Taskinfo 2000; PSP Mixbass

TaskInfo 2000 displays a host of useful information about the many simultaneous processes running in your PC. Here it shows how much CPU overhead Cubase VST 3.702 is taking, along with details about the plug‑in DLL files that your song has loaded.

Utilities for monitoring CPU usage and file accesses are less than entertaining, but Martin Walker finds them invaluable for finding out what's going on inside his PC...

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes while you're running PC applications? Which files are being read and written, what processes are being run, how much of your precious processor power does each process consume, and how much RAM is absorbed in the process? [No. Ed.] Well, this month I came across a couple of useful shareware utilities in my Internet travels that do just this.

TaskInfo 2000 is a real‑time process viewer: for each process that is currently running it monitors the percentage of total CPU power used, the amount of RAM, whether it's a 16‑bit or 32‑bit application, the path of the executable file used by the process, and lots more. Its display is split into three main panels — Processes and Threads, System‑Wide information, and Current Process information (see screenshot). Processes and Threads shows the full list of running processes and their specific data; if you click on one of these, the Current Process window fills with further information divided into five panes, including the product name and version number, the name and copyright notice of the company that released it, what other Modules it calls, and what other Files it has opened.

System‑Wide information shows the percentage of total CPU power used by all currently running processes, how much total physical memory they use, details about Swap file size and usage, and details of file reads and writes. General information about the CPU and Operating system is also available, along with full lists of all currently open files and drivers. At first sight there's just so much information on offer that it's difficult to take everything in, but you soon find your way around, and start to take in points of particular interest.

For musicians I suspect that the most interesting measurement will be CPU overhead, which is displayed in two columns: instantaneous and averaged. You can select how often the overhead is checked by adjusting the refresh interval between one and 10 seconds, but more useful is the ability to choose the averaging time for the Long Term reading, between two and 30 refresh intervals. This smoothes out the inevitable variations in monitored CPU overhead to give a more meaningful and consistent value.

The results are fascinating. When I ran Cubase it not only showed the amount of processor power it was taking, but a complete readout (in the Modules pane of the Current Process window) of each effect plug‑in DLL file currently loaded, and how much memory each one took. Meanwhile, the Files pane showed every WAV file in the audio pool, as well as the current read position during playback. You can also see the huge jumps in CPU overhead that cause audio glitches when you switch between applications.

The latest version of TaskInfo 2000 runs on Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, and 2000, with a Pentium 486 66MHz or faster processor, and of course monitors itself as a running application while you use it. For the record it took around 5Mb of RAM and one percent of the power of my Pentium II 450MHz processor. TaskInfo 2000 is shareware, and a few features are disabled in the non‑registered version. If you ar e still using it after one month, developer Igor Arsenin asks for just $12 registration to release the other features. If you want to learn a lot more about what goes on when you run your applications, point your browsers at www.iarsn.com/downloads

File Fare

Polish developers PSP have released their MixBass low‑frequency processor in VST plug‑in format, which provides low‑frequency compression, bottom‑end harmonic generation, and soft clipping. Uses range from the subtle addition of extra warmth during mastering to cone‑flapping excess, and MixBass seems eminently suitable for both acoustic and synthetic sounds. And the price? A bargain at $30. Visit www.psp‑audioware.com for details.

The second utility I found is File Monitor. While less exciting at first sight, it can also help you to understand more about your PC and to trace problems, by monitoring and displaying all file system activity. Once again it works on Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, and 2000. It has just one resizable display window, which shows every file access in chronological order, including timestamp or duration, and the Process that called the file, the type of Request (such as open, seek, read, and close), the Path of the accessed file, the Result of the request, and additional information in the Other column.

You can choose to Log Reads, Log Writes, or both, and can restrict the information captured using the Filter, which lets you Include, Exclude, and Highlight any type of named file access when you want to narrow down a search. If you are using Windows NT or 2000 you can also select and deselect monitored drives. Once you have configured FileMon you click on its Capture button: from then on every subsequent file access that meets your criteria is displayed in the main window, and you can also save it as an LOG file for further examination.

Initially, as with TaskInfo, you can suffer from information overload, but the Clear Display function lets you discard existing data so that you can at least start with an empty window before monitoring a specific task. I tried loading Cubase, and immediately saw proof of something I've only previously read about — that Windows looks for DLL and INI files in the application folder first, and if they are not found there it looks in the Windows\System folder. This allows older applications to use specific versions of DLL files if they have problems using the latest one, while INI files placed in the System folder tend to survive application updates and uninstalls to retain your carefully created user settings.

Further on in the FileMon display I found Cubase searching for its internal Vstplugins folder and then, on not finding this, looking for the external one before scanning its contents, and the contents of each sub‑folder, to build an up‑to‑date list of available VST plug‑ins.

I found lots of fascinating information, but you might be wondering how this would be useful for the musician rather than the developer. Well, I soon came up with one valuable use while running Cubase: I typed '*.wav' into the Exclude filter to ignore the files being accessed by the song, and then started audio playback. Anything that subsequently appears in the window is a non‑audio file access, and may be due to another process running in the background. If you're experiencing glitches that happen once every few minutes then FileMon will capture the culprit in the act if the problem's due to a file access. You can download FileMon at www.sysinternals.com.

TaskInfo and FileMon are both going to prove very useful in the future when tracking down problems, but I'm sure I don't need to remind you that they shouldn't be left running in the background when you're recording music that matters. No, I thought not.