The Audio Tweaks That Work - And The Ones That Don't!
Technique : PC Musician
Windows XP works better for audio than any
other Windows OS so far, but musicians still seek those ultimate
go-faster tricks, so this month we bring you a guide to those that are
worth doing and those that are worth avoiding.
In this split personality screenshot, will the
left-hand or the right-hand Windows setup run faster? Or will it not
make any difference at all with a modern PC? Read on to find out...
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Unlike previous versions of Microsoft's Windows,
Windows XP works pretty well straight out of the box with audio
applications, and I only recommend three essential adjustments.
Nevertheless, musicians still regularly ask me for a comprehensive list
of 'go-faster' tweaks, and look elsewhere when I don't offer one,
determined to make their PCs run faster by fiddling 'under the bonnet'.
You'll certainly be able to find lots of web sites
offering Windows performance tweaks, many written for mainstream users
and a few specifically for musicians, yet many of the tweaks they offer
will result in no measurable improvement in audio performance, and some
may make your PC unstable or even prevent it from booting up.
Nevertheless, many musicians are obviously still
convinced that XP will benefit from such snake oil, and since I prefer
not to have to send SOS readers and forum users elsewhere for
advice, I decided to write this feature, which will explain in some
detail the tweaks that work for musicians and why they do, as well as
covering the ones that are unlikely to make any difference — including
those that are potentially dangerous unless you really know what you're
doing.
It's not hard to see why musicians search for tweaks
for Windows XP — after all, its predecessors (including Windows 95, 98,
ME and 2000) often needed serious tweaking before audio applications
would run smoothly with them. This was largely because most mainstream
applications, such as those for word processing, accounts and Internet
browsing, generally involve a burst of CPU activity followed by some
idle time while the user considers what to do next, so it made the most
sense for Windows to react as fast as it could to user input, but hang
on until the idle times before updating files on the hard drive and so
on. By contrast, musicians require from their PC almost continuous
streaming of audio data, coupled with almost continuous CPU calculations
for real-time plug-in effects and virtual instruments. In other words,
mainstream applications focus on user input, while audio applications
place far more emphasis on background tasks.
By the time Windows XP was released, the
'multimedia' PC market was far more important to Microsoft, partly since
PC games had become so much more popular and sophisticated, and partly
because many businesses were perfectly happy with Windows NT or 2000. So
it was important that XP be capable of delivering smooth 3D graphics,
background music and sound effects. Obviously, these enhanced
capabilities benefited the musician.
Only a few basic changes are needed to ensure smooth audio performance with XP, so let's discuss them first.
Change Processor Scheduling to 'Background Services'
Navigate to the Advanced page of the System applet.
Click on the Performance Settings button, select its Advanced tab and
click on 'Background Services' for Processor Scheduling (see top pair of
screens).
This is one of the few essential Windows XP tweaks,
since it benefits the performance of ASIO drivers, which run as
background tasks.
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For anyone using ASIO drivers (and nowadays that
includes just about every PC musician), this is the most essential tweak
of all, because ASIO drivers run as background services in Windows.
Music software and hardware developers Steinberg rely on this setting to
ensure low latency without dropouts, and you may be able to run your
audio interface at a significantly lower latency after this tweak.
Switch Off Power Schemes
In the Power Options applet, choose the 'Always On'
power scheme. Change the settings for monitor and hard disk turn off and
System standby to 'Never', so that your PC doesn't unexpectedly conk
out during song playback (see screens below).
The wrong setting here can cripple the processing
performance of many modern PCs, because of over-clever power schemes
that throttle your processor to a slower clock speed to keep it cool
and, in the case of laptops, prolong battery life. In theory, such
throttling schemes should let your CPU clock speed ramp up smoothly on
demand, but in practice there's a short time lag before this happens,
sufficient to result in audio interruptions and, therefore, clicks and
pops. The only safe way to prevent this happening is to make sure your
processor always runs at its top speed.
I mentioned this tweak only a couple of months ago in my 'Overcoming Overload' feature (see SOS
July 2006), but make no apologies for including it again here, as so
many musicians struggle on with poor audio performance because their
processor is running at a fraction of its top speed. By the way, the
'Always On' setting should ensure maximum CPU speed at all times (even
when you unplug the mains PSU and run on internal batteries), but you
should double-check this on the General page of the System applet, where
the current clock speed is displayed (see screenshot on previous page).
