I have to clarify I'm not talking about Livesets for a gig, just in the studio.

Omnisphere might be a problem since it takes ages to open up (and it's very laggy in general), I spent a lot of time trying to fix this to no avail yet. Same with arturia plugins even if the plugins, once loaded, don't hit the CPU much.

When doing a gig I try to stick to stock plugins and just a few third party VSTs. Ableton does kind of bypass unused plugins for a while already but even switchinf presets on my synths of choice is no problem since it happens fast enough. (For that reason I'd never use Omnisphere on stage)

Thanks for your replies I'm afraid I have to live with the loading times. Ableton itself opens in seconds by the way, it's just when loading a project file that it takes a while.

 

some instruments (like Kontakt) can be significantly faster if you stream libraries directly from SSD (instead of buffering from RAM) and even faster if you batch resave library storage

 

this is why my DAW computer is not my laptop. I leave the same project open that I am working on sometimes for days or even longer. Someone will bitch that it is not energy efficient but i don't care. I am not strip mining coal to run generators so i really don't want to hear about it. I could power it off, but why? lol. I never leave any other hardware on like this, because I do not want those hours on my gear, or my laptop. It's why I am running Logic on a server Mac pro. It's the most stable computer I have ever used as a DAW, easily. It is dead silent, 2 xeon cpus, 64gb ram, all external hardware connected to it, etc. It's like the mentioned above "old guy orchestral" machines but it's just not Cubase. It takes about 1 minute to reboot and 30 seconds or more to open a big project, and that doesn't bother me 1 bit. If i need to do something quickly that is not in the project, I can use either Sound Forge or Reaper in about 1 second or boot up the laptop. Powering up any external synth takes no less time.

It is a very economical solution to this, and i would do it again (and will) in a second.

 

Last edited: Nov 9, 2023

Loaded projects should only use RAM, because CPU is SUPPOSED to be "released" when project is not running.
But it seems some DAWs/plugins ... don't release CPU.

Keeping projects open is working well on modern computers in most situations.
Because even in extreme "RAM swap" on disk situations, it is only a fraction of RAM.
Less than project size itself.

And that's another reason why i max RAM on my computers : keeping things loaded AND doing several things at the same time.

 

IMO, that is not even wrong. They're not DAWs and (the good ones) have tons of features -- but different features, aimed at live performers rather than recording.