Computer Audio Asylum Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

---

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Computer Audio Asylum ] [ Return to Search Results ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

RE: Another question....

Posted by Dawnrazor (A) on December 1, 2011 at 22:47:37

In Reply to: RE: Another question.... posted by Tony Lauck on December 1, 2011 at 15:11:22:

Hi Tony,

Remember that the experience I am discussing was before I ever did the cmp2 thing. And the computer was just a normal one.

If you clock a computer down to the point where it is just barely fast enough then giving it the slightest bit of extra work may be too much. Given that Windows is not a real-time system with precise scheduling guarantees, it is best to avoid pushing the processor to its limits. Based on years of experience using commercial off the shelf software (COTS) to perform real time tasks, the average CPU utilization should be less than 15%, otherwise problems are likely, if not inevitable.


Now lets talk about the cmp2 box I am using for headphones. With 192k upsampling cpu use varies from 35 to a max of 50%. THis is with the processor underclocked to 990hz. Pretty good I'd say. My old ghz processor could do at max 96k and that was with foobars onboard upsampler. It would have choked with SRC. Is the headphone cmp2 box OK with 192 because it is dual core, whereas the other ghz box wasnt?

Once you get the cmp2 setup going (that can take a bit of time) I have found it to be very stable and definitely more so than a typical windows install usually is, though my windows 7 box has been drama free. Once I thought there was some software bug that was affecting behavior but it turned out I had set something on the keyboard and it was sending commands that were screwing up the mouse commands.

Anyhow if things are dedicated and slimmed down I am comfortable with 50% being stable.

FLAC should be decoded at lower priority than fetching more data from disk, scanning the user interface, and especially refilling the sound card buffers. At least in the past cPlay didn't apparently handle priorities correctly in some cases, e.g. sometimes pressing the "X" to close the window might hang the player for several seconds unless the playlist had completed or the user pressed "stop". To me this was a big red flag that cics had not quite finished with the job of getting a correctly functioning player. (It can be very hard to get these details right for software that has to run on many different systems.)

Interesting. I never ran in to the "X" bug. Maybe I was later to the party. Certainly the current version doesnt hang like that. BUT I just loaded a flac file. Cpu usage in the task manager was 50% but the mouse was totally sluggish for a few seconds, like I had before. Something is strange when flac decoding is in the mix that goes beyond cpu usage. Anyhow I only have a disk or 2 in flac and will be converting them.

Even with a Core i5 processor I found that playback with the "145 dB SRC" upsampler was unreliable as it used too much processor. I never heard it sound any better than SOX so I gave up on it. No doubt it would have been possible to get it to work by stripping down my computer, but what would the point be? Perhaps this problem was slightly worse with flac than with wav, but this was just a matter of problems more or less frequently. I wanted problems never. Also, as I use the computer for serious audio editing and restoration I was not in a position to strip it down.


Weird thing is that with the core I3 I have in the main rig 192k upsampling just doesnt work even with all the slimming. THough some inmates can get it going, it seems to allude me. But the E7400 processor in the headphone rig has no issues with 192k using SRC.

Yeah if you are doing more than just playback it makes sense to not worry about stripping things down. Maybe you can get a playback machine?

Oh and I kind of lost interest in the ipad file download thing. I figured out that you HAVE to download to another computer and then sync with itunes or an alternative and then it will find it.

So I have just had problems with flac and since I get all the info I need with cue sheets I think I'll pass on flac, especially if there is a chance it doesnt sound as good.

Cut to razor sounding violins

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Signature Sound

[ Signature Sound Lounge ]

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---