Let's hear it from you guys who are getting a lot of processing out of a little computer.

Right now, I got Reaper and a Fireface800... and loving it!

I'm tracking as much as I like at 24/44.1 without so much as a hiccup. When I start adding compression, eq, and reverb to tracks, it's not long before the old CPU acts like it is wading through a tar pit. I'm not running a super powerful computer... a 1.6ghz intel celeron with a gig of ram. I've been through all the XP tweaks I can find online or think of.

Any tricks or suggestions to squeeze the most out of my machine?

Can You freeze tracks, this keeps the plugin but takes the load off of the CPU.
UAD stuff is a great cure for this also.

I don't know exactly what freezing tracks is, but I'll look into it. Does this mean some of them won't be in the playback mix? I don't know how I can hear to mix right without all of them operational.

Maybe I can merge some tracks.

Freeze tracks are when the track is burned to the hard drive, but you retain the ability to "unfreeze" them and change the setting of the plugin to fit the mix
Nothing changes in the song or project just the tracks VST plugin's are played back by the hard drive.

Your going to have to bounce files down to save processing power. I'm pretty sure Reeper doesn't allow freezing of files.

What happens if you do without the reverb?

What are you using for plugs?

I ask because I've run full 24 track mixes on a P3 800/521mb without an issue. At the time, I think Waves Ren Bundle was the Comp and EQ mostly...either the RenReverb or Logic/Nuendo's built in verb.

Anyway--reverb is ALWAYS gonna be your CPU drain--particularly on Celeron's which I don't think have close to the same floating point performance as Pentiums or G4/5s. Reverb is one huge floating point number crunch.

Don't take offence to my asking--but, you ARE putting the reverbs on sends, right? I've known more than few people who inserted reverbs on every track they want reverb on...and couldn't figure out how their CPU ran out of juice so fast. (as a general rule)If you can't do a decent mix with a couple of true stereo reverbs, there's more wrong than CPU drain.

Right now I'm using free SIR for reverb and Antress plugs for compression and eq.

quote:

Don't take offence to my asking--

Never, ever!
The only individual tracks I'm reverberating are vocals and solos, and you are right, it sucks the wind right out of my CPU's sails. I can get by with just the vocals...or I can just track with reverb, I guess.

You could also "print" or render the reverbed tracks, perhaps one at a time, so you don't keep burning CPU, but I think Pop is probably on the right track. Use Send for your reverbs.

quote:

Popmann
Kyudan


Posted 12-22-07 02:28 AM
What happens if you do without the reverb?


Don't take offence to my asking--but, you ARE putting the reverbs on sends, right?

Popmann, Can you explain this, I think I may be utilizing my VST effects wrong also.
I use Cubase SX3. But have never used sends, I just burn off the track with the effect, or freeze the track channel.

How does one go about the set up to utilize sends????

Hey Dutchman,

You just "Add an FX Channel" in the same way you would "Add an Audio Track". I usually just right-click in the tracking window and select it from there.

Then pick which reverb you'd like to use, and it'll show up as "FX 1" on your mixer. Then, use the "Send" on each individual channel to route it to the reverb.

Lemme know if that's not clear and I'll try to elaborate.

In reaper what you can do is apply fx. Right click on the item ad select apply fx. Or, you can render tracks to stem tracks which creates a whole new track. This is good for say a reverb send track that doesn't actually have any items. Even better, though, you can set up a macro to select all items in the track, apply fx to selected items, and offline fx on selected tracks. Then all you have to do is is press say ctl-f and it does it automaticly. Now when you do this it creates a different take so you can even set up a macro to select previous take and set fx online. Then you'll be right back. If you go to the forum and look up my "macro help" thread and it has all the steps for those macros. As far as cpu goes I was on a 1.3 p4 and UAD was great.

Thank you for the explanation, I'm going to try that on my next mix, I think I have the concept, but I'm going to fiddle with it awhile.
I may have a few more questions

Look up old school mixers and auxilary send/returns. Cubase is really no different--just all virtualized and lacking channel count limitations.

Also, as far as the antress plugins go, when I demo'd them on my old computer they hit the cpu pretty hard. Have you had a chance to check out the stillwell plugs yet. The're pretty cpu friendly and they sound great. Major Tom is excellent. Especially as a sidechain comp for ducking. And the reaper only versions are rediculously affordable. Another thing, I always heard that convolution reverbs were cpu hogs. Which is why I never used them. Maybe I should try with the new one. You might check out ReaVerb to see if it uses less cpu than SIR. If not, you might try using ReaVerberate on your sends as you mix and then replace it with SIR after you've rendered your other plugs. If you use the macro I was talking about you can always go back after rendering the reverb and tweak comps and eqs if need be. I hope this helps some.

