I just bought a core i7 Surface with 16 gig of ram. There a several articles on the net about tweaking Windows for better performance. Just wondering if there is any advantage these days with new computers being natively as fast as they are. Any thoughts on tweaking good or bad? My reason for asking is that I’ve already tweaked my Surface, but GP has been a bit unstable and I’m wondering if the tweaking has upset something. I’m fully prepared to rebuild if necessary.
Unstable how?
I was tweaking such a device for almost 2 years now. Sell it as long as you get money for it. These super thin machines are not made to run under stage conditions with useable latency.
Once you think you find a good setting, the windows defenders services start up during a gig needing additional 30% CPU or new windows updates make your gigperformer GUI disappear. For me the situation got worse with every windows update.
Several little things are happening for me with GP. When moving three or four files in a set list, I get a “not responding” message. Then if I click in the window it all goes white. If I wait a while, the screen may come back. Other times, I have to exit GP and restart. Last night, GP booted up then just exited by itself. Some rackfiles won’t play halfway through a set list. Sometims when saving a file, GP exits itself. If I want to move a file GP takes ages before it will let me move it up the list. I was wondering if the tweaking I did may have affected the reliability of GP.
Wow. We most certainly would have heard lots of customers complain about something like that.
That kind of thing sounds more like changed or corrupt system files, a seriously broken plugin or even faulty RAM but it’s certainly not something inherently wrong with GP. Did you notice when this started happening?
Ive been getting the not responding/white screen issue for a while. I’ve only had my new machine for 6 weeks but similar things were happening on the previous one too. Should I just rebuild the machine?
Honestly, I have absolutely no idea. As I noted, it could be one (or more of) several things. What audio interface are you using?
Behringer UCA222. I also have a Traktor Audio 2 but I kept having audio dropouts with that. So I went back to the Behringer and it has been reliable.
I uninstalled GP then reinstalled it and it is a lot better now. Certainly quicker than rebuilding the whole machine
But the question remains - tweaking or not tweaking?
I’m not in a position to advise you on this. My sense is if you tweak stuff, you need to know what you’re doing and what impact it will have.
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I use the 1st gen Surface Pro as my desktop PC. All kinds of stuff are connected to it. I run Asio4All in it. GP runs just fine despite of all the junk running in the background. I think your issue is with the drivers you use for your USB interfaces. You might want to consider investing a better USB audio interface with a solid ASIO driver.
There is a good article written by people at Ableton about optimizing Windows computers for audio.
Here it is: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209071469-Optimizing-Windows-for-Audio
Thank you. I’ll check it out.
To Olive. Taking your advice on board, I dug out the Traktor unit to give it another go. Hopefully the audio dropouts won’t happen.
I just noticed that GP is hitting 100% CPU use on even a simple rackspce with just one instrument loaded. Is this ok? If not, what would be the cause? I’m using a new i7 Surface with 16gig ram. Might be time to rebuild the machine even though it’s only 6 weeks old.
What instrument? With the exception of an absurdly broken plugin, you shouldn’t see CPU levels anywhere near that. Obviously peoples’ mileage differ but in my environment (for example), I never see more than about 30% and that’s with 30-40 blocks in a rackspace.
When I first built the Surface it wasn’t anywhere near there either. I’m running Music Lab Real Guitar in every rackspace, sometimes 3 or 4 instances. Also Air Music Strike 2. Corruptions have crept in and made the computer unstable over a period of several weeks.
I have discovered that that the Music Lab Real Guitar is the 100% CPU culprit. I tested GP with a dummy rackspace and just one instance of RealGuitar. The CPU went to 100% immediately and stayed there. I use RealGuitar in every rackspace as my featured instrument using a PS3 Guitar Hero wireless controller. What is about about Real Guitar that is causing this?
Hmmm, that’s surprising - some of the demo people from Music Lab are in fact using Gig performer. May I suggest that you report this problem to MusicLab. There has to be something seriously wrong.