I am new to Serum and trying to see if it will work on my system. I am on an HP laptop, i7 quadcore processor @ 2.8 Ghz, Windows 7, 8Gb of RAM. Ableton Suite 9.6.2 32 bit,, Focusrite Scarlett interface with a buffer size of 1104 samples. With a fresh Ableton Live Set with no other tracks or plug-ins and just a single instance of Serum using a factory pad patch like "Celestial Light", My CPU meter goes over 100% and there are audio dropouts. Is my computer just too old and underpowered to run this synth? Or are there some areas I need to investigate? I run Alchemy, Blue2, Predator,Synth Master, etc. with no problem. Thank you for any input you may have.
how many notes of polyphony are you trying to do that gets you to 100% +?
About 8 or 10 notes. Also goes over the CPU limit when just using headphones direct from the laptop ( no audio interface) and just using the computer keyboard to play notes.
It's not the # of notes that is important but rather the total voices (fraction in the lower-right corner). I would recommend to keep that # under 64 total, because some other high quality wavetable synths such as Massive will simply force-limit you to 64 voices total at all times. Serum has no such imposed cap currently (maybe someday as an option, but I'd never just make that a blanket restriction) so you need to watch it yourself by restricting POLY and/or unison counts if needed.
Thanks so much Steve. I will look into that.
I was messing around with the same factory patch and was having the same issues. These are my system specs:
- Late 2015 27in 5k iMac (17,1)
- 4GHz Intel i7 (6700 quad core)
- 32gb 1867 MHz DDR3 ram
- Ableton & Serum both running at 64 bit
- Thunderbolt 2 interface running at 44.1 kHz Sample Rate and 64 samples buffer size
As soon as I changed Poly from 16 down to 8, performance was a lot better.
also good idea is to set oversampling to x1 for the actual work, and go for full x4 when rendering/freezing.
Is the demo version really old and not optimized ?
I just bought new machine. I7 6700K at 4ghz, Asus z170-A MB , 16GB memory , SSD, Behringer UMC1820 and Steinberg UR22 soundcards.
Evaluated demo of serum and I can't play f.ex. that "Celestial Light" patch even 2 notes without glitches ! Buffer size, sound card.. etc does not matter at all, processor load is over 70% according to Live9:s CPU meter.
Same thing was with my old laptop and I didn't bother to buy Serum because I though that it is too old.
The demo version is a little old, you will see about a 20% reduction from those numbers. You should watch the total polyphony count ("fraction") in the lower-right as that is probably the most relevant number. you could try the 3 day trial at Splice.com if you want to see the latest version in action.