If it's not what you expect, choose a different power scheme and check
again. Also make sure you've installed the latest throttling drivers for
your PC, since the intricacies of power schemes can vary a little from
model to model.
Disable System Sounds
Select the 'No Sounds' scheme on the Sounds tab of the Sounds and Audio Devices applet.
The bleeps, clicks, and other sounds that Windows
uses by default to accompany such events as startup, log on and log off,
new emails and the like can be helpful, especially for newcomers, but
there's a good reason for musicians to disable them: most of the WAV
files that Microsoft and other developers provide for such sounds have
22kHz sample rates. What now happens depends on the design of your
soundcard and its drivers. My Echo 1820M seems immune, but if a 22kHz
system sound cuts in when my Echo Mia card is playing back a 44.1kHz
project through its ASIO drivers in Cubase SX, the Cubase audio files suddenly jump an octave higher and run at double speed, while soft synth outputs become extremely juddery. The Cubase
engine has to be manually reset to cure these problems. Other musicians
have reported songs dropping to half speed, or playback stopping
altogether or suffering timing problems.
Always check on the General page of the System
applet that your processor is running at its maximum clock speed (here
my 1.4GHz Pentium-M laptop processor has been throttled down to just
598MHz). If not, choosing the 'Always On' Power scheme should ensure
this on most PCs.
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Unfortunately, even if you select the 'No Sounds'
scheme, whenever you choose a new graphic Theme the system sounds
annoyingly return to the Windows default sound scheme. In addition, a
few applications ignore the 'No Sounds' scheme altogether and continue
to force their own system sounds to use your interface. Examples include
some Local Area Network (LAN) cards, spyware utilities and the Firefox
web browser's Find function. To prevent this from happening, you can
try using the 'Do Not Map Through Soundcard' option. Under the Hardware
tab of 'Sounds and Audio Devices', select your audio interface from the
list of devices, click on the Properties button, then on the Properties
tab of the resulting pop-up window, and then finally on the Property
button of this audio device. You'll see a 'Do not map through this
device' tick box, which you should tick. On my systems, this makes no
difference at all, but it may work for you.
However, if you really want to get rid of System
sounds once and for all, it's quicker and more thorough to navigate to
the Audio tab of 'Sounds and Audio Devices' and set the Default device
for sound playback to something other than your ASIO audio interface,
such as an integral motherboard sound chip. If you really must hear
system sounds, you can connect the system audio output to some speakers,
but I've diverted mine to my SW1000XG soundcard, which is now only used
for its MIDI synth and doesn't have its audio outputs connected to
anything, so I never hear system sounds from any source.
The only side-effect of this tweak is that other
basic Windows audio applications, such as Media Player, will also have
their outputs diverted, but you can override that, if you wish to, using
the Options page to point to a specific audio device. The result of all
this one-off effort? You'll never again hear a system sound unless you
want to, and your main audio interface will be forever immune from
Windows' interference.
Some experts maintain that once you've turned off
the system sounds, checked your Power scheme and set Processor
Scheduling to Background Services, you don't need to tweak anything
else. However, in my opinion, there are still a few things that are well
worth doing.
Disable Taskbar Auto-hide
Right-click on a blank area of the taskbar. Choose
'Properties', and un-tick the box labelled 'Auto-hide the Taskbar'
(above left).
Although you lose a little screen space by leaving
the Taskbar permanently on display, your audio will no longer be
interrupted each time the Taskbar is hidden or reappears.
Turn Off System Restore on all drives
Tick this box from the System Restore tab in the System applet.
Disabling the Taskbar's Auto-hide function will prevent your audio from glitching every time the bar is hidden or re-displayed.
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By default, Windows XP runs 'behind the scenes',
monitoring changes to your setup, including the installation of new
drivers and software, so that if your machine develops a problem you can
roll back to a previously saved restore point. However, musicians
generally don't want the unpredictability of this extra overhead. Most
of us prefer to use disk imaging software, such as Norton's Ghost, to save an accurate image of our entire music partition, at a time of our choosing.
Turn Off Automatic Updates
Select this radio button from the Automatic Updates
tab in the System applet if your music PC isn't Internet-enabled. If it
is Internet-enabled, instead select the 'Notify me but don't
automatically download or install them' option. If you hear of a
particular update file that will improve audio performance, you can
still download and install it manually.
Disable Hibernation
From the Power Options applet, select the Hibernation page and un-tick the box labelled 'Enable hibernation'.
