Ardour GUI voices explanation

Installation & Configuration Linux
#1

Good morning
on the upper right corner of Ardour GUI
there are some fields that i dont really understand
as …

C=100% P=68% DSP=50% …

I didnt find any explanation on user manual about them
could anyone show its meaning?
thank you very much

malcom

#2

This can be broken down into several things…

C=100%

This tells you the state of the capture buffer in Ardour, in your case it is 100% empty so your likelihood of having a dropout is very low generally(By default this buffer I believe is 5 seconds).

P=68%

This tells you the state of your playback buffer, givent hat it is not 100% cahnces are this number is while you were playing back. This means the playback buffer(Again default of 5 seconds) is 68% full, so you are not likely to lose audio on playback at this point either, but a continued downward motion means that when it hits 0 you are likely to have a dropout on playback.

DSP=50%

This is a measurement of the amount of time remaining in a Jack process cycle. It is often confused with CPU load, which is not the case, but rather how much of each cycle is used to process audio. The closer to 100% the more likely you won’t be able to do all your processing in a jack process cycle and the more likely you are to have a dropout.

 Seablade
#3

@malcom: no. you want the capture & playback values to be as close to 100% as possible; you want the DSP load to be as close to zero as possible.

#4

thank you very much seablade
so it seems mainly that having high values for these parameters is a good thing, isnt it?

malcom

#5

Well you wouldn’t necessarily want DSP to be close to zero, since that would imply no plugins (or one of NSA’s AES-cracking computers).

But you don’t want it to be too close to 100% either, so if you’re up in the 70-80-ies you should consider consolidating track effect to shared busses, increasing the jack Frames/Period setting or buying a NSA AES-cracking computer.