Hi, this is more for information and needs no solution. With upgrading from 1.60 to 1.72 on my laptop audio signal lacks or produces only noise and drop outs. I could solve this by increasing the buffer size from 256 (which works fine with 1.60) to 512. I’m not quite sure, if this is an accepted behavior from your side, as it increases latency . 512 with a latency of ~10ms is still fine, but at the upper limit of a live-setup.
We have not changed anything in the audio engine. VST Live by itself still uses close to no CPU at all.
If you need to increase buffer size because it starts to crackle, that indicates CPU overload in the audio process. This is almost entirely down to plugins, so you may want to check what has changed with instruments, channel inserts etc.
You can test this with an empty new project. For that, you need to remove the default Layer (set instrument to (nc)). There should be close to no activity in the CPU meter, regardless of buffer size. Then maybe add instruments or other plugins to see what causes CPU load.
Thats why I noted it here. I didn’t used the laptop for few weeks and the only thing I did after that was to update VST Live. There are no changes to the plugins or the project. Only opened the project after the update. Now as I got through my mind, the other thing I did, was to change some licenses from eLicenser to Steinberg Licensing. Will this take more CPU usage?
We should hope not 
No, that shouldn’t make a difference. Possibly, changing licenses would update plugins but no reports so far about massive change of CPU load. Maybe changes to the OS (system updates).
You may als want to check Edit/Preferences/Audio/High Priority mode.
I cannot exclude the possibility, that there were some updates to the OS. The laptop was connected to the inet for about 1 hour doing the update and the licensing change. Normally the laptop is disconnected from the inet, to avoid such things. Audio mode was already set to high priority. And as I mentioned before, its not an issue at the moment. ~10ms are still ok .
Other thing I noticed. Open the project needs much more time to load (about twice to three times). Does 1.72 preload more than 1.60?
it should not. But we added “Preload Parts” which takes longer. Open File/Preload Parts" (or just “Preload”) and see if “Always preload” is checked. If not checked it should make no difference. If plugins have chacged, the first load after that may take longer (scanning). You may even disable scanning in Edit/Preferences/Plug-Ins/Scam on start.
Preload parts is checked. Thanks for the info. Could this influence CPU usage as it loads more?
I checked it.
Start VST Live
Open project (needs ~ 5 minutes)
Uncheck “preload parts”.
Restart VST Live.
Open project again. It loads now faster (~2 minutes)
Closed VST Live
Change buffer size back to 256
Start VST Live
Open project (again ~ 2 minutes)
Sound is okay without drop outs.
maybe my laptop runs out of memory (before swaping) with preload parts.
Memory might be an issue, true. However usually running out of memory causes much more load than just crackles and would not be fixed with a decent increase in buffer size.
Try with preload (not preload Parts).
It all comes down to how plugins behave. Preload makes sure all Instruments, Inserts etc have loaded their presets. Preload Parts also waits until each plugin has at least once performed audio processing. Some plugins initialize stuff when their processing is called for the first time; they should not, but what do you know.
You may check Task Manager for memory consumption. Unfortunately we have no information about what plugins “eat”, other than their preset memory which is displayed during preload, but that’s usually much less than what they consume internally (samples etc).
I will stay with normal preload (w/o parts), as I hadn’t any issue before and it loads much faster. Thanks for your input and I was able to switch back to a lower latency