On Tue, 31 Dec 2024 17:41:39 -0800, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On 12/31/2024 4:15 PM, Rin Stowleigh wrote:
>> On Tue, 31 Dec 2024 15:53:20 -0800, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I think I've got it all working now.
>>>
>>> TL;DR:
>>>
>>> 1. Don't buy cases with GLASS panels (I didn't even realize it was
>>> glass, the one I bought for me is plexiglass)
>>>
>>> 2. F Google keeping your bookmarks in the cloud. (I've actually had it
>>> lose them all for people a couple times at work too!) Export them to
>>> back them up.
>>>
>>> 3. F Onedrive taking over your filesystem (It's been working pretty well
>>> at work, but it was an unmitigated disaster on my son's personal PC)
>>>
>>> 4. Don't buy a CPU with built in GPU if you can avoid it and you're
>>> planning to use discrete.
>>>
>>>
>>> The LONG:
>>>
>>> Putting it all together was pretty easy. I installed windows 11 pro.
>>> Updated all the drivers.
>>>
>>> I brought over what I could, but he uses FL Studio (Audio studio of some
>>> sort) and that screwed it up where the most important plug in wouldn't
>>> work. Also got a bunch of errors that files weren't there when
>>> transferring the data.
>>>
>>> Wiped it, started over and brought very little over.
>>>
>>> Had an issue where Chrome wiped out all his favorites after he signed
>>> in. I tried to get the bookmarks from the old computer, but they were
>>> missing from where I saved them on the desktop when I popped the drive
>>> in the new one, back and forth several times and I finally figured out
>>> onedrive had somehow taken over his desktop, only the desktop wasn't
>>> there in onedrive, so the files just disappeared until I booted it back
>>> up. I eventually figured to put in in a folder on the root of c, and
>>> got them.
>>>
>>> Chrome would wipe them out though replacing them with nothing every time
>>> I tried. I loaded them up offline on the old computer, exported from
>>> them and brought them over, but somehow it picked up thousands of old
>>> bookmarks and not the few he wanted. We ended up just deleting them.
>>>
>>> FL Studio also had to export all his plugins he wanted and he dealt with
>>> loading them up. It was working.
>>>
>>> Somewhere in all taking the front panel off and on repeatedly the GLASS
>>> panel shattered into a million pieces when I placed it on the floor all
>>> of 1 inch below where I took it off. I got cut up and my arms and
>>> clothes looked like there was frost from microscopic shards of glass
>>> sticking to them. Most of it stuck to the thin flexible plastic that
>>> was on one side. I should've taken a picture, but wanted to get that
>>> out asap. I managed to slice both thumbs up getting it to the trash, an
>>> invisible splinter in one, took me a good half hour with a magnifying
>>> glass and tweezers to finally get it out. My other thumb was slashed up
>>> and wouldn't stop bleeding. I took the bandaid off a couple days later
>>> and it started bleeding. Two days later I tried again and there was a
>>> tiny amount of blood that oozed out, but I left the bandaid off and it
>>> stopped and finally dried up and just has a couple mm scab now.
>>>
>>> I cleaned up the rest of the glass after I'd gotten the splinter out and
>>> bandaided the slashed thumb, and a shower seemed to get rid of the rest
>>> of the frost like shards on me without drawing blood.
>>>
>>> The case is now without front panel. I want another panel like that so
>>> I'm trying to decide between putting cardboard there or leaving it open.
>>> The place is a bit dusty and it's on the floor so leaving it open
>>> probably isn't the best idea.
>>>
>>> It's a very nice case other than that major flaw.
>>>
>>> A day or too later my son brings up that FL Studio is running a bit slow
>>> as is Roblock and getting jerky movements. Task Manager shows no
>>> issues, CPU, GPU, Memory, storage, etc all very low - with only FL
>>> Studio CPU was only 3 %. I figure it's the nextwork as we're running
>>> off wifi, but I run an xfinity speedtest and his latency is better than
>>> mine, and I don't think FLStudio should be using network. I turn off
>>> the wifi and FLStudio is still slow and jerky. After trying about 20
>>> different things to troubleshoot it I install HW Monitor. I see the m.2
>>> drive is running pretty hot, 57 degrees, I installed a tester, and it
>>> climes to 80 while testing reads. I look and and find the plate that
>>> came with the mb isn't even warm, after checking it out I think the
>>> plate doesn't even touch the SDD, I double up the thermal silicone so it
>>> touches the chip on it, but it only makes about a degree difference.
>>>
>>> I order a cheap m.2 heatsink from amazon.
>>>
>>> Before it comes I poke around some more. I find the 6800 gpu is
>>> disabled and it's somehow using the garbage on the cpu even though hdmi
>>> is plugged into the gpu card. I realize the monitor hasn't come on off
>>> and on, and I've had to turn it off and fiddle with the power to it a
>>> couple times. It must've disabled from that. The power connectors
>>> don't seem to fit well. I'm not sure if that's the GPU card or the
>>> Thermaltake PSU that's slightly off spec enough to not fit quite right,
>>> but I give it a really forceful shove, and it seems stable now. I of
>>> course had to unsinstall the GPU drivers and reinstall and restart to
>>> get them working, I then disabled the CPU display drivers and it's been
>>> working fine since.
>>>
>>> I find it weird the "GPU" somehow didn't appear to be under load, but it
>>> was greatly affecting fps even in audio software. Maybe it was somehow
>>> picking up the card GPU as not being under load even though it was
>>> saying it was disabled.
>>>
>>> I got the m.2 heatsink, installed it, and the heat dropped to 48 C idle
>>> and 61 C under test load, much better. From what I've read at least the
>>> one I have the WD SN770 shouldn't need a heatsink, but it obviously
>>> makes a difference in heat if not that much in performance, as the test
>>> still came out about the same on the transfer rate.
>>
>> I haven't used FLStudio in a long time (it's a popular DAW among
>> younger folks just getting started, because its very video-gamey in
>> its user interface -- the developers were originally video game
>> developers and just migrated to audio software... it's kind of fun to
>> work with in certain scenarios, and some famous artists like DeadMau5
>> who I've never liked did get their start with it). I don't use it at
>> all because it doesn't integrate well with pro-grade studio gear very
>> well, but it has some things in common with other DAW software.
>>
>> If I knew you were building a system with audio production of any kind
>> in mind I might have offered a few tips.
>>
>> One is, in general stay with Intel for the CPU/mobo. General
>> experience across the board is better and I've read a lot of issues
>> with AMD processors and their compatibility with certain hardware
>> drivers like audio interfaces. Single thread performance and ram
>> speed are important depending on what is actually being done with it
>> (there are a lot of ways to make music and every workflow is
>> different.. loading lots of samples needs a lot of ram and disk
>> access while lots of soft synths will prefer CPU power). A lot of
>> games in the last couple of years just seemed over-optimized for AMD
>> processors and were giving benchmarks that gave false impressions...
>> as an example look at the way Intel Core Ultra chips were recently
>> panned upon release as being much slower than AMD, with Cyperpunk 2077
>> being one of the main examples... then suddenly CDPR releases a patch
>> for the game that boosts framerates something like 30% for Intel Core
>> Ultra depending on the resolution and GPU.
>>
>> This doesn't mean AMD won't work or be viable or good for FLStudio
>> especially if that's all he uses and he hasn't branched out to
>> hardware audio gear... I haven't followed what they've done so for
>> all I know they might be optimizing for AMD these days, but the
>> software is written in Delphi (Pascal) so I doubt it.
>>
>> The first thing that comes to mind (and this may be really good news)
>> is what ASIO driver is he using? The right one for his audio
>> interface? And if his audio interface is the built in motherboard
>> audio, that's probably his problem. Just get a decent USB Focusrite
>> interface or something and have him switch to that for making music,
>> switch back to Realtek mobo audio (or whatever chip is there) when
>> playing games if there is an advantage to do so (probably will
>> actually sound better through a good audio interface).
>>
>> And he may need to experiment with buffer size and latency settings
>> for whatever ASIO driver he is using. I don't know how much of this
>> is CaptainObvious info, it might be stuff he's already explored.. but
>> yeah out of the box on a brand new PC, its probably going to be
>> something like Realtek ASIO and that will certainly suck and spike the
>> CPU meter.
>>
>> Just remember that in FLStudio and most DAWs, the CPU meter seen
>> inside the software is not a representation of total CPU on the system
>> or of what you'll see if you load Task Manager.
>>
>
>Most of that goes over my head as while my son is an audiophile I'm not,
>but it's working fine now. The actual problem was with the GPU drivers
>getting disabled and it using the on CPU GPU (which even though
>benchmarks I see put it about as good as the GPU he had in the old
>computer, it's obviously much worse as it couldn't even keep up with
>FLStudio.)
>
>We had installed something called ASIO4ALL as that was one of the
>troubleshooting steps we came across. He hasn't played any games
>besides Roblox yet and didn't have any complaints after fixing the GPU
>issue.
>
>He originally wanted a Mac Powerbook last year, but didn't have enough
>money himself and at 3x+ the price of the computer I built him, I
>couldn't justify it at his age yet. Maybe in a couple years if he's
>still doing audio stuff and actually needs it (which I'm not sure of)

After I wrote that, I remembered the ASIO4ALL driver, I think that
gets installed with FLStudio and is probably the defacto solution for
using a sound card inside the computer and more than likely works with
most sound cards... the last time I used that I had an actual
dedicated sound card (like CreativeLabs) in the PC so I didn't really
think about that initially as a solution. Most of what I said will
apply more if he ever gets to the point where he wants to plug a
guitar, condensor microphone, or external keyboard (not just a MIDI
controller but an actual keyboard like a synth that puts its audio
through TRS jacks).

Either way, there is always this balance between finding the right
buffer size, the amount of tolerable latency, overall CPU usage and
the crackles and dropouts that can happen when the buffer size is too
low (versus the intolerable input latency of hitting keys when its too
high).

The complexity of dealing with latency only gets worse when you start
dealing with analog instruments sending audio into the computer for
conversion, not to mention latency from a midi keyboard to DAW and
then the response from the actual instrument back to the DAW. But the
software is getting better, to the point where you can quantize the
final audio post production to the timing you wanted in the first
place.

Still no replacement for just playing real analog keyboard directly.
Just voltage, no MIDI/ASIO/digital audio conversion latency bullshit
or anything like that, just actual pure musical timing.