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Hi All,Im still having big problems with judder on playback with BIAB.I gave info to tech support and they said I should upgrade my driver from Creative for my soundblaster platinum 5.1 sound card.In device manager it says this driver is the right one.I have overload at 100% in my cpu usage and when I stop playing biab the usage drops down to max 20%.Now this might not even be relavent.I notice in my add\remove programs that there is a band in a box server with a size of 40 thousand mb which made my eyes pop out.Will this cause the problems Im having if not then what could be causing it...and does the server need to be there.thanks frank

Unless you are running an iphone or android phone there is no need for the server. You started it by mistake, it's not running unless you launch it. On the bottom right of your computer screen are some icons, hover over them and find the server or use the arrow. Right click and then exit. It will stop. Don't start it again in the menus.

Thanks john.

Hi tributeman,

>> notice in my add\remove programs that there is a band in a box server with a size of 40 thousand mb which made my eyes pop out.

This is normal, and not the cause of the problem. Windows is reporting the size of the installer, and not the bandinaBoxServer (which is tiny). You may as well shut down BandInABoxServer anyway, although it doesn't use much memory or CPU.

The main issue would be that your 1.5GB Athlon XP system is slow, and if you use lots or RealTracks at once, then the CPU is getting maxed out as it is playing them, while it is also stretching and transposing them. Having said that, I program BB on a HP XP laptop with AMD and don't get jitter, even with lots of RealTracks.

Anyway, you can reduce the workload for BB during playback, by precompiling the songs. Choose Edit-Prefs-RealTracks and disable "Fast Generation", Your songs will take longer to generate before play starts, but you wont be maxing the CPU. If this solves the problem, then set Fast Generation back on, and just disable it for complex songs (lots of RealTracks, the ones that have problems for you)... you can disable for a single song in Edit-Song Settings "Song has playback problems, disable fast generation"

You should run a "Geekbench" speed test on your PC, at http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/
Typical new PC's have scores between 4,000 and 7,000
Scores of under 2,000 are quite low, and you might have problems as above, on songs with lots of RealTracks.

I'd suspect amount of RAM available on that 1.5G AMD.

Awhile back I did some experiments with ramcount by removing the existing 2G (on the AMD XP machine) and discovered that things got really slow in BiaB when the ram got down to 512...

Lots of disk swapping gets forced.

BTW I came to the conclusion that the difference between 1G and 2G of ram on this particular system was slight indeed when using BiaB. But 512 was crippling as to loading times, etc.


--Mac

Hi Peter and Mac.Sorry I havent come back as Ive been away for a couple of days

Peter Ive already unchecked fast generation but still have the problem
Ive also done Geekbench and it was low about 900
Im pretty sure its this thats causing the problems as my computer is quite old now
and Im going to have to increase my RAM but by how much I,d be interested to know.Thanks

Mac.As mentioned to Peter I suspect its my RAM thanks again

Just a thought.when I do playback on biab and look at the processor in task manager it rises to 100% and the whole track judders.Then after awhile it seems to right itself the cpu usage goes down to about 35-40% and plays ok.If I then play another track it starts all over again with large amounts of juddering

Try replay instead of play, it's the circle thing. It just plays what it did before and should be perfect I think. Takes 2 shots but if I'm right, at least you get it. You can always click on it and wait a bit, say half way through, then stop and replay...experiment with it, I think you'll find it's ok.

As to more memory, that really depends. Shouldn't cost a bundle. New systems are so cheap anymore, check on how much and save a few bob?

**Tiyr hard drive should have at least 15% of Free Space on it. Less than that can cause things to run even slower.

**Whe is the last time you performed a DEFRAG of your hard drives? Might be time to do a Disk Cleanup and a Defrag. Especially when using a low RAM count where the disk swap gets invoked more often.

You may also find that a bit of patience when loading a song is a virtue on that older machine. Don't push any buttons until BB finally stops loading a song...


--Mac

My old machine was a P4 2.8 with 2 gigs of ram and it had a score of 1700. It would render and play 6 RT's just fine but it was sloooow rendering that many RT's. It would take between 45 seconds and a minute or so but no stuttering or anything, playback was clean. My new machine does it in 6-10 seconds depending if one of the RT's is a solo or not. Rendering a solo RT seems to take much more processing than a regular RT. With a score of 900 on yours it's time for a new machine or even a newer used one if money is really tight. You can get a used core duo for $150-200 from Goodwill or most any PC repair shop that is still faster than my old box. Don't even bother trying to upgrade you'll just frustrate yourself.

