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Effects of setting high ksmps?

#1

Say I change the standard ksmps setting from 32 to 512. It improves CPU-usage majorly, but could this cause any other problems when running the plugin? Perhaps there’s a reason why the standard setting is 32?

#2

Latency is the key issue when increasing ksmps size. Csound has to process ksmps samples before it can return them to the output buffer, so you need to make a call on how important realtime IO is to your plugin…

#3

Okey, so it would increase the latency for outputting a-rate variables, not only k-rate?

#4

The k-rate stuff won’t be an issue. It will be the round trip time for an audio signal going into your plugin and returning. It’s less of an issue with a synth than an effect.

1 Like
#5

So setting ksmps to 512 would create a latency of:

512 / 48000 = 0.01 sec

Correct?

#6

Correct :+1:

#7

In general I would not recommend to increase ksmps. Actually, there are several plugins for which I had to reduce ksmps even below 32 for two reasons:

  1. Envelopes are sampled to slow. This may create a scratching noise for fast attacks or decays.
  2. Iterative calculations have to be done. That’s mainly for physical modelling. Then you have to use ksmps=1.
#8

You should probably just use audio rate enveolpes for everything?

This can be done within a UDO. That way the global ksmps can be higher :+1: