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Posted: 08-15-12 12:14 pm
by thatsme1133
when i play a heavy note song ( tohou-night of nights) synthesia seems to be unable to play all the notes when the songs gets into the heavy/impossible part. its like its cutting out some of the notes to be capable to play the others. it also gives this annoying sound, almost the same sound as when you touch you jack-cable who is plugged in a speaker, a short spark of sound, if you know what i mean.

i have had previous problems with the tohou songs, such as necrofilia, where the game crashed to the desktop.

disabling the futures in option who says "may fix crashes/bugs/slowing down game" doesn't seem to work either, but i didn't exactly go systematic through the settings either, so don't listen to me when i say i tried EVERYTHING.

I`m running version 0.8.3 on windows 7
graphic card: sapphire radeon hd 5850 1024MB
CPU: Intel core duo E8400 3.0Gh, 6MB

the download link to the midi file: http://www.sendspace.com/file/nmmpma

it runs completely smooth on my macbook pro, snow leopard, with only some lag due to the worse hardware on the mac.

i hope you can figure this out for me, its been bothering me for a while that a PC that can run heavy games is unable to play a song properly :P

thanks in advance

Posted: 08-15-12 12:47 pm
by Nicholas
thatsme1133 wrote:... where the game crashed to the desktop.
Were any crash report files left on your desktop afterward? If you send those to support@synthesiagame.com I'll take a look. It shouldn't matter how intense any song is, Synthesia shouldn't crash.

Otherwise, what are you using for output? The Windows synth? Or are you sending output to a keyboard or a different soft-synth?

You might have better luck with the sound output using a different synth, like CoolSoft's VirtualMIDISynth. The process is mentioned in the FAQ. It's free, lower-latency than the built-in Windows synth, and can use any SoundFont (so it can sound a lot better). It might be able to avoid the bad sound you're running into.

Posted: 08-15-12 12:51 pm
by aria1121
Wow, that is a really intense MIDI file.
Night of Nights, eh? Sounds very similar to the MIDI I posted a very while ago in my thread.
It is normal that Synthesia starts to lag because the MIDI file is very "heavy". It contains so many notes that it is difficult for the program to draw ("show") the notes falling down and to output them the synth ("play"). If you had something like a i7 processor with 6GB of RAM it may have run at something like 30 FPS in OpenGL mode.

But as far as I know it is just the MIDI causing the lag because I think Synthesia is simply not made for such MIDI's.

Posted: 08-15-12 1:00 pm
by aria1121
Nicholas wrote:It shouldn't matter how intense any song is, Synthesia shouldn't crash.
I remember when I had an old Acer (with 32 MB of VRAM and 756 MB regular RAM with Pentium 4M) it sometimes crashed to the desktop as well, I could definitly tell it was the laptop not being able to handle Synthesia that can't handle the MIDI on my laptop (lagception)
Nicholas wrote:You might have better luck with the sound output using a different synth, like CoolSoft's VirtualMIDISynth. The process is mentioned in the FAQ. It's free, lower-latency than the built-in Windows synth, and can use any SoundFont (so it can sound a lot better).
RichNagel wrote:P.P.S. About that "CoolSoft" thing: The "CoolSoft" BASSMIDI synthesizer is considered an illegal "hack" of MudlLord's and Kode54's BASSMIDI Driver. The "CoolSoft" guy simply snagged the source of the BASSMIDI Driver, and recompiled it with his own crapola embedded in it (web site, credits, etc...). In other words, the REAL (and latest and greatest) version of BASSMIDI Driver can always be found at http://www.mudlord.info/bassmididrv :)
Nicholas I think you should replace Coolsoft with BASSMIDI on your FAQ because I think it isn't so nice for Mudlord that you are advertising a deriviate of his work.

Edit (Off-topic) When I referred to that MIDI file from my post, I saw that the video right above the link in my original thread was featured on Memebase. In other words, Synthesia is now on Memebase as well.

Posted: 08-15-12 1:08 pm
by Nicholas
aria1121 wrote:... it isn't so nice for Mudlord that you are advertising a deriviate of his work.
I haven't seen any proof yet, we've only heard one side of the story, and BASSMIDI's license allows for derivative works (given proper citation).

In the meantime, CoolSoft's synth is much faster.

Posted: 08-15-12 1:11 pm
by aria1121
Ok let me try CoolSynth and let me see if there are some notable differences.

Posted: 08-15-12 1:20 pm
by aria1121
Yes it looks a slight bit faster than BASSMIDI.

Posted: 08-15-12 1:28 pm
by thatsme1133
Nicholas wrote:
thatsme1133 wrote:... where the game crashed to the desktop.
Were any crash report files left on your desktop afterward? If you send those to support@synthesiagame.com I'll take a look. It shouldn't matter how intense any song is, Synthesia shouldn't crash.

Otherwise, what are you using for output? The Windows synth? Or are you sending output to a keyboard or a different soft-synth?

You might have better luck with the sound output using a different synth, like CoolSoft's VirtualMIDISynth. The process is mentioned in the FAQ. It's free, lower-latency than the built-in Windows synth, and can use any SoundFont (so it can sound a lot better). It might be able to avoid the bad sound you're running into.

installing a new output did the trick, everything works fine now :D

that "crash" i talked about where just some bad wording on my part, it didn't actually crash, synthesia just shut down in the middle of the song, leaving me at my desktop. at least that's what i think happened, because i cant remember any crash report, and i can play the song without any troubles, exept for that stuttering, but thats fixed now :D

thank you so much, now excuse me, i have some listening to attend to :)

Posted: 08-22-12 5:25 am
by aria1121
:lol: Maybe using those Touhou MIDI's are a good new way to benchmark computers? On my laptop (see my specs in my signature) I got roughly 4 FPS with this MIDI (1366x768, full screen, OpenGL, note-markers off) and on another laptop (i3-2310M@2.1GHz - Intel HD Graphics Family R9 1298MB - DDR3 3072MB 667MHz) I got a nice 24 FPS with Microsoft GS-synth almost giving up.

