CPU usage

Hey guys,

Thanks in advance for your help. I have searched the topic every way I could think of and kept getting similar posts... that didn't help much.

So I find that Kontakt, Reaktor, and Spark to be resource hogs. The problem with that, is the sounds available from them are... awesome.

Disclaimer: I know that even having sounds from these kits loaded consume CPU. I know to have my sample rate low (mine is at the default 48k). I know to run by itself. I have a pretty decent computer (though it's about time to upgrade). I have a high-end gaming sound card, it does have a Music creation mode.... Not sure how to change the buffer on it (read that on a few posts).

In other posts I've read, it states that Maschine doesn't support multi-core processors. Has this been, or will it be changed? Maybe I should assign it to a dedicated core if it hasn't?

I have 8gig Ram... wouldn't think 6 sounds with a few effects would bog me down so bad, but they do. I can fill the pads with the default library without issue, but... well you know where I'm going with this... they just arent' as good of sounds for what I'm trying to do.

I love this piece of "maschinery"... would like to find a way to run it more effectively. Hoping some people have some good information on how to do that.

Glad to be a part of the community. Excited to be back to making music.

Thanks for the help

Ey

 

You could resample. N.I. Has said multi core support is not going to come out in the near future. I was waiting to see what they were going to end up doing with that, but they hinted that multi core would not exactly be a cure all for everything. I think I'm going to get the fastest i5 iMac with SSD and go from there.

N

 

The default is 44.1khz, setting it at 48khz is asking the computer to do more work but this only comes into effect when sampling anyway (your computer will take 44100 samples per second rather than 48000 to digitize the sound you copy) and I am not sure exactly how much of a drain it is on the CPU this would be. Perhaps more noticeable when rendering.

As it is Maschine doesn't support multithreading yet and only uses one core when in stand alone mode but when its a vst it will run inside multithreaded supported host and with the new transport features arriving you could probably convince yourself that your running in stand alone mode.

Agreed though that some VSTs and instruments within Reaktor are hugely CPU intensive making it difficult to have full control over some instruments as is routing and making FX chaining I find. Resampling as Novem pointed out is the workaround for the moment. If you want to work with particularly heavy CPU hogging instruments you could resample the entire track without the instrument(s) and then tweak til your hearts content then resample that back into the original track and finish production work on the track.

 

Using an Intel i7-3630/3610QM processor as a minimum spec would probably be recommended. I have an AMD quad core 2.0Ghz machine with 6Gb RAM but it struggles with Maschine in Standalone mode. The problem is that the AMD single thread performance is pretty poor, so much so that some of the prepackaged projects that come with the Maschine Expansion packs are completely unusable (CPU redlines throughout). The DAW on this same laptop can handle several times as many synths and plugins as Maschine (and, as a proud owner of Komplete 9, they usually are the same synths & fx that Maschine complains about in standalone mode!)

Unfortunately, I find Maschine rather awkward as a VST plugin as well. It is designed primarily for standalone use and it shows in my experience. So my general workaround at present until I can afford to change my laptop for a new i7-3630QM model or better is to create templates from the projects that work well for me in the standalone version of Maschine (where the CPU is always running under 75%) It limits the scope somewhat, but at least I know I won't be frustrated after the insertion of 3 elements!

 

a i7 wont solve the problem, also you forget about RAM, its not all about CPU.