Important DSP Factory Info
pete leoni
made an interesting discovery that may help some of you out that are having
problems with this card. This card is *very* memory dependent because for
every output device that you have open, it caches many megabytes of ram. In
fact with Cakewalk 6.01 and all 8 output ports open it sometimes exceeded
the 64 MB's that I have installed and began to hit the swapfile! Needless
to say this is untenable. Yamaha makes no mention of this in the literature
that I am aware of. The moral of the story is be very careful if you don't
have at least 128 Mb of ram installed when running some apps such as 6.01,
and be very careful of the buffer settings on 8.01 and other apps. It would
be very nice if the manufacturers these devices would let us know these
things up front instead of having to make painful and costly "discoveries".
For those of you that plan on purchasing the DSP Factory card, add the cost
of at least 64 MB's of additional ram to your purchase of the DSP factory
card, along with the cost of the expansion boxes for more inputs than 1
stereo pair, and real the cost of this card begins to climb rapidly.
--
Pete Leoni
Demotech Productions
pete leoni
Add the cost of Gary Simmons LUI or C-console to the mix as well.
Garry Simmons
Cakewalk creates playback buffers for each stereo output. Since you have 8
stereo outputs, you have 8 times as much memory usage. There is no reason
for allocating stupid amounts of memory to control the DSPF card. It's just
not needed, although that's not to say the code isn't being wasteful. It
would be interesting to compare the memory usage with a DSPF for the plain
vanilla 8.01 vs the DSPF-enabled 8.01.
Garry
pete leoni wrote in message
<01be4305$b7c82fc0$d15b...@Pdemotech.ametro.net>...
>I have recently been playing with the Yamaha DSP Factory card, and I have
>made an interesting discovery that may help some of you out that are having
>problems with this card. This card is *very* memory dependent because for
>every output device that you have open, it caches many megabytes of ram. In
>fact with Cakewalk 6.01 and all 8 output ports open it sometimes exceeded
>the 64 MB's that I have installed and began to hit the swapfile! Needless
>to say this is untenable. Yamaha makes no mention of this in the literature
>that I am aware of. The moral of the story is be very careful if you don't
>have at least 128 Mb of ram installed when running some apps such as 6.01,
>and be very careful of the buffer settings on 8.01 and other apps. It would
>be very nice if the manufacturers these devices would let us know these
>things up front instead of having to make painful and costly "discoveries".
Eric Haarbauer
set the wave buffer size & number very low? Or are you talking about a
different buffer? (I don't have a DSPF [yet], so I can't try it.)
-eric
Garry Simmons wrote in message <77vq65$r...@hope.harvard.net>...
Garry Simmons
Eric Haarbauer wrote in message <77vtfu$s...@hope.harvard.net>...
>But if the DSPF is doing all the mixing, etc., then shouldn't one be able
to
>set the wave buffer size & number very low? Or are you talking about a
>different buffer? (I don't have a DSPF [yet], so I can't try it.)
Hi Eric,
Cakewalk still (potentially) needs to submix multiple tracks before sending
them off to the DSPF for final mixing. Let's say you have 8 tracks of
backing vocals. You may use Cakewalk to create a stereo submix of them so
that you only use two channels of the DSPF mixer. You can also apply DirectX
effects in realtime to individual tracks, via inserts or aux buses, and
Cakewalk has to process all that before sending it off the DSPF for more
mixing and processing. In a sense, Cakewalk/Console View is a submixer that
feeds the DSPF mixer. I intend on making extensive use of audio vectors to
"ride" my channel volumes in Cakewalk and use the fader positions on the
DSPF mixer as master volumes (more or less).
Here's another cool trick.... Dedicate two of your DSPF channels (i.e. one
stereo output) as a DirectX effect return. Change the Aux return driver to
be DS2416 Out #8 for all your Aux masters. Then you can use channels 15 and
16 of the DSPF mixer to control how much DirectX effect output you blend
into the final mix. This lets you continue to send dry audio to the other 14
channels of the DSPF (via the 7 remaining stereo outputs). Since you've
freed your CPU from having to do EQ and dynamics, maybe you can even more
DirectX effects than before, plus you still have the 2 onboard effect units
on the DSPF. I use my AX44 to send auxes 1 thru 4 to an outboard effect box
(Ensoniq DP/4), so I more effect processing available to me than I could
ever use...
Garry
pete leoni
You-da-Layla guy, have you seen extraordinary memory usage???
pete
Garry Simmons <ga...@cliffhanger.com> wrote in article
pete leoni
Thanks for info
Waiting for 8.03, playing with 8.01 now, looks like 8.03 will be the thing.
pete
Hugo Martinez <hu...@hugomartinez.com> wrote in article
<36a5dd43...@news.cakewalk.com>...
> "pete leoni" <demo...@datasync.com> wrote:
>
> For me, 8.01 has also been more stable than 6.0/6.01. Of course, 7.0
> and 8.0 were major pieces of unadulterated crap so I understand why
> you use 6.01. At least you get work done.
>
> Take care,
>
> Hugo
> http://www.hugomartinez.com
>
Hugo Martinez
>This card is *very* memory dependent because for
>every output device that you have open, it caches many megabytes of ram. In
>fact with Cakewalk 6.01 and all 8 output ports open it sometimes exceeded
>the 64 MB's that I have installed and began to hit the swapfile!
Pete,
I found Cake Pro Audio 6.01 to be a memory hog when tweaked to maximum
performance with a Wave/4, all four ports used. I quickly upgraded my
64 megs to 192 on my PII 333.
Now may be a good time to upgrade to 8.01.
Today I use a Celeron @450 with 128 Megs (64 less than my old PII!),
Win 98 and a Yamaha DSPF. I'm only using four of the Yamaha's ports,
as I've been transferring projects over from the Wave/4. I do have
two AX44s. Right now, Cakewalk 8.01, LUI, IE 4 and Agent are open. I
routinely have Wavelab open along with Cakewalk and LUI, sometimes
even while accessing the Internet. I break the rules by using this
computer for everything, including graphics, scanning, web design,
bookkeeping, games, etc. No problems.