Lance

quote:

Also, as far as the antress plugins go, when I demo'd them on my old computer they hit the cpu pretty hard. Have you had a chance to check out the stillwell plugs yet.

Been avoiding the stillwells for the time being. I'm not complaining about the price, but they aren't free. That's important until I get a little more cash together.

Free plug ins are worth what you pay has been my experience. SIR as an example was a HUGE CPU hog next to WavesIR...and the Waves was actually doing a bunch of DSP on top the convolution.

This is one of the reasons I don't use a computer DAW...I'm financially voting against changing everyhng we buy into software licenses. I don't want to dowload the right to listen to an album for as long as I meet the changing terms of the agreement, or use software until the company decides they don't support it.

Rant off...you just need to budget 1.5-2 times what you paid for your computer hardware for software. Else, I have your answer on what you should do with the DPS24 when you get it back--use it.

quote:

Rant off...you just need to budget 1.5-2 times what you paid for your computer hardware for software. Else, I have your answer on what you should do with the DPS24 when you get it back--use it.

That is the dream, of course. So far, VST has not been able to determine what is causing the IC protector to repeatedly blow. I don't have a good feeling about it. For the time being, I'm using Reaper and free plugins, with no investment in the software. If I decide I love it as much as I've been told, I'll send $ and look for better plugins. Bottom line is, I need to get something happening. Throwing money at a used DPS ended up being a bad gamble.

I don't disagree with you.

It's been a great machine for me, save a couple big flaws*...but, I've read about LOTS of people having trouble with used units. I wonder if there was just a bad run or something.

*no HPFs on the channels...and some glitchy performance from the automix engine.

FWIW...the Waves Ren bundle (if they still bundle them) used to be $250. That will get you a really good compressor, EQ, and a usable reverb for little scratch. none hard on a CPU. Delays and gates and such are more than useable in Cubase or Logic (albeit you're using Reaper). In fact, C4 has a new "vintage compressor" that has surprised me with it's quality.

Thanks for the heads up on the plugins. Of course, I will wait this DPS thing out before I spend any moolah.

quote:

I wonder if there was just a bad run or something.

I'm curious about that, too. I think I may start a thread on the DPS forum when I get a computer break today, and ask people who are having trouble with their deeps what the s/n is. Wouldn't that be interesting if we found evidence of a bad run? Maybe the fix would help a lot of frustrated owners.

Every time I read a thread like this I feel fortunate. I'm running a similar computer to wretch, an Athlon 2200 with a gig of ram and I can consistently mix 25 to 35 tracks without much problem. I use a lot of EQ and run plenty of plugins.

The Freeze feature in n-Track is a valuable help. It renders the track with the plugin effects and then plays back the rendered track instead of using processing power to run the plugins in real time. If you want to change the effects on the track you just unclick the freeze icon on the track and you have your raw track back. You make your changes and then hit the freeze button again. It's a great feature and very simple to use.

The other thing is that whenever possible I assign tracks to a group and use the plugin on the group. For example, I usually use 8 or more mics on a drum kit. I'll assign the kick resonant and the kick batter tracks to one group. I put Vintage Warmer on the group to compress the kick and I put a reverb on the track to give it a little "bigness". Then I assign all the other drum tracks to a different group and apply different compression and reverb settings to that group.

On the project I'm mixing now I have 4 to 6 guitar tracks on each song (a few songs have 8 to 10 guitar tracks). I put all those tracks into a group and apply EQ to the group instead of EQ'ing each track separately. That saves quite a bit of CPU power.

The other thing is optimizing your PC. When's the last time you have wiped your hard drive, including operating system, and started over? To some people this sounds drastic but I do it about once a year. It's amazing how much faster the computer is after you do it.

Another trick is to pick up a cheap 40 gig hard drive and put a second operating system on it. This will give you a dual boot system. You can use this drive for your audio applications and save the data to the other drive. Boot up from the other drive/operating system for surfing porn sites, downloading illegal music and software, and all other activities that the computer gets used for (just kidding about the porn and downloading).

Even though I'm getting by with my current system I'm buying the parts to build an Athlon X2 3000 'puter which should free me up to use plugins and eq as lavishly as I want.

As the saying goes, you can never be too rich, too thin, or have a computer that's too fast.