Odroid N2+ Poor VST Audio Performance

[Groove On]

If you're getting poor/bad audio performance from an audio VST on the N2+, it can sometimes be the context switching between the BIG.little ARM cores. In my case, Pianoteq was giving me a lot of x-runs and wide fluctuations in performance when it switched between the 2x low-performance and 4x high-performance cores. One way to get more stable performance is to assign the application to the 4x high-performance cores like this.

 

taskset -c 2,3,4,5 'Pianoteq 7'

 

On the N2+ the 2x low-performance are numbered 0 and 1. The 4x high-performance cores are 2,3,4,5. 'Pianoteq 7 STAGE' is the name of the application being assigned.

 

This is more useful if you're using Hard Kernel's version of Ubuntu. Armbian handles context switching much more smoothly so depending on how hard you're driving the VST application, you might not need to do this on Armbian.

Edited May 13, 2021 by Groove On