To enter this power-saving state, Windows saves the
entire contents of your system RAM to a file on your hard drive, so that
it can later restore your PC to exactly the same state. In the case of
many modern music PCs fitted with 2GB RAM, this could take some time to
save and restore. Hibernation can be handy, particularly on a laptop,
but can also sometimes cause problems when USB and Firewire devices
don't wake up properly before your sequencer, making it crash and
require a complete and lengthy power down and reboot. So if you still
want to attempt to use it, beware of these points.
Disable Fast User Switching
From the User Accounts applet, click on 'Select the
way users log on or off'. Un-tick the 'Use Fast User Switching' box and
then 'Apply Options'. This will ensure that if you have multiple users
logging on and off your PC, they will be forced to close down their
applications before they log off, so that there are none still running
in the background and consuming system resources when you log on and
start your audio ones.
Set Menu Speed to 'Maximum'
You can do this with a Registry tweak, but the safest and easiest way is using Microsoft's TweakUI
utility (see screen above). Click on the Mouse setting in the left-hand
pane. Pull the Menu Speed slider to its fastest setting and click the
OK button. Then all cascading menus on Start menus and inside
applications will appear instantly, rather than after an annoying delay.
Marginal Tweaks
Many tweaks are now a matter of user preference,
since they make little or no difference to the performance of modern
PCs, while others are simply to make your life a little simpler. Here
are the main ones, along with some guidelines to help you make up your
own mind whether to implement them or not.
Minimise Visual Effects
System applet, Advanced Tab, Performance Settings button, Visual Effects page, select 'Adjust for best performance'.
This will disable a whole clutch of graphic bells
and whistles, the most important of which are the various animations —
exploding windows when minimising and maximising, fading and sliding
menus, buttons and boxes. These all rely on your computer's processor
for the entire duration of their moves, and can therefore tip your PC
over the edge when its CPU overhead is already near 100 percent running
plug-ins and soft synths. I find the various animations annoying anyway,
and I'm glad to see the back of them, although their overhead is
arguably so tiny with modern processors that this tweak is largely
optional.
However, 'Adjust for best performance' also disables
various other features that are rather more useful and yet impose
microscopic overheads. Some musicians still prefer the rectangular
Windows Classic look, but you can reinstate the XP look, with its
soft-sculpted windows and buttons with rounded corners, by switching to
the 'Custom' button on the Visual Effects page and ticking the 'Use
visual styles on windows and buttons' option.
While you're there, it's certainly also worth
ticking the 'Smooth edges of screen fonts' option (which offers a
considerable boost to on-screen legibility, without compromising
performance), and 'Show window contents while dragging' (which makes
re-aligning the multiple windows in modern sequencer applications a lot
easier).
Remove Desktop Background Image
Select the Desktop page of Display applet and select '(None)' for the Background wallpaper setting.
In days gone by, this could reduce graphic overhead,
but nowadays it's marginal, so whether you have a blank desktop or one
with a pretty picture on it is rather up to you. Since the image is
loaded into the RAM of your graphics card you won't waste any system RAM
using a fancy image, but I still prefer the uncluttered look of a blank
desktop, and when I'm making music my sequencer and other music
applications fill my screen, so the desktop is nearly always invisible
anyway. I do, however, choose a memorable colour for the desktops of
each of my various Windows multi-boot partitions (green for General,
mauve for Music, and red for Review) from the drop-down menu on the same
page. Otherwise, it's easy to forget which partition you're currently
running.
Disable Screensaver
To permanently disable the screensaver, just open the Display applet, navigate to its Screensaver page and select '(None)'.
It's not really necessary to disable screensavers
nowadays, since even when they're running their processing overhead is
tiny compared to the power available from a modern CPU, and before they
kick in they consume no overhead at all. Nevertheless, since ASIO
drivers run as background tasks, playing back a long song is regarded as
'no user activity' and will allow a screensaver to cut in unexpectedly.
If you simply want to avoid this annoyance, just increase the 'Wait'
time to a more suitable value.
Making cascading menus appear instantly by setting this TweakUI
slider to its fastest setting is not an essential tweak, but it
certainly makes my Windows XP experience a lot more pleasurable!
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I recently adopted a third approach that takes a
tiny bit of one-off effort to set up, but lets me start my chosen
screensaver on demand. I find this invaluable when working on
in-progress mixes, because replacing the visual clutter of the sequencer
with something more relaxing enables me to concentrate on listening and
more easily notice where changes are needed.
