Pianoteq 5 high cpu usage

Just to be clear:

. . . How does your setup work with Pianoteq 4.5.4 ?

. . . What does Pianoteq show as the "Performance Index" when you play?

I started a thread on this topic.  What I did for my laptop (Intel Core i5, 2.6 GHz, 4 cores):

1.  Disabled the WiFi-card driver (just "disconnecting" the WiFi didn't do much) -- you must go into the "control panel" to do this;

2.  Used ASIO4ALL on the _built-in_ sound card -- I had poor results with a USB soundcard, even with ASIO4ALL.

3.  Set the power plan to "Maximum performance".

.              Charles

PS -- I'm still new to this game, and there may be things I should do, and haven't done.

256. I'll try lowering it. Thanks! Larry

yes its reducing polyphony and switching off all unnecessary background applications, anti virus, windows defender etc, and the main one, wifi.

5 seems about 15 percent more cpu intensive than 4.5. i have two laptops, one with an i7, which could run the program 2 or 3 times simultaneously without issue. however i can still  run 5 on a core due 1.72 ghz, with 5.7 ms of latency, and 48 note polyphony, with no problems as long as all the unnecessary background operations are turned off. including minimizing the pianoteq interface as that requires cpu cycles.

Thank you so much for the help.

Let's see.

I changed power management to maximum performance.
I reduced polyphony to 128.
I reduced sample rate from 96k to 48k
I set audio buffer to 5ms (240 samples)

Now the cpu is maxing at 75% and I'm not getting crackling. If I do, I'll reduce the internal sample rate.

The K2 is a really killer piano! I'm not sure if I'm going to go back to Ivory II. Larry

All three editions run the same engine, hence they have the same CPU usage.

I never knew Cubase SX uses so much resources before I had Pianoteq. It has a lot more reserve in the standalone mode. In fact, on a Penthium IV 3.0 GHz 2GB RAM machiine, I can't use Pianoteq together with Cubase at all. Must buy new computer ...

Since I'm the individual that started this post, I want to mention (and I stated this in another thread) that I am getting excellent performance out of Pianoteq. My initial problem was probably with an incompatible sound card, a Sound Blaster ZXR, that was acting up in my computer.

Since using a Xenyx Q502USB mixer with ASIO4ALL, I'm using less than 50% peak CPU on my 2800ghz dual core computer with 2.7ms latency (I get occasional clipping at 1.3ms), 4800 HZ external and internal sample rate, 128 polyphony, hi res MIDI.

Operation is seamless.

That's a neat idea!  I never thought of using the Behringer USB mixer as a soundcard.  But it's cheaper than most things sold as soundcards, and probably works fine.

One more thing on the shopping list . . . <g>

.          Charles

The Steinberg looks like a good choice. The signal to noise ratio on the Steinberg is the same as the Behringer.

I must say that the Behringer is super quiet when I play the piano, and I couldn't tell the difference in sound quality between it and a fancy tube headphone amp. Albeit, I'm not an audiophile, and there might be things like listener fatigue, subconscious stuff.

If I were on a budget, but wanted to make sure I was getting the best sound within that budget, I would pick up both the Behringer and the Steinberg used, spend some time comparing, and sell whichever one loses on price or quality.

kalessin: With something like the Steinberg, do you plug the keyboard into the midi input? I am currently using a midi to usb cable and then crappy onboard soundcard. Wondering if I upgrade to an external soundcard if I should plan on connecting the keyboard to the soundcard too instead of to a usb port on the laptop....

That should not make much of a difference, other than wasting a USB port if you don't. Most modern keyboards have built-in USB anyway (and an increasing number even drops the old hardware MIDI ports). If you use an interface like the Steinberg UR22, if you use the built-in MIDI port or an external converter cable will make not much of a difference. The Steinberg interface might be a little bit superior in terms of latency and jitter, but to be honest you will probably not notice anything. But on the other hand, why waste that USB port when the UR22 provides a MIDI port anyway?

The question of latency and jitter when using MIDI over USB is actually a rather contentiously discussed one; in theory USB is not a real-time transport and thus actually can (and does, to a degree) introduce increased latency and jitter. In practice, most of the time you will not notice anything, especially in the case we are discussing here: a single keyboard controlling a virtual instrument. Jitter becomes important when you control many different hardware devices all at once, but as far as I know this is not really the way things are done anymore in the days of DAWs and virtual instruments.

This is physically improbable. The MIDI signal is a serial connection of about 31250 bits/second. Since it is serial, latency between channels actually is an issue. But the electromagnetic wave in the wire travels at near-lightspeed, i.e., several hundreds of thousands of kilometers per second. In other words: if you change the voltage on one end of a cable, even if it is 10 metres (~30ft) long, the change reaches the other end in less than 50 nanoseconds.

Cheap sound cards can and often do suffer from several artefacts:

• A mixture of white, pink, red noise

• 'Humming' sounds due to bad electrical de-coupling (this is also especially true for the cheap USB stick-like devices)

• Clipping

• Distortion: a bad sound card can sound like listening through a cheap band pass filter

• Aliasing: when the sampled signal is not reconstructed correctly (Nyquist-Shannon theorem), the result are artefacts in the higher frequencies. Similar effects happen when working with 96kHz audio and not properly downsampling.

• Badly-done dithering: audible as a nasty "hissing" sound whenever certain sounds are played that are rich in high frequencies (violins, pianos, electrical guitars). Especially problematic on low volumes; this is an effect almost every single mobile device (smartphone, tablet) I know shows.

My most notorious example for these is a SoundBlaster Play! I have lying around here. That is after all a device for around 25-30 bucks. It shows audible humming on certain USB ports, especially on hubs (and Creative still advertises a SNR of 90dB!), it hisses and it produces aliasing so bad that the built-in sound of my tablet is actually better...

I wouldn't call myself an expert. I know that there are multiple timing and latency problems with MIDI, but I am not a professional music producer, so I don't know all of the specifics. Whether the hardware limitations pose a problem also largely depends on what you are trying to achieve. Cable length can definitely be an issue, but im my opinion not because of latency but rather because of signal quality: I would be at least careful (i.e., use quality cabling) with anything longer than 10 metres (30ft). I know just enough from my physicist/programmer point of view to be able to state that in 'simple' scenarios like the ones discussed here, there shouldn't be much of a practical problem.