gigastudio can't handle polyphony

[sten oerting]

Hi there! I run gigastudio 160 on a pentium 933 - and logic/protools on a mac.
Whenever I play the piano (or any other instrument for that matter) with a lot of polyphony and the sustain-pedal working, gigastudio freezes. It just can\'t handle all these messages after a while...
Does anybody know how to work around this problem???
Your help is highly appreciated!
Sten, Copenhagen.

[Chadwick]

Sten,

When it starts to hang - what is your polyphony meter reading?

[sten oerting]

Dear Chadwick!
First of all, thank you for your time and concern!
I believe you refer to the peak-meter:
I just tried twice, and the \"freezing state\" was as follows:

voices: 28/56
peak: 50/68
memory: 19% and lower
CPU 28% and lower

It happens especially quick with the gigapiano, probably due to it\'s stereo and heavy layering...

Any ideas?

Thanks - Sten in copenhagen!

[gigaDiga]

It seems as though GigaStudio v2 had a bug with using sustain pedals. When I did poly tests with a piano and alot of sustain GigaStudio used to bomb out on me around the 80 voice mark. When I did a similar test without sustain and using Cakewalk to pile the notes on thick I would get 120 voices before break up.
Now, with GigaStudio v2.2, I can get the full 160 when playing the piano with the sustain pedal floored.
If you haven\'t upgraded I\'d urge you to do so. If you have then maybe you should try doing a test without sustain, using your sequencer, and see what poly you get. If you\'re looking for a cloud of harmonics, as I was, you may acheive similar results using reverb to create sustains.... a bit of a botch perhaps but sometimes an artists limitations can lead to new innovations.

http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/wink.gif hope this helps

[Chadwick]

Gigga, that\'s fascinating and makes me live in hope for full poly.

I also find a max poly of:

1. 60-80 with sustained Giga piano

2. 110-120 without sustain. As i go higher I hear notes held up.

Your experience really makes me look forward to V2.2

Made my day

[Mega]

Besides getting the fastest available CPU and hard drive of course, I found out a strange way to increase polyphony on GigaStudio 2.01 (haven\'t tried 2.20 yet). I was able to get near 160 by increasing the vcache MaxFileCache in the System.ini file to values like 24576. I know this is not recommended for computer audio applications since this will increase the amount of buffered data in disk reads and writes, but it has worked for me. (The much lower recommended vcache value of around 4096 gives me polyphony of around 128, which is still pretty good.)

[This message has been edited by Mega (edited 06-18-2001).]

[David Pogorelec]

I run GS 160 on a dedicated PII-800 with 512 meg RAM. I own most of the available pianos and have no problem getting 160 notes polyphony with heavy sustain pedaling. I have found that disabling Virtual Memory gave me the best improvement in performance. Next, setting both MinFileCache and MaxFileCache to 131072, and ChunkSize to 4096 (in SYSTEM.INI file) gave the next highest noticeable improvement. The combination of motherboard and ATA controller appear to be a major factor in disk I/O performance. There have been lots of complaints about \"add on\" controller cards; my board, an Asus CUBX (100 mhz FSB) has a built in ATA66 controller (on IRQ 10) and performs well reading samples from a dedicated IBM Deskstar ATA100 drive. My C drive uses the other onboard ATA33 controller (IRQ 14 & 15). I use an EgoSys Waveterminal 2496 sound card. Using the latest EgoSys v1.0 through v1.2 E-WDM drivers has caused nothing but blue screens on my machine, so I reverted back to using the the older non-WDM drivers. The GigaStudio v2.2 upgrade did not provide any additional performance gains but it does give some new features that are quite good (i.e., \"accelleration tags\"). It is important to make sure your audio card is in a PC slot getting it\'s own dedicated IRQ. IRQ

[Mega]

Interesting setup you have there, David. You might want to optimize your MaxFileCache number by finding the lowest one that gives you the same GigaStudio polyphony and sustain pedaling performance as you have now. Companies like Cakewalk and Frontier Design actually recommend a very low MaxFileCache of 4096 because unlike many other software, audio applications do a lot of serial disk read and writes so having a huge disk buffer will affect audio track performance. Also, a high MaxFileCache will take away valuable RAM from applications and sample loading (although that is less of an issue in your case since you have 512 Mb RAM). So it is a good idea to try to optimize the MaxFileCache if the recommended 4096 setting does not seem sufficient. In my case, I can maximize GigaStudio polyphony and sustain pedal use with a MaxFileCache of 24576.

[Doug Bircher]

How do you adjust the MaxFileCache?

[Mega]

Doug, you change the MaxFileCache with the line \"MaxFileCache=####\" (where #### is the value you decide on) under the [vcache] section in the system.ini file in the Windows directory. Then you need to reboot the computer.

[This message has been edited by Mega (edited 06-19-2001).]

[Blob]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mega:
Doug, you change the MaxFileCache with the line \"MaxFileCache=####\" (where #### is the value you decide on) under the [vcache] section in the system.ini file in the Windows directory.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Been messing about with my cache\'s for a while now and it seems the chunksize is more important than Min/Max (from personal expierience) i get good results (lower cpu usage as well) with min/max=16mb and a chunksize=1024 (1mb)

[gigaDiga]

Bummer....

my system has reverted back to 120 voice maximum. So much for that naive excitement about v2.2...

I\'ll try meddling with maxFileSize etc...

[Mega]

Thanks Blob for bringing up the other important parameters of MinFileCache and ChunkSize. MinFileCache in an audio PC should be set to equal to MaxFileCache to get a consistent performance with a constant file cache. As for the chunk size, I actually get better results with a ChunkSize of 512.

[eilamgross]

I could not find any entry to chunksize in
system.ini
Where should I put it?
Eilam

[Audiomagic]

In system.ini under [vcache]you can type: \"chunksize=\"

[Kenn159]

Quoting Dave
It is important to make sure your audio card is in a PC slot getting it\'s own dedicated IRQ. IRQ


Reply
Ive read from a few threads including a reference to some of this from David were it\'s mentioned you need to have your sound card on the first pci slot [because thats the one the computer scans first ]and to make sure that your card doesn\'t share a IRQ with another device .
Well I moved my sound card to the PCI first slot but now it wants to share a IRQ with the Video card on the AGP slot right next to it and also share a IRQ with PCI steering .

I looked and found that IRQ 3 and 7 are free , how do I get my sound card to go to those free IRQ\'s .
Thanks , Ken