Hi, as we all have encountered surely, CPU resources are limited and at some point the system can’t handle it anymore.
I want to get an understanding of what elements are the ones to focus on to free up CPU. I’ve heard using instrument tracks instead of rack instrument with multiple MIDI tracks routed to it makes better use of threading. But then, I guess that’s only when there are MIDI note playing. So if one was to continuously mixdown MIDI sections to audio, would using a rack instrument be a better way to go?
In general does converting MIDI to audio and deleting or muting the MIDI data help free up system resources?
Well if you use an instrument Track and link 10 midi tracks to that instrument. Assuming you use 10 different sounds from that instrument, you would have the same CPU usage as if you loaded a Rack instrument and did the same.
They would all be using 1 Thread to run on (Hyper Threading put aside) that would put the load on one Core of the CPU.
If you spread the load to 10 single instrument Tracks instead, every instrument only using one voice, 10 threads are used.
When we were all using 32bit, 10 instrument Tracks would eat up a lot of the limited and precious 2 Gb RAM we had.
Of course it depends highly on the resources the plugin uses, I am sure there are exceptions
Yes converting MIDI to audio and disabling or removing the instrument would help a lot.
And in general not a bad idea, as it forces you to commit and not do a half as… job in the first place.