Audio dropouts when using only one plugin instance

Hey @Gonzalo,

fortunately, there will be no need for that!

As I was running LatencyMon one last time, so I can submit my reports to your team, I monitored the processes in task manager. Latencymon did not report any anomalies.

Something weird came into my focus. I discovered a process called GCloud running and using just about 1% of CPU. That seemed odd because I disabled all of Google’s services such as Drive or similar and turned off the internet connection.

However, this was not Google related software, but a utility software for my Gigabyte motherboard. I remember I installed their own software called App Center for something I can’t remember, at least 6 months ago, maybe even more and I thought that this software is unrelated to the performance of my computer. Boy, was I wrong.

I promptly uninstalled this software which automatically, uninstalled all of its additional background services. Immediately after uninstalling this, my DAWs somehow started breathing again. I can run 10 instances of Plini or Cory Wong on 64 samples buffer size without a single dropout, and audio load never reaches over 60%. All of my projects now work multiple times better, regardless of the plugins used.

I am amazed by how much this little software caused damage and how hard it was to find. Mostly because it did not kill my PC, but it suffocated it silently and randomly. All the monitoring apps did not catch anything. It was there for months like a leech and I did not notice it. My guess is that its EasyTune interfered with the CPU and tried to optimize the performance by manually adjusting clock speed. But that was definitely brutal for audio tasks.

I hope this helps someone in the future. Real-time audio issues are sometimes super hard to debug. My advice now would be to always test performance on a completely clean machine if you can. If not, try to really strip down your software stack to the bare minimum because you never know what can interfere with audio.

All in all, I am super happy that I found this. If I hadn’t bought Cory Wong plugin, I probably wouldn’t bother with this for months, until it would start to really get on my nerves. :laughing:

Thanks NeuralDSP for the amazing plugin, sounds made on Cory Wong are seriously world-class!

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