To do this, you first choose a screensaver from the
drop-down list and adjust its settings for a restful display, using the
Preview button. Click the Apply button so that these settings 'take',
and then choose the '(None)' setting, as before. Next, use the Windows
Search function to find the various screensaver files, by entering
'*.scr' into the 'all or part of the filename' box. Then right-click on
your choice and select the 'Create Shortcut' option. This will let you
create a screensaver shortcut on the desktop, which you can launch at
any time by using the Windows-D key-command and then double-clicking on
the shortcut.
Disable Internet Synchronise Time
Navigate to the Internet Time page of the Date and
Time applet and un-tick the option labelled 'Automatically synchronise
with an Internet time server'.
Many people don't have any idea that their real-time
system clock is, by default, synchronised to an Internet time server
once a week, but it's a handy way to keep it accurate — assuming that
you periodically connect your PC to the Internet, that is. If your music
PC remains separate from the virus-ridden world of the Internet you
might as well disable this function, as it won't work anyway.
Ignore Driver Signing
On the Hardware page of the System applet, click the
Driver Signing button and select 'Ignore — Install the software anyway
and don't ask for any approval'. Few audio developers pay Microsoft for
the privilege of getting their products Windows Logo Tested, so this
tweak will bypass all those annoying 'are you sure?' messages each time
you install new software.
Startup and Recovery
In the Advanced page of the System applet, click on
the Startup and Recovery Settings button, and under the System Failure
section un-tick the box marked 'Automatically Restart'. If you do ever
experience a system crash, this will prevent Windows from immediately
rebooting. You'll then get a chance to read the on-screen information
about the error, which may reference a particular system file, such as
an audio interface driver, to help you track down the cause of the
crash.
Disable Error Reporting
In the advanced page of the System applet, select
the Advanced page, click on its 'Error Reporting' button and select the
radio button labelled 'Disable error reporting'. In the event of an
application fault, this will prevent your PC attempting to send a report
to Microsoft.
Pointless Tweaks
As mentioned in the introduction, there are quite a
few tweaks recommended out there on the Internet that either do nothing
at all or can seriously impair the performance of your music PC. For
instance, ignore any references to vcache settings and conservative
swapfile settings, since these don't apply to Windows XP.
Instructions to reduce the Color Quality of your
display from the Highest (32-bit) setting down to 16-bit were only valid
years ago, when more primitive graphics cards took more resources with
higher bit settings. Nowadays everything tends to be optimised for the
32-bit settings, so you will reduce the performance of both hardware and
software if this is changed. Also ignore any suggestions to reduce the
hardware acceleration of your graphics card, since this will result in
your CPU having to perform those duties instead.
Services are small applications, installed either by
Windows XP or other software, that carry out a host of background
tasks. Each one on your PC is either set by default to Automatic, so
that it loads every time you boot up; set to Manual, so that it only
gets started when needed; or Disabled. Disabling various Windows
Services in an effort to further streamline your PC's audio performance
is, in my opinion, pointless. Moreover, if you don't know exactly what
you're doing your system can become unstable or even refuse to boot up
afterwards. It may not be obvious from the description of a particular
Service how it can affect the smooth running of audio applications. For
instance, the Portable Media Serial Number Service, described as
'retrieving the serial number of any portable media player connected to
this computer' will disable any dongles you have plugged in and
therefore prevent many music applications from running.
Your requirements may also change over time. If, for
instance, you've stripped Services down to the absolute minimum by
disabling those that relate to networks, you'll have problems if you
ever install the excellent FX Teleport utility that uses the network to ferry MIDI and audio data to other PCs.
Despite all the above, so many musicians seem keen
to delve into the intricacies of the Service list that I decided to
carry out a practical experiment by disabling all the Services I
possibly could on my own music PC and then measuring any improvements I
could find. Initially, the Windows Task Manager told me that as soon as I
reached the desktop Windows was using 205.6MB of my system RAM, and
that the only CPU overhead was the two percent taken by Task Manager
itself.
After very carefully disabling every possible Service that a non-networked music-only PC wouldn't need (on my PC, some 46 Services in all), I rebooted. The total CPU overhead was still exactly the same, at two percent, but the system RAM consumption was now down to 197.6MB: a negligible improvement of just 8MB. To double-check for any audio improvement, I ran a song that had previously been struggling at the limits of both my CPU and RAM, even with an audio interface latency of 20ms, and found no improvement at all. I rest my case!
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