[ardour-users] Ardour not fast enough (again)

[audio lathe]

Thank you intent, you were absolutely right. I didn't realise the
plugins could affect ardour that way (but now I think about it DUH!!)
and that was enough to track down the offending plugin - it was the
"LFO Phaser". I try not to post to the list unless I've done
everything I can to work things out myself and I've rarely had issues
with ardour - most answers I've found by scanning the mail archives.

To answer your question about the plugins I'm using the following plugin setup

pre-fader plugins
glame Butterworth Lowpass 
glame Bandpass analog filter 
I use these as I like a nice kind of "black backdrop" behind the
music, I dont like extraneous high frequency noise in my recordings.

post fader plugins
Dyson Compressor
GVerb (a favourite)
SC4 Compressor
Valve Saturation
Simple Amplifier
SC1 Compressor
LFO Phaser (well I was using this one)
Reverse Delay
Barry's Satan Maximiser 

(Stop plugins with transport was selected -- btw)

By using by using ardour for about the last 2 years I've taught myself
the process of recording music, I'm extremely grateful to Paul and the
gang of developers within the Open source community. Over that period
of time I accumulated a bunch of gear which feed into ardour. This
includes two twelve channel mixing desks (one just for drums!!!) and
about 20 microphones including the shure sm58's, 57's AKG's,
sennheiser and rode microphones (I just got this awsome rode valve mic
for vocals).

Our recording process is kinda organic, just recording drums, bass,
guitar and vocals all at once. We record once every two weeks, write
everything to mp3's and listen to them to refine for the next jam - we
are getting to the point where we can record a cd with ardour. We
don't use samples or even MIDI.

My whole house is a part of the recording process and I split the
instruments into different rooms, we use wireless headphones with two
different mixes and two transmitters.

Ok, this is probably not the space to discuss recording technique, but
I just want to express how impressed my band and I are with the effort
of this community. Thanks


On 8/28/05, intent at netpratique.fr <intent at netpratique.fr> wrote:
> On jeudi 25 Août 2005 13:22, audio lathe wrote:
> > G'day Ardourist's,
> > Further to a thread back in July (ardour-users-ardour.org Digest, Vol
> > 18, Issue 28, ardour-users-ardour.org Digest, Vol 18, Issue 15)
> > "Ardour was not fast enough" I am encountering the same problems when
> > playing back 16 and recording 16 tracks at 44100 using two delta
> > 1010lt's. I've attempted to answer many of the questions that were
> > directed at Devlin's original post and hope that I've provided enough
> > detail.
> >
> 
> Hello, nice to see that we can use two envy24 cards with ardour btw :)
> (i have an EWS88MT)
> 
> Concerning your queries, your disc tuning seems great. Reasonably higher than
> my 2 years old IDE Seagate. I don't think that you can really improve tuning
> now. But If you have time, try to find info about the -Q parameter with
> hdparm but i am afraid it is still experimental and risky (you are warned).
> Anyway,  i think that your problem has more to come from the plugins and
> denormal cpu peak when you stop playing. This send 0 or null value to the
> plugins and its known to produce a CPU peak. Even if the plugins are patched
> against it, my observation is that a slight CPU increase still can occur.
> When you have plenty of tracks and plugins it's enough to put ardour out of
> CPU cycles. Hence the dreaded message.
> 
> The vmstat output seems to indicate this. Which plugins do you use ?
> 
> You can make the simple test to turn off the plugins and rerun your bench if
> the problem is gone try to enable plugins by name and you may find that one
> is more likely to have high cpu usage when ardour is stopped.
> 
> You can enable "stop plugins with transport too, in the options...
> 
> There several ways to observe CPU usage, i prefer "top" but the ardour cpu
> jauge should be enough to know if the CPU is put to its knees by the
> plugins..  Then, its not the fault of ardour.
> 
> Hope it helps.
> 
> L.
>