What's more important - cpu or soundcard when mixing?

[crackityjones]

Hi,

Apologies if this has been covered before. I'm using adobe audition for recording my bands stuff. It works absoloutly fine to record/playback anything, it never stutters or lags even with up to 30 tracks. That is with pure raw tracks though, no effects anywhere.

If I add effects - say reverb/chorus whatever to maybe 8 tracks it keeps up, but once I go over this it starts stuttering and jumping all over the place. Turn off the effects on the extra tracks and playback is smooth again.

When it starts to stutter like that I do notice that the cpu is up to 100%, so I assumed the problem lies there. I have a quite powerful quad core laptop I use for work so I tried setting up everything on this. Sure enough the cpu on that was ticking along at about 40%, but playback started to stutter again. So in this case I'm wondering if it's the soundcard.

So in short I'm trying to decide which spend money on upgrading. Both have just a standard built-in soundcard. I can put a decent soundcard into the desktop, but have lower cpu power, or I can use the laptop which has decent cpu, but poor soundcard. I could get a firewire external card perhaps which might help. I don't want to waste money on a soundcard for the desktop machine only to discover that the cpu is the problem and likewise I'm not sure a firewire card will be fast enough as it's external for the laptop.

In general when mixing multitrack sessions with effects is the cpu or the soundcard the bottleneck - or is it not as simple as that?

Any opinions greatly appreciated!

 

[Bobbsy]

The soundcard has little to do with the mixing process, other than acting as a D to A converter to give you an analogue feed to your monitors.

It's your CPU which is doing all the work when you add effects--and some effects are pretty CPU intensive.

Frankly, even the fastest processor in existence will eventually have trouble as you add more and more effects.

A few thoughts: first, you don't say what version of Audition you're using. None of the earlier ones up to AA3 could make the best use of multicore processors--and even the most recent (from memory) doesn't get much benefit from anything over a dual core.

Second, extra RAM, if you have the capacity, can be a bit help with this.

Third, tricks like using buses to add the same effect to multiple tracks as only a single effect can help. Beyond that, tricks like "locking" the effects you're happy with can take load off the processor.

Finally, although you likely know it, once you're ready to mix down, even if you had stuttering when mixing, the rendering of the final mix will be fine.

 

[crackityjones]

Hey Bobbsy

Thanks for that. I had used audition 3.0 for years which I think only uses 1 core at a time. I tried the trial version of Cs5.5 as it can apparently make use of multi core, and I expected to see a huge improvement, if it did I was going to get the full version. To be honest I didn't see much of an improvement, maybe slightly. I was using this on an i5 quad core running about 2.6ghz per core.

What puzzled me is the fact it was only running at about 40-50% when it started to stutter, on audtion 3 it was maxing out the cpu so I expect it to stutter then. Unless Cs5.5 just doesn't use all the cores and that 40% means it's only able to use 2 of the 4 cores as you suggested, in which case 50% would be it's max I guess. I have 4gb of memory and it never goes beyond 2gb so don't think that's affecting it.

I guess I'd be wasting my money so going off buying an expensive soundcard if as you say cpu is the main issue. hmmm well looks like one of these days im going to have to make the inevitable step of moving to cubase or nuendo, unless audition cs6 has quad core support.

For the moment I'll forge on and as you say lock in the effect of the tracks I'm happy with, which was what I was doing all along with autdition 3, was just nice to be able to take the effect back off in case I needed to, but not the end of the world.

Thanks again for that.

 

[axeman_ukl]

have you tried altering the latency after you have done all the tracking when mixing there is little point burning up cpu power on low latency.

 

[crackityjones]

have you tried altering the latency after you have done all the tracking when mixing there is little point burning up cpu power on low latency.

You sir, are a legend.

I on the other hand, am a complete idiot.

I had the asio buffer size down pretty much as low as I could get it from when I was recording the stuff, never put them higher for mixing. Set those up to the highest possible and so far it's purring along. Thank you so much.