the time for offline render for Mixdown, freeze and render in place depends on the latency settings (buffersize) of your ASIO Driver. The smaller the buffer the longer it can take to render offline
This doesn’t make any sense to me.
I am not really understand why this is relevant for offline rendering. For what i understand is that offline rendering was invented to be independent from system recources so that you can have a perfect mixdown for a projekt that whould’nt be able to play in realtime. And i also can perform an offline mixdown without even selecting an AsioDriver.
So maybe some of the Steinberg employees can explain this?
I’m not an expert in this area, but it make sense to me.
Even if you use an offline Export/Render, you have to take the data from he hard drive, put itto the RAM, and process it. If the buffer size is smaller, you have smaller blocks, you transfer from the hard drive to the RÁM and you have to do this more often. Probably the “way” from the HDD to the RAM costs a time.
Next, what I could imagine, the computer can maybe use more CPU power with the highest Buffer Size. There is more data in the RAM to process, so the CPU can divide it better to the different cores, and process it more effectively. Maybe the CPU could be also waked up, for these tasks (because more tasks come at once).
But as I mentioned, I’m not expert at all, and I will be glad to learn something new.
Hello Martin,
thx for your answer.
The Asiodriver has the purpose to give access to the Audiointerface in Realtime in Both directions. From the DAW to the Interface into the analog outsideworld or from outside into the DAW and ultimately on the HDD. All this is realtime dependent and the buffersize determines how larg the chunks are measured in samples. the larger the chunk the higher the latency.
Howerer in offline rendering the Interface and its asiodriver doesn’t even matter as there is no connection to the interface needed. You can try this yourself. unselect the Asiodriver in Cubase and you will still be able to perform a mixdown offline.
How fast the Audio can be tranfered to Ram from You HDD depends on the bandwith and speed of your SATA Interface and the capapilities of your harddrive of course. How fast Instruments like Synths and Effekt Plugins can be calculated offline depends on your CPU Power.
At least that is this what i have thought and it was also confirmed by other. That you can perform offline render without any driver and Audiohardware also proofs it to me.
So you might now understand why i am confused about this.
I was a little skeptical so I tested with a mixdown of a 3 something minutes song.
Buffer @ 4096 mixdown 30sec.
Buffer @ 32 mixdown 2min. 30sec.
Buffer @ 128 mixdown 1min 30sec.
Buffer @ 128 and asio guard on high 45sec.
That’s why I feel mixdowns are slower than before. They actually are.
Now that I use a 128 buffer and asio guard on high all the time, I have the benefit of a playable buffer when using a VSTi and no dropouts. But at, it looks like a cost of slower mixdowns. This is really interesting, and of course begs the question if there should be a even higher buffer implemented for offline bounces.
Thanks for making us aware.
Seems like an easy way to save time would be to change buffer size to render off line then change it back. Def faster than waiting.
The reason larger buffers render faster is the same reason you can get more tracks/plugins using larger buffers. The larger buffer size constitutes a more efficient transfer of audio data to/from the CPU.
Ok thx for the test. Seems that this is only the case when Asio Guard is applied.
Now i am even more confused.
Asio Guard was invented to ease off the workload on the Asio-Path by precalculation of non realtime dependent track like Audiotracks in a secondary path outside the Asio path. The content of this audiotrack is allready on the drive so it can be precalculated.
All this matters for realtime playback or recording. When rendering offline there is no Asio needed and therefore Asio Guard isn’t either.
So maybe i am missing something here. Hope some Steinberg tech can explain it to me why asio quard has still effect during offline rendering. .
No the first 3 are without Asio Guard.
I made the 128 buffers with and without AsioGuard, at 4096 it will disable it automatically btw.
In the future I will up the buffer to 4096 when doing mixdowns or Render In Place, I wish it was possible to do a macro for that.
