INTERACT FORUM
More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 27 for Windows => Topic started by: wer on January 19, 2021, 07:51:47 pm
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Can anyone think of why the Analyzer in DSP Studio would be sluggish? The dancing line is moving slowly, graphically. It lags behind the music (or sometimes half a second ahead, but never synchronized), and looks like it's displaying at a low framerate.
The rest of the MC interface is nice and responsive. Machine is fast. CPU usage is 3%. Happens with both MC27 and MC26.
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Good question. A while ago I pointed out that the display lags the music, but there was no response. I don't normally use the feature, so it's not a big issue for me, but I was surprised that no one else had mentioned it.
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It's kind of a big issue for me. I need that feature to work. I was optimistic over the release note about the "high resolution" option providing better results at low frequencies, but I can't really tell if that feature is working, or if the low frequency information in Analyzer is still just wrong, as it previously was. Thanks for confirming at least I'm not the only one seeing it.
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Have you enabled "High Resolution" in the right bottom corner? That slows down Analyzer with high CPU utilization.
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We have resolved one issue that made the analyzer pretty slow, and it should be much better - if high resolution mode is turned off, that is.
In high-res mode its still pretty slow just due to the detail its trying to draw. We're looking into ways to improve that or evaluate how much detail is best to show.
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Yeah, I never understood it. The High-Res mode is just bonk, lags regardless of system, and regardless of hardware. Both Mac and Windows, High Resolution mode is lagging, and isn't requesting more CPU nor GPU usage.
But in general, the analyzer looks weird. The scaling compared to something like the Analyzer you get from an RME DAC makes no sense. The spacing between bands is also weird, and the vertical level is confusing without having the scale of dB display on the left or right for quick glance comprehension of the output level itself.
https://imgur.com/PjnZYwH
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Whether High Resolution is checked or not makes no difference for what I'm reporting, as indicated by the fact it happens with MC26 that lacks that option.
CPU utilization remained low with High Resolution checked on MC27, even though performance of Analyzer was sluggish.
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But in general, the analyzer looks weird. The scaling compared to something like the Analyzer you get from an RME DAC makes no sense. The spacing between bands is also weird, and the vertical level is confusing without having the scale of dB display on the left or right for quick glance comprehension of the output level itself.
The bands are a logarithmic scale, as common in such a graph. For some reason the 500Hz line is missing though, which gives that one odd spacing in the middle. Its otherwise a pretty much standard layout for a logarithmic plot.
The Analyzer is mostly designed as a quick smoke test to see if your DSP even roughly works as expected, and it serves that purpose quite well.
Whether High Resolution is checked or not makes no difference for what I'm reporting, as indicated by the fact it happens with MC26 that lacks that option.
CPU utilization remained low with High Resolution checked on MC27, even though performance of Analyzer was sluggish.
As mentioned in my previous post, we have already resolved an issue that made it generally rather slow, and non-highres mode should work much more fluidly in the future.
Drawing the high detail curve for highres mode is currently bottlenecking the drawing logic though, and will still be pretty slow.
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The Analyzer is mostly designed as a quick smoke test to see if your DSP even roughly works as expected, and it serves that purpose quite well.
The Analyzer does not work well though, if what one is looking at is bass, especially low bass. I have found it to be extremely inaccurate at low frequencies: indicating the presence of signals that are not there, and not indicating the presence of signals that are. The former problem is I suspect tied to the fact that the trace always wants to run off the left edge of the screen. At high frequencies, if you extend the chart to 30kHz, you can see the trace run to 0 above 20kHz. It never runs to 0 in the low frequencies.
All the other VST plugins I have tried (both FFT and filter-bank based) don't have this problem, and are much more accurate in LF than the MC Analyzer. I'd think this could be easily corrected.
The Seven Phases Spectrum Analyzer gives an old-school display and is a lot more accurate below 100Hz, for instance.
https://sevenphases.wordpress.com/spectrum-analyzer/
Here's an example of what I'm describing. Notice how MC's Analyzer indicates one peak at/below 120Hz, while the other analyzer clearly shows 3 separate peaks (30/60/120Hz) with the largest of these actually being the one at 60Hz. MC's analyzer shows only the 120Hz peak: the others are missing. In MC, the curve should rise as frequency drops from 120 to 60Hz (since the 60Hz peak is almost 10db higher) but it does not.
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Make sure you have "High resolution" checked.
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The Analyzer does not work well though, if what one is looking at is bass, especially low bass.
There was an attempt to improve this some years ago but that implementation led to a v slow moving view, so slow as to be basically useless
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,106835.msg742638.html#msg742638
I think you are better off using an external tool to verify the behaviour of the DSP really
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The bands are a logarithmic scale, as common in such a graph. For some reason the 500Hz line is missing though, which gives that one odd spacing in the middle. Its otherwise a pretty much standard layout for a logarithmic plot.
The Analyzer is mostly designed as a quick smoke test to see if your DSP even roughly works as expected, and it serves that purpose quite well.
As mentioned in my previous post, we have already resolved an issue that made it generally rather slow, and non-highres mode should work much more fluidly in the future.
Drawing the high detail curve for highres mode is currently bottlenecking the drawing logic though, and will still be pretty slow.
Thanks Hendrik, the whole time I was thinking people are saying to disable High Resolution because the hardware people have can't handle it (thinking, what more would I need above an i9 / RTX 3080).
Would adding the dB scale (just basically adding the 10dB or 5dB numerals) on the left side of the screen be too difficult to have in some later version of JRiver?
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I have indeed had to use 3rd party tools to see useful information there. But I don't think that's a good solution for the user. Every VST plugin I've tried performs adequately here except for the built-in analyzer. So it's obviously not an intractable problem. I think it can and should be improved.
I'm not trying to advocate that the Analyzer should have all kinds of market leading features and be fancy. It should remain a simple basic tool. I'm just saying it shouldn't be the least accurate analyzer you can use. Don't come in last, finish in the middle of the pack.
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Yeah it would be nice
Accuracy as mentioned
dB labels on y axis
Adjustable y axis range
Ability to select which channels to show and a legend that can handle larger channel counts
would be my v basic requests
A hold button to snap a value and an optional peak trace would also be nice to have and are still pretty basic functions
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We found the reason why high resolution was slow (and for some people normal mode as well), it should be resolved in the next build. We also improved the overall render performance of it.
And as a bonus, we threw in an accuracy increase for high res mode, since the performance concerns were mostly eliminated.