CPU (Usage and Maximization for Digital Audio)

While it is impossible to speed up your computer's processor without a sauder iron or another form of upgrade there are many ways to more effectively use the processing power your computer has. Here are a few general tips to avoiding the disruption in recording or mixing from lack of computing power.

General Computer Changes:

• Quit all non DAW applications
• Make sure you have a good amount of memory, 512mb or more is usually recommended for most DAW's, a gig or more can significantly increase tracks and fx that you are able to use at one time.
• Turn off extraneous proccesses that might be going on, (that handy weather app that sits in your upper menu bar, or the last.fm app, etc.)
• If you have a laptop, you might be able to adjust processing speed, check the energy saving panel to make sure processing speed it set to highest, an "automatic" or "low" setting will top out lower than the "highest" setting.

DAW Specific Changes:

• Cut down on tracks. If you have a mono fx track that is in a stereo track, bus them down to a mono track. or bus multiple tracks down to a stereo stem, after bussing the tracks down to a stem disable the previous tracks so that they do not use processing power (in protools this is done by changing the voice to none). (to record from one track to another set the output to a bus and the input on the new track your recording on to the same bus or busses if it's stereo. Later when your mixing if you want to change a stem you can enable the tracks again and remix your stem, say if your horn stem wasn't punchy enough and you wanted to hear the trumpet a bit out more than the full section.
• Don't duplicate reverbs, or compressors unnecessarily. If you are using Protools, it has internal sends that can be set up to output to a bus (these sends have their own faders so you control how much gets sent to the reverb or desired effect), set up an aux track with your desired effect with it's input set to your output of the send. Then you can adjust the amount of reverb on each individual track of a drum kit rather than sending just the sum or individually placing reverb on each track.
• Freeze tracks, Digital Performer has the ability to "Freeze Tracks" this basically writes the effect information to the track so that it doesnt have to reprocess it every time you press play.
• In Protools use audiosuite plugins that write directly to the track, rather than RTAS plugins. (Warning: This writes over your previous audio, it is good practice to duplicate your playlist before writing plugins directly to the track. This allows you to go back to the original playlist and change your plugin settings at a later time.)

Categories: Tutorials | Technical | Pro Tools