Posted: 08-22-12 7:41 am
by Nicholas
I had to force V-sync off in my video driver and use a full-screen mode... and this is on my older development machine, but I was able to push 220 fps through that nonsense around measure 112. Otherwise it was >1000 fps the rest of the time.

My newer personal machine could probably do better. And neither of these have their little SLI bridge thingies connected -- I'm more interested in more displays than I am performance. :lol:

Posted: 08-24-12 5:21 pm
by aria1121
Nicholas wrote:I had to force V-sync off in my video driver and use a full-screen mode... and this is on my older development machine, but I was able to push 220 fps through that nonsense around measure 112. Otherwise it was >1000 fps the rest of the time. My newer personal machine could probably do better. And neither of these have their little SLI bridge thingies connected -- I'm more interested in more displays than I am performance. :lol:
What for CPU do you have?

I have a T3300 and has a PassMark benchmarking score of 1394 which is very low. (List of all CPU benchmarks) I guess your CPU is somewhere listed in here... I have to turn off falling notes (F5) otherwise I'll end up with 1 FPS in the heavy part of that song (else 18 FPS).

Sometimes I am really wondering like, wow, who has taken so much time in making these Touhou and Necrofantasia songs?

Edit Sooner or later I'll maybe post a vid of my Roland HP-1 handling some of these kind of songs.
Update Lol it is unbelievable that my X-MIDI is capable all of this and my piano is handling everything like a boss, it may not play everything on time (will slow down eventually, you have to pause the song and wait 5 seconds until it is done playing excessive amount of notes).

Posted: 08-24-12 9:01 pm
by Nicholas
My dev machine is a few years old now, so it's only got an i7-860 (earning 5,628 points on your chart). But I just put together a new personal machine a few months ago (mostly so I could separate my "Synthesia time" from my personal time by physically moving between computers -- shortest commute, ever) just after Ivy Bridge was released. It's an i7-3770 (or a 10,362 on your chart). (Fun fact: if you want to use 32GB of RAM in a computer you need at least the Pro version of Windows. Home Premium only lets you use up to 16 GB. ;) )

That test was run on the 860. That same computer only has a GTX 550 Ti for video, too, hence the lower numbers.

Posted: 06-22-13 10:16 am
by kiwi
Nicholas wrote:My dev machine is a few years old now, so it's only got an i7-860 (earning 5,628 points on your chart). But I just put together a new personal machine a few months ago (mostly so I could separate my "Synthesia time" from my personal time by physically moving between computers -- shortest commute, ever) just after Ivy Bridge was released. It's an i7-3770 (or a 10,362 on your chart). (Fun fact: if you want to use 32GB of RAM in a computer you need at least the Pro version of Windows. Home Premium only lets you use up to 16 GB. ;) )

That test was run on the 860. That same computer only has a GTX 550 Ti for video, too, hence the lower numbers.
u can enable it simply with reg edit (at least in the server version but i suppose the trick works for win 7 too )

Posted: 06-22-13 6:36 pm
by Nicholas
Windows 8 bumped the limit for all SKUs way up to 128 GB, which was nice of them. :lol:

Posted: 06-24-13 9:49 pm
by Rainjinmaru
i have had this problem with that exact same song! (touhou night of nights) it seems that notes do not play in time when the thing goes crazy, such as when notes are zigzagging on the screen or there is just a TON of notes. :arrow: -----> I THINK IT IS LAG <-----, because all the notes eventually out of time even after. sometimes it is still playing even though i skipped the rest of the songs and it is practically done

Posted: 08-13-13 12:20 pm
by Rainjinmaru
this also happens when i play Necrofantasia. apparently the file i found is very note heavy at somepoint. at that point, there are A TON of keys on the very left and they are stacked so tightly i an only see the shadow of the keys. it lags and even after that part is done, it is still trying to cram all those notes in even after it is already on a part that is not very note heavy. this seems to happen more often now. maybe it is because i downloaded the Gunbound game? but i had saved all the stuff on a USB. would that still affect it? the delayed notes are gettting pretty annoying... :evil:

Posted: 02-09-14 6:01 pm
by rawbar
Was the bottleneck for this sort of problem determined to be CPU or video? I have some slight playback lag in a couple of Dream Theater songs. Direct USB midi between a Yamaha EZ220 and my older Dell XPS M1530 laptop. I'm not using any special MIDI drivers, just the out of the box Windows 7 drivers which seem to be fine (even for playing along) up until things get really busy.

Posted: 02-09-14 7:26 pm
by Nicholas
What are you using as your output device? The Windows synth or your EZ-220? The EZ-220 should be able to handle virtually any (reasonable) amount of output without any latency. The Windows synth... not so much.

Posted: 02-09-14 7:49 pm
by rawbar
Ez220 for output. I think it's the laptop that's lagging.
It's not by much but when there's lot going on I'll hear just the drums fall a few tenths of a second behind. Ie it doesn't seem to be all instruments.

Posted: 02-09-14 8:04 pm
by Nicholas
Hmm. It might be the laptop, but really, even from 2007 that should be plenty to play Synthesia. How busy of a song are we talking about? The "Necrofantasia" mentioned earlier in this thread is one of those totally crazy "4 million notes!!1!" MIDI files designed to push synths and software well past their limits.