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Hi There
I was wondering if any of the older versions of spec/zag are still available, as i have a fairly ancient machine i.e. a celeron 2.93Ghz with just 2 gig ram, and not much chance of an upgrade in the near future, no matter what settings i try in preferences, i cannot live monitor anything, so all i can do is best guess settings and run through off line!

Any help with this would be most appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Jim.

Jim,

Are you live-monitoring your source at 44.1? Are you adjusting your DSP settings under "preferences?" There are settings under which none of us are really able to live monitor. Zeerround can weigh in more as to whether your PC can handle this, but there's a lot you could hopefully do to lighten the load.

Hi
Yep I've tried using 44.1 hz source, i've tried setting preferences even as low as :

Buffer size 512
fft size 1024
fft overlap 2
Higher presision is ticked
bypass drivers current settings is ticked

plus all other variants suggested in forum and pdf

with the above settings, plogue just crashes, any higher either the sound is slow and distorted, or plogue grinds to a halt, with settings at fft 4048, and overlap at 4, i get dsp of over 350, even with the simple spec layout, but as i said i can process off line, its just frustrating having to guess rather than monitor.

Jim.

Sorry but the older versions are no longer available, but I don't think they would solve your problem anyway, as dsp load is lower now than in the earliest versions.

Let's try the following. there is a registry hack for Plogue that allows you to incrase the buffer size beyond 512. I've attached it below. Un-rar and double click, or you can look at it with a text editor and make the change with regedit.

Close Plogue first, then reopen at try the new buffer sizes, noteing the DSP with SPEC processing. You may find that the best setting is not the largest buffer size, e.g. 2048 vs. 4096.

I'm also curious as to what DSP load a layout with just your audio device in it uses, as I've never heard anyone having this issue before with an Intel processor. What sound card and driver are you using?

Are you able to play an audio file directly into your audio device without a problem?

Hi
right i'm running win xp sp3, and my sound card is a terratec aureon space 7.1 pci, with the last set of drivers issued from web site. It is connected to my av via spam cables, as i cannot get it to play dts files through windows via spdif, though through linux was no problem.
I'm also running the latest version of plogue and everything is 32 bit.

I have no issues running other layouts with highest settings and monitoring, and following tutorials from www.dtsac3.com main site i get dsp of around 12 with final layouts again with full settings and monitoring.

When i load spec main layout with no audio file loaded into player but soundcard attatched, if i switch the layout on, i get dsp of around 180, even with lowest settings

The reg hack allows me to load spec simple layout and monitor by using buffer set at 1024,fft size 4096, and fft overlap 4, giving a dsp of around 70 as you suspected raising the buffer size any higher has no effect except at 4096 where performance degrades

again since the reg hack i can load spec main, and as long as i bypass everything, then set to process everything except "Free mastering Tools", and " Automatic Gain" i can run and monitor with settings of fft size 2048, and fft overlap 2 giving a dsp of around 90, but if i just load spec main, and bypass the two groups, i get dsp of around 140, go figure!

I also cannot set fft size to below 2048 as plogue freezes then crashes to desktop

Also just to see now i've loaded spec main with no audio file and no soundcard on layout, and it has frozen my machine for about 20 mins when i set it to on.

Sorry if all this is a bit long winded, but as you can see, ive tried everything i can think of, so any help would be gratefully received.

Jim.

Since you mentioned liinux, are you running windows bare metal or in some kind of VM?

no had linux on seperate partition, just to playback dts files, removed once i got spam cables, as its on another machine already

And in Zag uncheck Peak Capture.

In the Input Conditioner, make sure the mode is bypass.

If you're not doing Per Track Automation you could use a copy of the layout with the Preset Manager removed.

If you're using ArcTan, vs. Slice, you could bypass ZPan.

That's about as lean as you can get and still use Zag.

I'm still somewhat stumped by your high DSP load however. How is your memory utilization? On my machine Plogue with SPEC loaded uses 198 Megs, but if you have other stuff running?

I'll boot up my XP machine and see what things look like.

Yep with with settings of fft size 2048, and fft overlap 2 i can live monitor but the sound although running in real time i.e not choppy or slow, is very rough and metalic sounding even with the settings you've just recomended, i've now discovered that the bass tone generator is running in the background, even though the checkbox isn't ticked, so time for a reinstall me thinks