Hello this is the Windows Optimisation Video
and we're going to be going
through how to get the most out of your
window system when using it for audio.
This might allow you to reduce your
buffer size which will in turn reduce
your latency and it also just make sure
that everything is running smoothly and
it will minimize any issues that you
might have during a session caused by your computer.
So firstly we just have a
couple of settings that you can change
on your computer which will help optimize it
So if you go to Control Panel
and then go over to Hardware and Sound
and then Device Manager,
it will bring up a list of all of your devices.
For this one you you want to
go onto your disk drive
and then right-click
and select Properties on your disk drive.
In the window that pops up,
you want to go across to the Policies Tab
and then enable both the settings.
Now if we close all that down,
and get out of device manager.
If we head over to Power Options
and then what we want to do is
click on High Performance
and then Change Plan Settings.
This is where we can check that everything's sorted.
Go on Change Advanced Power Settings
and then just make sure that High Performance
is selected in that little drop down menu.
Just hit OK and then we hit Save Changes.
Now we go back to Control Panel
and back into Hardware and Sound
and now we go to Change System Sounds.
We're just going to make sure that these
are turned off as these can cause
annoying sound in the middle of
recording but also have been known to
sometimes cause some problems.
One thing that can sometimes degrade the audio
performance of your computer is actually
graphics drivers.
Now that's not to say
that the graphics drivers are bad, it's just
that they cause the computer to
prioritise video or the graphics over the audio.
If you're just recording or doing
some mixing or something and you don't
need the video performance then it's
usually a good idea just to disable your
graphics driver temporarily to get the
most out of your system.
This is a bit more in depth than what we
were doing previously but if you are
having issues with audio dropouts and
performance issues and then this could
really help you.
There is this program called
LatencyMon which lets you analyze your
system's drivers and it'll show you how
long they're taking to complete their processes.
If they are taking longer than they should
then it will cause the computer to not
be able to perform as well and will
result in these audio samples being dropped.
If you download LatencyMon from the website
and then open it up you'll see
that it comes up with a blank window
to make sure you get the most out of this
test you'll need to connect your audio
interface and open your DAW and start
playing audio through your audio interface.
Once you've got all this set up
you can just hit the green play
symbol and it will start the test.
We recommend that you leave it for about 10 minutes
still with audio playing from your DAW
Once you've waited 10 minutes for the test run
if you go to the Drivers Tab it will give you
a big long list of drivers.
What we want to be looking at is the highest
execution time and it shows you how long
the drivers are taking to execute.
We want to try and keep that below 0.1ms
for each driver.
As you can see in this example we have the "ndis.sys"
driver which is above 0.1ms which means that
this could be a driver that is causing us issues
or that could cause us issues in the future.
Now that we've identified that the
"ndis.sys" is a problem driver for us
and could be causing issues
we have three options: we can deactivate it, we can
update it or we can reconfigure it.
When you find one of these you need to
be very very careful not to just
deactivate it because you might find
that you ruin something on the computer
you stop it from being able to boot.
Some serious stuff!
So it's worth a quick search
to just check that the driver that you're
going to be altering is not something
very key like that.
So after a quick search we found that the "ndis.sys"
comes from the ethernet.
So if we disable that, if we go on to
Control Panel and Network Connections
right-click on Ethernet and disable,
now if we go back into LatencyMon
and run the test again
,we can see that the "ndis.sys" is
no longer taking more than 0.1ms
We do actually have a list
of common drivers that have been known
to cause problems.
So if you head over to the link in the
description that will give you a list of
all the different things that could be
worth just checking to see if they're on your system.
If you want more information
head over to support section of our
website where there's lots of articles
and useful things to help get you up and
running with your product.
I hope this has been useful and that it will help
you get the most out of your recording experience.
Thanks for watching!