SpectraLayers Pro 7 system reboot when unmixing Stems

Did you change anything in your BIOS? are you overclocked? hyperthreading on or off? which type of graphics card? Did you calculate power consumption correct for the powersupply? are the cooling fans spinning? have you done a RAM check, could be bad ram - might have to take your ram out and put back in one at a time (with computer off obviously).

could be a lot of things. but, thinking about SL being graphics intensive -im wondering if your graphics card starts to suck more power than usual and your PSU isn’t keeping up.

I was able to fix this issue in my ASUS motherboard BIOS settings

Look for an option for “CPU core ratio”.

Mine, by default, was set to “per core”. I switched to to “Auto” and BOOM it fixed the issue.

Something about how the core’s resources are allocated is causing the reboot in my case.

I’ve unmixed 20 tracks without incident.

Hope this helps.

Here is a Dropbox link to a video I took from my phone of exactly what I did.

Issue here seems to be what is being called “CPU under voltage” in so far as if I overvolt the cpu from default settings I can survive unmix stems.

I should not have to do this with anything let alone a basically non real time process.

RX8 never causes such a problem with the same / similar operation on this machine even though the same amount of time is taken to process.

I wonder if the usual recommended audio machine bios settings set by Steinberg are not the best ones to use with this program?

There is really no need to hammer any machine with a non real time process IMO.

Hippo

Do your problems happen on short, say 1 bar events, as well as long/entire song?

Hippo, I just did the following test on SL7 and RX8 with my Core i7-9750H on Windows 10, unmixing a 44100Hz stereo song which is 3 min 27 sec long:
RX8 (default settings, 4 stems): 55 seconds = 13.75 seconds per stem
SL7 (default settings, 5 stems): 20 seconds = 4 seconds per stem

So SL7 is 3.4 times faster performing the unmixing. It’s likely consuming more CPU power than RX8 during that process.

This is confirmed by the CPU usage graph during the unmixing:
RX8:

SL7:

I agree you should not have to tweak your BIOS settings, but in that case it’s purely due to hardware settings not being set to be stable under heavy CPU load. Fortunately the BIOS settings let you fix it.

Ok
Thanks for taking the trouble
No sale here even at half price
Others may disagree.

Hippo

in your position I would actually do the opposite, and use SL7 as a benchmark to fix my system so that it doesn’t crash - because who knows, maybe you will run into this problem with other software, or on a project, or in a more intense RX8 CPU processing situation.

I haven’t had problems unmixing and i’m on Windows 7, Cubase 10… then again, I’ve only been using it on short events.

I recently installed the demo version of SpectraLayers 7 and find it extremely capable.

However it runs very unstable on my PC.

In my case SpectraLayers 7 crashes with BSOD in many unpredictable ways. I have not succeeded in running it longer than an hour. 15 minutes is typical. Several tools like healing or unmixing produce crash. After the crash I reset SpactraLayers. After that I am able to use the tool that crashed many times in succession, but after a while it crashes again, even if I just repeated what I previously did.

My computer is a high end workstation and is not overclocked. My bios CPU (and other) settings are set to normal. I routinely use parallel programs like Davinci Resolve Studio and Blender, and often render an image for several consecutive days, using all processors. I have never had any crash problems.

I would very much like to acquire SpectraLayers, especially now for the bargain price, but it is almost unusable for me as it is. Please convince me that there will be a fix, or work around.

Robin:

For several years, Prime95 ( GIMPS - Free Prime95 software downloads - PrimeNet ) has been the gold standard for CPU stress testing. Any serious DAW manufacturer checks if Prime95 runs a few hours without interruption to ensure that the PCs are stable and capable. There’s 100% load on all cores with it. I already posted a screenshot in the other thread that my build is absolutely stable with it.

I do respect all your efforts to optimize your software for giving the fastest possible results. But I suggest that you publish a benchmark build for anyone to check their computers before buying it, and also for DAW builders to give them the possibility to guarantee stability with SL at this level. Seems to me as if your software is the hardest job a DAW build can do ATM.

As I reported, I had serious instability problems with SpectraLayers Pro 7 (demo).

However I now discovered that adjusting BIOS settings indeed seems to cure the problem, as described in sleepylions recent post about ASUS motherboard BIOS. I have ASUS too.

After changing Advanced Settings / AI Tweaker / CPU Core Ratio from Per Core to Auto, I have now played with SpectraLayers 7 for several hours, and have had zero crashes. Definitely much better than before, and hopefully the fix for good. So, I purchased the license.

The trouble is that the best settings for stable low latency audio are not the same as needed for SL7 in my case.

Going into bios just to use it for the limited use I can put SL7 in every day audio use and then back again is not on especially as rx8 and wave lab get me to the same place in most cases without a reboot and bios adjustment required

As to it being faster than others , who cares , its an offline process.

I care a lot about the near RT performance of this machine when I need it for work a day DAW use.

My machine also passes all the usual recommended stress tests

Changing the way the CPU Voltage is handled in the BIOS won’t affect in any way the audio latency, they are unrelated (and there are no audio settings at all in the BIOS anyway). It can only benefit the stability of your system overall without affecting its performances.

Setting the BIOS settings to AUTO made no difference here as they were already set to AUTO! SL7 is still rebooting itself when I unmix stems and often at the beginning of the unmix process so I fail to see how this system can even get a chance to overheat!

It doesn’t seem to be an overheating problem but something more related to power requirements (CPU not getting enough power when all cores are used simultaneously to the max of their capacity).

I’ve just increased my CPU Voltage to 1.3 and that seems to have stabilised things

Great, glad to hear that!

It’s interesting as I have had no issues until the last Windows updates, my issue is mostly different though and is a rendering issue (though sometimes it crashes). It may be a different issue to what was previously experieinced however maybe it is something with Windows. I have only just started troubleshooting so wanted to read through the forums first but thought it might be worth repsonding on this.

A rendering issue will likely be linked to the the graphic card. Which graphic card do you have, and does it change anything if you install the latest drivers for it ?

Hi Robin,

It is a Radeon RX 580 Graphics card, I updated the drivers as I thought that may have been the issue. I feel as if this is a Windows update that is creating an issue as it occured soon after an update. AMD and windows updates don’t always play well, I have had previous issues with Adobe products. As you mentioned above it normally is not a single piece of software that creates the issues.

Cheers
Dave

Hi Robin,
I think that I have come to the realisation that I need to setup a profile using my GPU software. I upgraded the majority of my computer including graphics card and have faced some bigger issues, my GPU has been setup for performance however by looking at a lot of different posts it seems that I need to do the opposite and pull back the performance. Once I have done that I will repost with the result.
Cheers
Dave