Audio Dropouts - Solutions?

vvvv gamma question
1

Hello vvvvorum,

i am trying to play roughly 450 Audio Files from a directory at the same time, but I am getting dropouts. The patch seems to run smoothly so is it my Audio Driver that is can’t catch up?
Audioplayer_Example.vl (12.8 KB)
I am using ASIO4ALL 2.16 and VVVV Gamma 6.6.

Is there a way I could perform this in a more lightweighted way? For example by using buffers or maybe an async loop?

Thanks in advance!

Regards
D

2

looking at your patch, I am wondering why you want to play that many audio files at once?
Try to explain what you are doing, maybe there is a more optimal way of doing it

Things you can do.

  1. use another ASIO driver than ASIO4All, i Would suggest FL studio asio driver. just install FL studio demo and then uninstall everything except for the asio driver.
  2. what audio file type are you playing? Compressed audio needs to be decompressed by the CPU, so using uncompressed audio is key, Wav is good.
  3. Are all the files the same format? samplerate, bit depth, codec?
  4. are you using a machine with a fast CPU and fast SSD as well as enough RAM?

Sune

2 Likes
3

thanks @sunep

I want to create an audio pointcloud, that enables you to sonically explore a catalogue of wav files (in a spacial 3d way). Depending on the camera position there you should hear the respective (closest) Wavs. However there has to be an option to also listen to all ~450 files simultaneously.

I will try the fl studio driver and see how that affects the performance
All files are wavs but they come in different formats when it comes to SR and Bit Depth.

Here are my specs (I also use an ssd)

CPU:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz

Base speed: 3.60 GHz
Sockets: 1
Cores: 4
Logical processors: 8
Virtualization: Enabled
L1 Cache: 256 KB
L2 Cache: 1.0 MB
L3 Cache: 8.0 MB
Usage: 8%

Speed: 3.70 GHz

Uptime: 0:00:34:14

Processes: 234

Threads: 3498

Handles: 103783

Memory:

16.0 GB

Speed: 2400 MHz
Slots used: 2 of 2
Form factor: DIMM
Reserved for hardware: 51.8 MB
Available: 10.8 GB

In Cache: 2.9 GB

Committed: 9.6/31.9 GB

Paged pool: 455 MB

Non-paged pool: 479 MB

In use (compressed): 5.1 GB (159 MB)
4

are you spatializing the sounds? if so, how?
are the sounds stereo or mono or multi channel?

5

I don’t intend to spatialize the sounds (yet). Allthough this seems interesting as well…

By spacial I meant that the Wav files are spreaded out in a 3d space. (Imagine a random spread of spheres in Stride, with each sphere representing one Wav. The closer you get to a sphere i.e. Wav, the louder this particular Wav will become. I achieved something similar referring to the sound particles help patch.

Problem is this “All-On” mode where all 450 Wavs should be played back:/

6

Not long ago, the developers announced the introduction of Pure Data (represented by Plug Data) in Gamma. It seems to me that the solution of such tasks could be entrusted to a node-based DSP system rather than standard NAudio tools.

Have you tried anything similar in PureData or MaxMSP?

7

Are the sounds changing or are they static?

If they are static, you could pre-render a mixdown of all audio files, I also think you will have issues with levels when mixing that many files.

Also for consistency, I would sample rate convert offline to avoid samplerate mismatchs and do the same with bit depth.

If they are changing over time, I would convert the files as they are added.
This tool looks like one that would make it easy to integrate, you can launch it from gamma using executor.

I would go for 16bit 48kHz wav

Sune