Question by Pierce: Sound Card for a DAW? FL Studio, Kontakt, Samplers, etc?
Will a sound card assist in preventing clipping from samplers, and also stop voice limitations?

I’m having problems with FL Studio whenever I get a large project going, when I hit around 4-5 instruments at the same time, it’ll start to clip (Once I do a playback and there are notes assigned to each of those 4-5 instruments) Of course just exporting the project to any sound format for a “finished” product it sounds just fine, so I figure it’s simply the workload in real-time.

Also, voice limits. I’m currently messing with samples from plugin’s like Symphobia where they have ensembles at the ready. When you load one of their “multis” it loads up several instruments at once and when you play one note, several if not all of the instruments will play in ensemble form

Problem is is that when you get an arrangement going, if one instrument reaches its voice limit, it starts to cut out other instruments. What causes this? I increased the voice limit for the offending instrument, yet still the same thing?

What helps with these two problems? CPU? RAM?
Or a sound card?

I’m currently using a…

GA-MA790FX-DQ6 mobo (And the soundcard that comes onboard with it, some 7.1 w/e card, ya know just stock)

AMD 3g 6400+ X2

2g RAM (But I’ll be upgrading to 4g, possibly 8g – if it will help, will it?)
@eMTAU

Must say I really appreciate the input! I did as you recommened, and voila! no clipping Much smoother, I had recently reinstalled my OS, but about half the things you mentioned I never bothered doing before ^_^ Any suggestions concerning the voice limits

I was monitoring Kontakt and running a sample through and layed down a random arrangement of notes. At times when it would completely drop some of the instruments the CPU jumped to the red (I assume that also that little red light beeping constantly is telling me the CPU is being stressed quite a bit, even though i don’t the the bar itself jump to the red, just the red light keeps blinking). I’m guessing I may need to upgrade to a phenom sooner than i thought X_X (I did increase the voice limits on them all, but it appears it was only a marginal improvement.)

Also had noticed my Disk (Which i assume is the stream from HDD) jumped to max usage as well sometimes, RAM would assist in this I believe correct?

Best answer:

Answer by eMTau
You PC specifications seems to have no problem with the FL….i myself have a lower spec….but clips are not a problem. It seems that you FL is not getting the most performance out of you specs.

To solve this problem follow these steps:
1 – right click my computer/properties/Advanced tap/…under Performance click settings../Advanced tap/click Background Services….apply and ok.
2 – right click on desktop/properties/Appearance tap/Effects/…and untick all the boxes.
3 – make sure u run Disk Defragment, Disk Cleanup, disable System Restore, disable your Antivirus background services when you are working with FL Studio.
4 – set your sound driver to ASIO driver….get ASIO4ALL if u dont have asio drivers….ASIO4ALL comes with FL most of the time….do this by opening FL Studio….Options/Audio Settings…under Input/Output section….click the dropdown box where your sound card driver located…..and select the Asio driver.
5 – on the same window….set mixer Interpolation to Linear….turn off safe overloads and set priority to Highest.
thats it.

buying a good soundcard will too improve the performace on audio problems….but first try the steps above…..also i recommend external soundcards like Firewire or USB Audio interfaces……have fun

good luck

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!