit 99% when producing.

Hope you find a solution

Fl Studio : 12.2 Build 3
Intel Core i5 3470
8Gigs of ram.

 

A synth, plus all the plugins you put on the channel will be processed on the same core.
If you buss a couple channels, then put plugins, all the tracks feeding that buss will have to be processed on the same core.

 

Does that mean one could save CPU by using the Patcher plugin?

 

This is because the internal CPU meter shows, let's call it real time load, whereas task manager doesnt. The crackling means your CPU isn't able to compute the different operations fast enough for eg 44.1 kHz output frequency. As the program is still able to function properly, CPU isn't maxed out in your task manager. If you're using a higher sampling rate than 44.1 kHz, you could lower it to this value. This would lower CPU load proportionally (for example half the load when switching from 96 to 44.1 kHz and so on).

 

Do you have opened 3rd party plugins? In their processing tab is an option too to enable multithreading for the plugin. This helped me. The enable multithreading option in FL settings only affected the FL plugins.

 

In what way? The path that each stream of audio takes has to be processed on the same core. You can't have a compressor and an eq on a channel, the compressor doing calculations on core 0 and eq on core 1 because the result of the eq is dependent on the result of the compressor, so its serial processing, not parallel.

When you buss, you take n amount of streams, and making one new stream, so once again serial processing.

 

Sample Rate : 44.1
Buffer : 1024
Mix in buffer switch : On
Triple Buffer : On
Resampling Quality : 2
All other CPU options are : On
And i have manually changed "Allow threaded processing" to all VSTi options to On.

Same Problem.

 

As I already said, your CPU is not able to compute the audio in real time. You could try different things.. Open your project on another machine with a different hardware configuration and compare the CPU loads. Try an older FL Studio version / another DAW with a comparable project. Use less hardware-consuming plugins. Could you maybe name some typical plugin chains in your projects/which plugins you use? I suppose this doesn't happen when you only use one instance of a synth or something.

 

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=832&cmp[]=2275

It might be time for a cpu upgrade.

If theres one thing to take away from this thread its that DAW CPU meters are to be trusted, not task manager, they measure different aspects of cpu performance.

Notice I sad "DAW", FL is not the culprit, in fact because it can smart disable any plugin, it is one of the most efficient.