When working with projects with large MIDI track counts - e.g. orchestral MIDI templates, the size of a project can become huge, many pros have to work with slave systems, this is becoming more common for the amateur too as our collection of orchestral packages mushroom. Here is a serious way to radically downsize RAM and CPU needs.
*Purging - simplified - unloading all the notes except the ones required for playback
If we had a purge project button that worked this way:
In the Visibility area four colour states for the buttons (currently two).
Each MIDI/Instrument track can be:
a] Visible; Purged,
b] Invisible; Purged,
c] Visible; Active
d] Invisible; Active
Purged: Take the subset of only those sounds needed for the notes that are written in the part in the track. From this subset deduct all those layers for sounds that have more than one layer, that are not called for for the velocity for those particular notes that were used. Use these header only.
By setting most tracks to purged, except the ones you desire to work on, only those samples that are required are loaded into RAM. Presently, unless you have the vigilance of a cobra, most often all the samples for all of the notes have their headers loaded into RAM.
It may even be possible for Cubase to ‘know’ what notes are required for each MIDI track and impose an ‘auto purge’ until the track is opened in an editor, orf receives live note on input from a keyboard. Only at that point would the track instruct its VST to load all the headers for all the required samples for that voice. I notice too that Spectrasonics load a ‘preview’ state which gives the ear something whilst the full patch is loaded.
Anyways . If this is feasible, this would seriously impact the size of large projects and therefore their CPU and RAM load/requirements