Audio glitches / performance

Tracktion Engine
1

Hi again, one more question… :grinning:

I’m experiencing intermittent audio glitches which suggests too low buffer size and/or too much work in the audio thread. However the average CPU load is very low and my edit is not very big: about 10 audio channels (of which most don’t even have any clips) and a couple of lightweight plugins. It also happens with relatively large buffer sizes (512 samples). I’m on macOS/CoreAudio and in other software I’m usually able to use much smaller buffer sizes without any hearable glitches.

I suspect there may be something that I’m doing that I shouldn’t do; I have checked for obvious stuff such as memory allocation in the audio callbacks etc but is there anything else I should look for? Are there some diagnostic tools or even just a checklist for things to watch out for?

Also, how big difference (performance-wise) is there between debug and release builds?

Any suggestions welcome!

Erik

2

There’s probably a big difference between debug and release builds. Not only is there way more error checking but debug builds probably won’t generate SIMD at all which is probably used quite heavily.

I would probably start with a basic profiler to see what your hotspots are.

You could also enable the TRACKTION_CHECK_FOR_SLOW_RENDERING config flag which will assert if a section of the audio pipeline takes a particularly long time. It might show something useful.

3

Thanks, I’ll try that!