Hi all!

First let me congratulate you guys for making this incredible software. I use recabinet since version 2.0 and with a integrate GUI this thing just rocks.

now for the bad part

however, since i bought recabinet3 im struggling with cpu issues...

My pc is a AMD64 X2 5000+ 4gb Ram running win7 32bit
I use a presonus firepod as audio interface (i also have the onboard audio card enabled, can this be a problem?)
I use reaper as a DAW as well as Sony acid pro 7 sometimes (same cpu issue on both)

On reaper the plugin chain just with Recabinet shows 25% load on both cpus.
On acid i dont have a way of knowing, but the computer gets really slow with two instances, so i bet its the same.

Also crashes are very frequent to the point of making recabinet not usable at all.. and that drives me nuts...

I have read everything that was here and i have the latest version of recabinet (3.04) and the latest of reaper.

I have tryed removing and instaling a fresh recabinet version (i even got to the point of seraching registry values and deleting them after the unistall) and still the behaviour persists.

Is this kind of cpu load normal on a PC like mine? is there any way to tweak reaper to work better?
I need some urgent help.. need to record a EP for a band and i cant use reaper

Thanks in advance!

Another customer running AMD hardware alerted me to similar issues. We're going to have to get an AMD test box in house to investigate this, right now we're a 100% Intel operation, and Recabinet 3 has been on the market for a year with no issues reported from AMD users until a few weeks ago.

In the mean time, make sure that your Presonus is the active ASIO driver in Reaper (although I'm sure you've already done this if you're recording through it.)

Thanks for the answer kazrog,

I will probably do two things in the weekend,

One: try and find updated CPU drivers or disable the one that i have (amd had a cpu driver, strange i know)
or
Two: install Win7 64bit since the cpu runs at 64bit native and see what happens

I will post conclusions of my experiment asap.

regards

Going 64 bit with Windows 7, Reaper, and Recabinet will probably improve your performance. Also make sure you are disabling any kind of CPU power management.

Hello again kazrog!

Good news,

With 64 bit version, i have massive performance improvements.

One instance of the plugin now consumes 13-15% of cpu instead of the 25% on the 32bit version.
On 32bit windows, with one instance there was great probability of a crash happening (specialy if a riff is in loop ) with 64bit i played 4 instances of the plugin with minimal pops and with a riff looped.

however, while playing i tried to operate the plugin gui and it crashed. I dont know if its something easily repeatable, but its allready late here in Portugal, and i want to go to bed lol. As soon as i get some more conclusions i will post them here.

I am also a software developer.. so i know how much these platform related bugs/quirks can be a pain in the ass

Btw: listened to your band and its great! Im a big fan of soilwork, Inflames, ScarSymetry etc (groove metal and melodeath stuff) and i really enjoyed what i heard. Have to listen to more

keep up the good work
Cheers

Thanks for the kind words, and for soldiering through the issues. Looks like I'll be spending some quality time with the debugger once my AMD box gets here...

As for Backmask - we're working on a new album at the moment, around our busy schedules. The new record picks up where Dark Fiber left off, I'd say it's more progressive and definitely heavier so far.

Recabinet 4 is also in the works, but there will be some free updates to Recabinet 3 before that comes out later this year.

heheh All good news then (except the debuger part obviouly lol)

more feedback:

Did some more tests:

#important : I installed a feature from AMD called "dual core optimizer", the info in the amd site states:

The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer can help improve some PC gaming video performance by compensating for those applications that bypass the Windows API for timing by directly using the RDTSC (Read Time Stamp Counter) instruction. Applications that rely on RDTSC do not benefit from the logic in the operating system to properly account for the affect of power management mechanisms on the rate at which a processor core's Time Stamp Counter (TSC) is incremented. The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer helps to correct the resulting video performance effects or other incorrect timing effects that these applications may experience on dual-core processor systems, by periodically adjusting the core time-stamp-counters, so that they are synchronized.

Dont know if your architecture uses the same direct access, but the truth is that once i installed this i went back to recabinet and tested every knob and button of the GUI during playback with 4 instances runing in loop and no crash whatsoever!

Bottom line, im satisfied and i hope these tips will help other AMD users

looking forward to hear the new album, and to try recabinet 4

thank you and good luck with the debugging!

Hey there
Thanks for posting this info... I had started a thread (REAPER crashing) basically detailing what was happening with you. I would scroll through the mics or cabs, make adjustments and have my AMD box crash as well. I will look into this remedy... I have a quad core processor, wonder if AMD has an optmizer for that too.

Thanks again, this forum is great.

Recabinet 3 uses SSE/SSE2 extensions, hooks into a system library that uses RDTSC via inline assembler, and is highly parallel. It assumes that NO power management is present - so that perhaps has something to do with why AMD's multi core optimizer is working for you. If this proves to be a viable solution (rather than a bug on our end) then we will recommend this to our AMD users.

Thanks for posting this, it's a great find! I'll freely admit to being a bit unfamiliar with AMD's product line and overall approach, so this was very helpful!

Hi again,

sorry for the late response.

No thanks needed! just glad i could help somehow.

I did some more tests and recorded live,and recabinet feels stable as a rock. However I have lots of clicks and pops during live processing, and when playing recorded tracks.

As i read in a topic here this is maybe related with some insuficient buffer size (probably on the asio driver), however since im a bit new to reaper, and there are a lot of different buffers i can change, can you be so kind and walk me thru to the correct one?

Thanks again!