Bob

Hi John,still does it in replay

Mac. plenty of free space..have done disc clean up..will do a defrag tonight

Jazz. this is exactly what my son says and it looks as of its a new machine soon

thanks everyone for your advice Frankie

"1.5gb ram"

Unless you've somehow gotten a matched set that will do 1.5G, you *may* be taking a performance hit by not doing so and your BIOS has gone ahead and set that odd number of RAM to run as Single Density.


--Mac

Mac sorry but Im not with you on this perhaps for a learner would you explain what you mean by "matched set" also a "performance hit" thanks Frank

First check your computer motherboard specs to see if it supports "DDR" Double
Density RAM.

Most computers from that era do support DDR.

Double Density RAM gives you TWO RAM read/writes for every single clock pulse, hence its name.

The thing one has to know about this is that you cannot install RAM sticks willy-nilly as we did with older systems and get more memory as a result. The sticks have to be matched - and also placed into the proper slots on the motherboard in order for the machine to automatically set itself to run in DDR mode at startup.

A mismatched ram set would force the machine to start up in Single Density mode, which is "taking a hit" because in single density mode you would have literally the effect of HALF the amount of RAM as you would when it is running in Single Density mode.

If your 1.5G or RAM is configured properly the motherboard will see it as DDR. BUT - if perhaps your computer has one stick that is 1G and another that is 512K, then they are not matched and it is going to run in the slower Sindle Density mode. This is a case where using only the single 1G stick will actually deliver more performance than trying to use the 1.5G with the "extra" mismatched ram stick. In DDR mode, the 1G of ram will actually performa as if it were 2G of ram. But with mismatched sticks and the forced
Single Density mode, it would run as 1.5G of RAM only, and run slower.


--Mac

Thanks Mac,,My son who understands computers more than I do will take a look at your post and I will let you know exactly what Ive got.Thanks Frank Im putting up a post about best computer to have for a home recording studio but not overly expensive perhaps you might add your advice to this

Actually DDRam is "double data rate", the double speed twin of SDRam, but the concept is correct. The RAM passes data at double the speed of SDRam. However, remember that your computer will adjust the data rate DOWN to the slowest RAM in the bus, so check your specs and see what the data bus speed is and make sure you match RAM with it. If your computer is older and the motherboard will only support RAM up to 133mh, you can stick faster RAM in it but the data it is going to pass at 133mh. There does come a time to let go and buy new. As computer hardware matures and is refined, the performance upgrade to a fast CPU and a lot of RAM makes worlds of difference.

Remember too that the processor only moves (processes) data from hard drive to RAM and programs execute in RAM. SO the faster your RAM is, the better response times you will see. The days of a 166mh CPU and 128mb of RAM are long over. Software is much more sophisticated and needs horsepower. A program like BIAB does a lot of binary math and the more horsepower you have, the better. Sure it will run on anything, but how well?

I go back a long way. My first PC was an 8086 CPU. Then a 286, then a 386, then a Pentium 100.... my slowest PC (of 5) now is a 2.6gh dual core. I remember a friend thinking that a program that said right on the box "Requires minimum of Pentium 100" would run on his 386 because he had a whopping 32mb of RAM in it. I could not make him understand that the data needed to be processed faster and in bigger byte sizes for his fancy new game to work. So he loaded it anyway, and the little stunt plane would fly an inch, stutter, fly another inch, stutter again.... I loaded it on my Pentium and it was fine.

You can get a decent Dell for $450 these days. WELL worth it. And if you need to make payments, Dell has credit accounts and you can pay in installments.

//edited to make a small correction in how I explained bis and RAM speed

Eddie.thanks for all that info.Im from the UK so will take a look at Dell computers.I think this computer is now to old to handle biab and this juddering on playback is doing my head in Cheers again Frank

You aren't by chance using WIFI? I had similar problems on a newer computer that made me insane. Turning off the WIFI card fixed all my issues. Seems the WIFI card was constantly polling the router and taking up CPU time.

Good call, Rick. I turn the WIFI on that computer off every time I work on music. When I am working on music, I don't need to be bothered with email anyway, and if I do want to monitor mail I can take a laptop upstairs with me to poll mail.

I pulled the WIFI card and ran a cable to the router. It's been working like a dream since.

I am on 2 different floors..... everything would be hard wired if possible but my house would look like swiss cheese if I did that with all the stuff I have. I had to buy 2 wireless bridges as it is....