I tried out the software on the internal soundcard before I did my gig and didn't experience any problems. But when I got to the gig and connected my S4 the CPU load was through the roof.
Probably because my computer has the i7 processor Traktor didn't have any glitches so I just played the whole night with the WARNING light blinking on my S4!
I looked at the NI forum to see if anybody else was experiencing the same thing. There where quite alot of posts about other problems with the 2.1.1 update, but not direcly the same. Then I remembered that I had a similar experience when I bought the S4 and used the S4 software (Pre Traktor Pro 2). What I did then was to switch soundcard from the S4 built-in soundcard with my trusted Audio 8 DJ and voila CPU load dropped and didn't show much stress even when playing with 10 audio sources, all keyed and running 4 x 3 effects. Still... Pretty important.
All in all the new 2.1.1 update is a step forward, but I guess, since they've altered the architecture, that some old ghosts come back to haunt us.
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| Always bring along a back-up soundcard! |
Lessons learned:
- When upgrading your software you should try the system out before you do the gig with EVERYTHING connected as it would durring the performance. Do a stress test on the system.
- If the S4 gives you trouble with high CPU loads... Try using another soundcard.
I guess this also would go for those of you who recently puchased the Native Instruments Kontrol S2 aswell.
2 comments:
i think NI is stepping on a big pile of crap with this one.
I own an S4, an iMac and a laptop PC (both with intel i7 sandy bridge CPUs). I've had so many problems with glitches in audio on my laptop PC from day one and i hoped this would be solved with 2.1 update, since that introduced the support for multi-core CPUs, but the glitches are still there. Having to run that damn script to turn off all the services, pisses me off more and more everytime. How come i own the best CPU on the market and still i experience those problems on an €900 "supposedly professional" controller??!? this is just plain stupid and NI should really work on this issue because it's obviously not an OS problem, it's an audio driver problem!
on my iMac i never had those kind of issues but i have to say that when i upgraded to 2.1 i experienced a lot of problems and had to revert back to 2.0.3. I tried to uninstall completely 2.0 and re-install 2.1 from scratch but no results. hope this will be solved soon.
NI should really solve the issue quickly or they aren't gonna sell controllers to PC users anymore.
I guess the complexity of multi threading has created some unforseen issues in this release. It's the first time in a long time I've seen as much dissatisfaction on a Traktor release.
Native Instruments will probably fix it in the same quiet manor as they did the last time. Didn't take to long for it to get fixed the last time around.
Hopefully it will be pretty soon as I normaly use my Audio 8 for post processing in Ableton. In the mean time I'll just have to go with Traktor.
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