I’m using my backup machine at the moment, which is a 2014 Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM.
I’ve tried to set up NP 4.5 and NPPE, with strings and precussion from BBCSO Core, EW Hollywood choirs, and Spitfire solo strings.
On my normal machine, this takes about 35GB of RAM, plus I have 6 patches of BBCSO string instruments loaded directly in Dorico. So, probably all told about 40GB of RAM.
I thought this would have no chance of working, but miraculously it does. There is the occasional dropout, but most of the time it’s perfect.
Clearly a lot of the data must be being read from disk rather than RAM, so the internal Mac SSD must be fast enough for NP to work with.
I’m very impressed. Did I really need that nice new machine I bought a few months ago?
I used to have a 2014 MBP, and they were brilliant machines. (Apple’s laptops from 2016 to 2019 were pretty terrible.)
However, there’s lot to love about the Apple Silicon laptops. An M3 CPU is at least 3 times more powerful than the Haswell 4th-gen i7, for starters. To say nothing of the battery life.
Hi Ben, I was slightly tongue in cheek with my comment - my old machine starts to sound like a vacuum cleaner under this kind of load, whereas the new one is totally silent whatever I do to it.
Plus rendering audio on the new machine is about 4-5 times as fast.
Yes, it certainly is. Plus Noteperformer is apparently designed to be happy loading samples directly from disk if there isnt enough RAM to load them, as long as the SSD is fast enough.
with Windows, though, you need to specifically allocate extra memory to the swapfile – if I hadn’t done that there’s no way my NPPE CSS template which requires about 52Gb RAM would work on my system with 48Gb in total.