I am in the process of attempting to speed up my recording processes (opening, loading, rendering, mix-downs, editing etc), and you can see from my sig below what equipment and programes I am currently using.
I would like to make it very clear that I am NOT a computer wiz, so I am not sure if what I propose will work, hence this post for a bit of guidance.
I was thinking about buying a Samsung 1TB portable hard drive to see if it speeds up, in particular, Halion Sonic but also the other areas I outlined above. Also, would a new SSD prevent the use of Halion Sonic draining my CPU and slowing down my computer?
Lastly, if the answer to the above is yes then do I just move all my Steinberg programes off my C (hard) drive, where it presently sits, and on the portable SSD?
I have searched the SB forums and knowledge base but could find no answers that I could understand!!!
As I said, I am not computer savvy, so could any answers be in the simplest format please.
Simply put, if you are experiencing “Halion Sonic draining my CPU” it means you are running out of processing power, your computer is underpowered. The answer to that obviously is, you need a more powerful machine.
I’m afraid adding drives won’t really help you, even an SSD would only make you machine a little quicker when booting up, and perhaps when streaming samples. It wouldn’t help when rendering, mixing down, editing and such.
Sorry mate, but it looks like it’s time for a new, more powerful machine, if you’re looking at a performance boost !
See if this helps, secondly see how Sonic is set up - I found with my 8 core system the best performance was achieved by setting sonic to use 7 cores. on some PCs it may be better to allow Cubase to handle the multithreads (multicore “off” in Sonic). there really is not right answer - experiment.
in sonic Options > Multicore
You can pick “off” to the number of cores your system has.
Note that Cubase itself will start a thread per instrument track loaded. So you might want to try experimenting with having multiple sonic instrument tracks rather than loading up one Sonic instance with loads of patches. This will use more memory, but if memory isn’t your limiting factor then it may probably perform better.
If you’re on a laptop ensure the power scheme is “Maximum power” and that it’s plugged in - turn off any CPU speed stepping parameters in the BIOS.
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