Quote from: Aerithos on January 22, 2016, 09:26:18 pm

When you have two samples that play after each other, you want to make sure that the ending value of the first sample is the same as the beginning value of the second sample. When the values don't match, a pop can occur as the speaker "snaps" to the new value. The smoother and more tonal the sample, the more noticeable the pop.

This was the problem! Thank you so much! I had no clue this would cause a popping noise.

Glad I could help!

Man I thought I checked that list! Haha shame on me!

I did the same thing with epicVerb. Then I read through the list again, noticed it was already there, smacked myself in the head, then deleted the post...

I found the source of the problem.

I have two CPU sockets, and each CPU has 6 cores, 12 cores in total. I believe the issue was that the CPU was feeling stressed due to the amount of designation tasks to all those cores, which it wasn't doing a very good job of anyway.

I limited the number of active cores to 2, and since there are 2 CPU's, 4 cores are now active. It increased performance by almost 80%! FL Studio itself no longer reports 100%, but 60% maximum of one particular session file... and so does the CPU.

Strange, but I think the category of my CPU is important, as they are made for servers, meaning a workstation computer.

Huh, definitely forward that result to Image Line. It sounds like FL Studio isn't effectively handling multiple processors. I'm guessing that the issue comes from expecting data to be available in the L2/L3 cache or registers in a thread on one processor that is actually from a thread on the other processor. Possibly some latency issues too, especially if two threads split between the processors have alot of interaction.

Quote from: Aerithos on January 13, 2016, 01:33:41 pm

Huh. If all of FL Studios multi-threading options are enabled, I have no clue what could be wrong. Maybe try switching to ASIO4ALL and see if that works better. It's possible that the MBox driver is creating thread stall in some way, and the ASIO4ALL, FL ASIO, or DSound driver won't have that problem.

Interestingly enough, both ASIO4ALL and FL Studio ASIO perform slightly worse than the MBox's ASIO driver. I'm not sure if this next bit of information is important, but when the CPU load goes up to 100 or above, the options settings where it says... 'Underruns: #' stays at 0.

So, you wouldn't say ditching the MBox for a better Audio Interface/Soundcard would help since they don't do any processing themselves?

It could be the Audio Interface that is stalling and not the driver. If the system has an internal soundcard, try testing that with ASIO4ALL. Or borrow another Audio Interface and test that. If they exhibit the same issue, then hit up the Image Line Forums and ask in the support area there (and make sure to link this thread).

But a little detail on what I think may be wrong. When FL Studio finishes processing all the plugins and calculating a sample, it sends that sample to the output sound buffer, in this case, the MBox hardware buffer. If that buffer is currently unavailable, then FL Studio needs to wait until the buffer becomes available again before moving on to calculating the next sample.
Things that can make the buffer unavailable:

• Broken Sound Card/Audio Interface - Test by trying a different Sound Card/Audio Interface
• USB/Firewire Communication Issues - Test by trying a different port or cable
• Sound Card/Audio Interface Driver Issues - Already tested by trying ASIO4ALL

But that's the extent of my knowledge, so Image Line would be the next valuable information resource...

Sounds beautiful!

Sounds like only one core is being used. In your case, 1 fully active core out of 8 will show as 12% in Task Manager, which coincides with the 8-16% variance you are seeing. So enabling all multi-threading options in FL (global setting and per-plugin) should resolve that and improve performance.

The actual plugins don't do any processing on the sound card/audio interface. The main benefits of an audio interface are a higher quality ADC/DAC and sound buffer access that skips the OS sound layer and reduces latency.

Things to try (if you haven't already):

• Make sure that the Multi-Threaded generator/mixer processing options are turned on in Settings -> Audio.
• Check to see if your audio interface has an ASIO driver listed under devices in Settings -> Audio. If not, try ASIO4ALL.
• Make sure that the Allow threaded processing option is on for each plugin instance. Settings button -> Processing tab

In my humble opinion, your version is considerably better than the original.