[Fix 11.3.4] New to SCS... Huge memory usage...

[davidpallett]

Hi guys,

Only just bought SCS (Professional) and having a problem.

It seems to be hogging a massive amount of memory, despite only having a single audio file loaded up (a single 80 minute 192k MP3). At the moment, it's showing as using nearly 900mb of RAM which seems a bit excessive!

It's also a bit stuttery (sometimes takes a few seconds to transition between the Show and Editor modes (which I assume is down to the memory it's using.

PC is an Intel i5 laptop running Windows 7 Pro, 4gb RAM, hybrid SSD hard drive. Outputting via a Scarlett 2i4 USB interface (ASIO)

Anyone got any ideas?

[sclg]

Memory usage seems about right as it will have loaded the mp3 into memory.

Why it's stuttering, I don't know though.

Steve

[Eric Snodgrass]

Stuttering is usually caused by your sound card's latency buffers being too low. Try raising your sample buffer number in the Focusrite and see if that helps.
Also make sure that any programs you have working in the background are turned off. Laptops are notorious for having many programs load up during startup, thus stealing processor and memory resources.

[Mike Daniell]

David,

I've replied to your separate email, but just reiterating some points from my email:

• An 80-minute audio file seems very long for an SCS cue. Is this for some background music or ambiance that runs for a large part of the show?
• The excessive memory allocation may be due to the size of this file plus the fact that by default SCS may pre-buffer up to 3 seconds of that file - although the pre-buffering is of the uncompressed data. On my development machine (Win7 64-bit etc) if I load SCS with a large production the memory allocation is about 119mb.
• The stutters in playback concern me. As Eric responded, this may well be fixed by increasing your ASIO buffer size (which is an ASIO driver setting, not an SCS setting). If that doesn't help then please advise what ASIO buffer size you are using.

[Mike Daniell]

An additional option has been added to SCS 11.3.4 to allow you to nominate the maximum length (duration) of an audio file for the generation of the audio graph. The default limit is 10 minutes. Steve advised that providing this limit has corrected the issues encountered.