Valhallashimmer causes crackling.

sso · February 02, 2023, 10:56:52

One of my favorite plugins causes immense crackling to the point of the sound being completely fucked.

Its a weird problem, since when i opened up a older song, this happened. so i went along disabling all the plugins to see what was the problem.

And it was valhalla shimmer 32bit and im running 64 bit now. Whats interesting is that i changed it to 64 bit and then it worked fine.

Except when i reloaded the song, then the problem happened again with the 64 bit version of the plugin.

I noticed this also in the version of mpt before the new one, which i just updated too.

Except, there the 32 bit version of the plugin worked. (apart from slowing the program bit.) (with occasional wildly varying crackling when i pressed play ,that stopped when i pressed play again.)

But the 64 bit version caused immense crackling when i tried to change it to 64 bit and caused the 32bit plugin bridge to crash and didnt stop when i closed mpt.

sso · February 02, 2023, 11:00:54

Eh, i was also trying to change my email but the website demands password without letting me type it in?

Saga Musix · February 02, 2023, 19:00:42

Valhalla Shimmer works just fine here. When you hear the crackling, does the plugin GUI indicate that the plugin is running through the plugin bridge (it will say "bridged" in the window title of the plugin)?

Quote from: sso on February 02, 2023, 11:00:54Eh, i was also trying to change my email but the website demands password without letting me type it in?

You need to enter your current password into the bottom-most input field on that page. Did you do that?

sso · February 03, 2023, 03:39:20

Oh its... well, once i couldnt find the password for this site, (when i changed emails) so i set up a new identity here.
For some reason when i set up a new puter. I couldnt find the new identity , but amazingly i found the old one.

So, my new identity is using my current email,but this one is using a email i havent used for over a decade.

On valhalla shimmer. Going through it again, i reinstalled audio drivers , they had started to fuck up..

Well, all the valhalla shimmers im using (now 64 bit) are working. Except one of them , placed in slot 64 connected in a chain to Diva-classic compressor32bit-Trash2-valhallashimmer64.

Is causing the crackling and did not work. (just prrruumpp ,pruummp and does not play anything except that.) I just changed the reverb to valhallavintageverb64 and the song plays fine.

Weird thing though.

Hey man thanks for all the help. I appreciate it. MPTM is my favorite toy/tool (i dont make money off it.

) And i love all the work you guys have done. Been a very cool decade and half (or something like that.) good times upon good times.

sso · February 03, 2023, 06:43:08

Well, its back to crackling like crazy but playing fine once i hit stop and press play again.

Also started to crash again, randomly.

Lol.

sso · February 03, 2023, 06:49:16

eehhhh... Its mostly working fine. I tried the wasapi and that works better.

BUUT... the focusrite asio just sounds crisper and nicer.

And its kinda working, so im just gonna live with that.

Saga Musix · February 06, 2023, 20:27:04

I think Diva might be your problem here, not ValhallaShimmer. It's known to be quite a power-hungry plugin. It could be that your machine is keeping up with just Diva but adding another plugin like ValhallaShimmer might be what's causing it to tip over. As WASAPI is working better for you, it's a telling sign that the ASIO driver would also work better if you increase its latency. Ususally that is done through the sound card's control panel but I cannot tell you any specifics for Focusrite devices.

sso · February 07, 2023, 17:30:22

ehh, im only using about 7% of the cpu , even when i have over 100 plugins. I think im using 10 instances of diva in one song. Plus some
serums and fm8´s.

Its a i9 13900kf.

Anyways. I removed some 32 bit versions of valhalla and some compressor that was 32 bit and then everything was fine.
It still crashes very occasionally. Always in the edit screen. Just randomly really. Sometimes when pressing play but only in the edit screen. But no more crackling.

Thanks for the reply.

Saga Musix · February 07, 2023, 17:34:05

As OpenMPT's mixer is currently single-threaded, those 7% mean that you are in fact maxing out an entire core of that CPU. But in general, when you are in this sort of situation, the first thing that will help is indeed using only plugins whose bitness matches that of OpenMPT itself. If OpenMPT crashes for you, it would be helpful if you could provide the crash dump so that we can check if there is anything that can be fixed on our side, or if it's a plugin issue.

manx · February 07, 2023, 17:40:40

Quote from: Saga Musix on February 07, 2023, 17:34:05As OpenMPT's mixer is currently single-threaded, those 7% mean that you are in fact maxing out an entire core of that CPU.

I am contemplating whether we should add CPU usage to the OpenMPT statusbar. The fact that Task Manager considers 100% to be "all cores/threads" is misleading at best. I really prefer the Linux way of showing CPU load, where 100% is a single core/thread, and a fully loaded 13900KF would be 3200%.

sso · March 22, 2023, 03:11:41

"As OpenMPT's mixer is currently single-threaded,"

Yeah i thought so. I was hoping not.

So this stands to change then?

Does this mean that turning hyperthreading off might be beneficial or?

sso · March 22, 2023, 03:13:10

It hasnt really crashed since i started using the wasapi.

Thanks.

Saga Musix · March 22, 2023, 19:26:01

Quote from: sso on March 22, 2023, 03:11:41So this stands to change then?

There are no immediate plans. It's a complex topic.

Quote from: sso on March 22, 2023, 03:11:41Does this mean that turning hyperthreading off might be beneficial or?

I'm not aware that this would be helpful. In general, a CPU with a high single-core performance is advisable.