TC Powercore Firewire Mac Pro El Capitan sluggish playback start

32 Lives
1

Hi,
32 Lives does work with my Mac Pro 5,1 El Capitan Logic Pro X 10.3.3 with two Powercore X8s connected to their own Firewire cards through a PCIe expansion chassis. I’ve found that the Powercores are way more stable using their own Firewire bus for each one, but that’s a whole different topic. :slight_smile: Just wondering if it’s normal behavior for playback to take longer to start when you hit the play button as you add more and more Powercore plugins into the mixer? If I really go for it and load up both X8’s with plugins, it takes about 4 seconds for playback to start, it starts and runs, it just seems like a lot of delay for it to happen. This may be normal Powercore behavior, and I’ll accept that, just wondering if this is true? When I load up my PCIe UAD-2 Octo with plugins I don’t get this delay behavior, just for comparison / reference. That’s probably not a fair comparison since we’re comparing newer tech to old no longer really supported tech, but there it is. It’s cool that I can still use the Powercores, just concerned about latency / delay / tracks not being in sync when it takes so long for playback to start. It seems to have a lot of thinking to do before playback can start.
Thanks,
Robert

2

Hi Robert,
Logic X and most (if not all) modern DAWs, provide delay compensation.
So if there’s a plug-in with X delay it’ll try to delay everyone with 0 delay to be on par with it.

All PowerCore plug-ins has slight delay (see page#25 in the PoCo manual) and some has greater delay due to the DSP process they use (for example Assimilator).

32 Lives doesn’t add additional delay. (it does pass the reported one to the host).

If you’ll try to put a lot of plug-ins that adds-up delay one after another, you’ll end up with what you’ve described.

We’ve also tested this here with Logic 9 and Ableton 9 in 32-bit to make sure 32 Lives behaves the same.
Even without 32 Lives we have been able to get more than 2 seconds of delay but putting multiple Assimilator instances on a single channel.

Some things to keep in-mind:

  • UAD does work differently and is a product that is still under development.
  • PoCo has few buffer settings. you can try fiddling with them, maybe you’ll be able to get some improvement.

Hope this helps.

Best,
Tal.

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