Help with Cremona Quartet Strad Cello

Hi all hope you're well

I bought the Cremona Quartet a little while back and it's a great product, I have been using it on cubase 10.5 mostly, however I have been using it on FL studio 20 and the Strad Cello makes a horrible crackling noise when playing, particularly in any legato/sustain articulation. If I dial back the close mic it seems to disappear. I'm guessing this is something I have to take up with Image Line but I thought I'd ask here first if anyone has had a problem with this or if there is a common fix for NI products that have a crackling noise. This is the first time it's happened and only seems to be on FL studio. If you need PC specs or further info just let me know, as I said it's only that one instrument library.

 

Hi there and welcome to the forums!

Crackling sounds usually indicate computer / DAW problems somewhere. First to keep in mind is that these kind of instruments are quite heavy when it comes to resource demands, so it is possible that it might overload the DAW (this can theoretically happen if you also have a lot of other resource hungry instruments active). With that I mean that whilst playing the rest of your system can't keep up and that results in those crackling sounds.

There are dozens of possible causes, the most common ones are ASIO driver settings (most DAW's allow you to customize these in the settings, things to look out for could be your sample rate, buffer size and other options your DAW might provide), adding too many and/or too heavy instruments ("VST's") to your project as I already mentioned earlier, using a sound interface which simply can't cope (using the on-board audio interface which is installed on your computer is usually not a good idea to get the best performance) and of course there are also possible hardware problems (though I guess we can rule those out considering that things work normally in your other DAW).

So yeah, that's where I'd start looking.

 

Cremona Kontakt libraries are huge. Some of them around 10 GB for one patch. So, if one does not have suffitient amount of memory, crackling is almost inevitable even if Win memory swap file is on fast SSD.

My next PC must have at least 32 GB of RAM, but I will go most probably for 64 GB. And it is mostly because of Cremona. It is great, but it is hungry.

 

Thanks for your reply, just to update you it partly turned out to be a non NI plugin that loaded my CPU usage to 100%. One thing I haven't tried yet which I was told may help is to reduce polyphony? With that gone there is far less crackling though it can be faintly heard still. I think you're right in that it does have something to do with ASIO as well, possibly my audio interface as I do use the onboard audio and playing around with ASIO settings seems to have improved things a little more. So using an external more powerful interface can help improve sound quality over an on board?

 

Yeh I noticed that, it takes a good 20-30 sec to load a multi-mic patch and the quartet mock-up I'm doing with cremona chews up 16gb memory on it's own. My computer is probably midrange, a Ryzen 5 3600xt, 32gb 3200mhz ram and all SSD's. I was told 16gb was plenty but bought 32gb just to be sure, but maybe that's not even enough. Also using onboard audio so that may also be a problem.

 

It should be OK. But also depends on efect plugins, you may use. Those may be CPU hungry beasts.....
So, probably the internal audio interface. Does it have ASIO driver? And if yes, do you use its ASIO driver? And if there are crackles making soundcard buffer bigger may help. Also stop other programs.

 

No I had to download ASIO4ALL, although FL studio has it's own asio driver.

 

So, maybe external audio device with ASIO driver might improve things...

 

ASIO4ALL doesn't seem to help much, increasing buffer rate did although there's still a hint of a crackle, I noticed it also get's worse over time, when I open the existing project it sounds fine but over the next few hours it slowly get's worse.

 

Try external audio card that has ASIO driver from manufacturer....

Generely, your computer should have enought CPU power. I run Cremona on 9 year old notebook 4C/8T i7 2.1 GHz CPU, 16 GB RAM, SSD, external audio interface.

Another aspect might be problém with cooling of the CPU. Over time it might get hotter and decrease CPU clock. Or some programs running on background. Antivirus,......