What's In Your Rig?
- This topic has 4 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 11 months ago by ,
Matt.
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2018-05-03 at 19:52:13 #43268,MattParticipant
Hi everyone,
I’ve recently upgraded my laptop to an MSI machine which sports an Intel i7 7700HQ, 16gb Ram, 500gb M.2 drive, and a 1tb data drive.
I’m running Cubase Artist 9, and I’m managing to get around 15 tracks of audio, and about 8 instances of Kontakt. All channels would probs have an instance of Neutron, and maybe some other plugs.
The CPU starts to crap out at around these track counts when using buffer sizes of 1024 samples.My question to you all (apologies to Mac users) is, does this sound like poor performance for a reasonably well spec’d machine, or do I have some serious tweaking to do??
I’d love to find out what you guys get by on in your workstations, and also the opinions of any Hackintosh owners too.
Links to pages on optimizing workstations or other resources would be most welcome.
Thanks for reading!
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2018-05-03 at 20:43:05 #43269,
shrikeParticipantIt could be reasonable performance, but my gut says it could get better. It’s hard to say without actually looking at a project.
Like do those 15 audio channels include tracked or looped audio? If it’s just a loop being played in an audio track it should have a pretty minimal hit, but if it’s, say, a full 5-minute take of drums or bass or whatever, it might start to challenge that 16gb of RAM. If you’re on this site I suspect it’s looped…
You didn’t mention what audio interface (soundcard) you are using…? I suspect that has a big part in it.
That’s a decent proc, you shouldn’t have much issue with that.
What format are your drives? HDD or SSD? That will have an impact.
These are Studio One based, but still relevant to any Windows machine
https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/studio-one//15-ways-to-optimize-your-windows-pc-for-studio-one
_-| get to work |-_
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2018-05-03 at 21:10:18 #43271,MattParticipant
Hi Shrike,
Thanks for the link, I shall have butchers when I’m home.
You’re absolutely right in saying my audio tracks are looped audio of about 2 mins each, give or take, and mostly bounced drum loops from previously processed midi tracks.
The main drive running the DAW is the M.2 SSD, and the data drive is a standard SATA HDD. The Kontakt libraries run; as do all the libraries, from the data drive.
I would have liked to have opted for SSD all around, but sadly my budget would not allow.The audio interface is an Audient iD4, which has been pretty solid so far. In the future i’m hoping to punt on an RME device, or maybe a Universal Audio if I feel I’m going to make use of the UAD plug ins.
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2018-05-03 at 23:17:48 #43274,shrikeParticipant
I have a UAD interface. If I had it to do over again, I don’t think I would go that route.
UAD is nice, but I honestly don’t think it’s worth the skrilla. Maybe for those tracking soft rock or whatever, the UAD emulations are incredible / amazing / sound just like the hardware / whatever, but for us, making varying levels of dirty and loud, I think you could better spend your money elsewhere and get more bang for the buck.
_-| get to work |-_
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2018-05-04 at 15:35:14 #43275,MattParticipant
You have just answered a burning question I have always had as far as UAD stuff goes.
Apart from compressors and EQ, what would UAD really bring to the table that would make that much of a difference in a DnB mix?
I am definitely taking your advice for the future there, and maybe go down the RME route for sure. Total-mix was always useful when I used it in the studio.
Also forgot to mention that I had a look at the link, and it was really insightful. I’ve already noticed a small drop in my resource usage in Cubase so thank you for posting it, Shrike.
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