Engine Preferences

[onecircles]

The engine preferences of Buzz is a place that we all visit, but who knows what it all really means?

We have amplifier response time, which doesn't seem to affect my latency through midi, is it the response time of the internal logic within the machines? *demonstrates ignorance*

Then, if multithreading is enabled, which in my case it is, we can chose how many cores we want to use, and it even seems we can chose WHICH cores we want to use. Is there any conceivable benefit to selecting any cores specifically?

We have Affinity settings which are completely opaque to me: Set thread affinity mask, Set thread ideal processor, and disabled, and finally a "time critical priority" check box.

What the heck does this stuff do people?

[UNZ]

when we ported the old buzz manual to buzzwiki, we tried to add explanations for all those things:

http://buzzwiki.robotplanet.dk/index.ph ... uring_Buzz

But basically: i wouldn't mess with the engine settings (appart from response time), they most likely provide the optimal performance already

[UNZ]

We have amplifier response time, which doesn't seem to affect my latency through midi, is it the response time of the internal logic within the machines? *demonstrates ignorance*

no its the intertia of the volume slider on the connection triangle between machines (no inertia would make it click when you change volume there)

Then, if multithreading is enabled, which in my case it is, we can chose how many cores we want to use, and it even seems we can chose WHICH cores we want to use. Is there any conceivable benefit to selecting any cores specifically?

not really, unless you need to restrict buzz to use less cores for some reason (can't really think of a good reason you'd want to do that tough).

We have Affinity settings which are completely opaque to me: Set thread affinity mask, Set thread ideal processor, and disabled

"Sets a preferred processor for a thread. The system schedules threads on their preferred processors whenever possible. On a system with more than 64 processors, this function sets the preferred processor to a logical processor in the processor group to which the calling thread is assigned."

in english: don't mess with this one, just let the OS do its job

and finally a "time critical priority" check box.

Causes the audio thread of Buzz to run at the highest priority (called "Time critical" on Windows.) This should make Buzz more resilient to stuttering if other applications suddenly use CPU.
In practice, i've not seen much benefit from this flag, but yes there are probably use cases for it. Then again, there shouldn't run a ton of others heavy stuff when you're buzzing anyway.

[onecircles]

Thanks very much! I have been restricting buzz to 4 cores when I'm running guitar rig alongside it, but if I get guitar rig working within buzz as a vst I suppose that won't be necessary. If I can get away with it I'm going to use this little computer I built to run a projector as well as buzz and guitar rig while I'm playing music live, so there may be some to use this feature down the line Given what you said I'll definitely leave time critical priority checked. I've been fiddling with things and I don't remember what affinity setting is the default?

[onecircles]

Also thanks for buzz wiki. I need to spend more time there! Perhaps I'll contribute when I become more knowledgeable.