FabFilter

Hey everyone, I've recently added Pro-DS to my collection of awesome Fabfilter plugins, but I've noticed a bit of unexpected behavior in the plugin's display. As I'm aware, Fabfilter made the smart move to use the GPU to take care of the UI elements in the plugin window, making everything all nice and smooth no matter what. This makes anything with a nice display like Pro-Q and Pro-C much more of a joy to use. Unfortunately that isn't the case with Pro-DS, at least not always.

Here's what's happening, if I turn on input monitoring in Logic 9.1.8 under Mac OS 10.8.3, everything is buttery smooth at 60fps on Pro-DS. But if I'm just doing regular playback, only the waveform stays at 60fps, the output and gain reduction meters on the right, as well as the Threshold knob display get choppy, much like the old style of using the CPU to render the plugin UI.

I should note that this doesn't happen with any other Fabfilter plugins, every other element of every other plugin stays at 60fps no matter what I'm doing, it's only in Pro-DS, and only in those few spots.

Does anyone know why this could be happening?

We'll investigate! What buffer size does your audio hardware use?

Cheers,

Either 128 or 256 samples. Never below or above. I'm not sure how that affects things, but however I can help haha.

Hm, I've just tested Pro-DS in Logic 9.1.8 and both the main display and the level meters were perfectly smooth here.

Are you running the latest version of Pro-DS (1.03) in 64-bit Logic? You can check with Help > About in the Pro-DS plugin interface.

Cheers,

Hi Adam,

I've tested this as well, and found out what is happening. When monitoring a track in Record mode, the plug-in processes audio with a buffer size as specified at the "I/O Buffer Size" setting, which is usually a very low setting.

But if you're just playing a mix, and haven't got any track enabled for recording, logic uses a buffer size as specified at the "Processing Buffer Range", which is either Small, Medium or Large. These buffer size are larger and this normally saves CPU usage.

When you use a Processing Buffer Range of Small or Medium, the meters will run smoothly! Only when using the Large setting, the meters will run a bit less smoothly, which is something we will look into for a future update :-)

Cheers,

Ah, excellent! Thanks for the info. I have been running the buffer range on Large, I shouldn't have any issues running at a smaller setting, I've got loads of CPU power to spare. Frederik, sorry for not replying sooner, I'm running Pro-DS 1.03 on Logic 9.1.8 64-bit, I'll test Floris' suggestion of using a smaller buffer range.

Thanks again!