I have a i7 8gb (sad memory) gtx 650 laptop and a mostly air cooled workstation. I'm trying not to make my room hotter than tropical this summer. I have PT 12xxx installed on the laptop and everything from AudioEase to Zynaptic Plugins installed as well.

Do all the plugins being used load into RAM, and if so, htf do I "remove" or move "unused" plugins such that I can conserve RAM...(should I just buy 8gbs more of memory, will that even solve the problem?) I remember in my long tutorial travels of 6 or so weeks having some software use an unused plugin folder and I think it referenced saving memory...I have no clue if it was even referencing PT or Cubase or FL for that matter now.

Or...do I have to uninstall ALL the plugins and then reinstall "just" the ones I want to use? Cause idt many plugin groups even give me the opportunity to install specific plugins like Melda, or Blue Cat does. Idt Waves, t-Racks, etc does at all...

Thanks for any helpful direction. I'll even take helping direction said in an insulting way, idc, I only care about actionable information.

Happy Mother's Day. I'm doing my time soon with my Motha.

 

Last edited: May 8, 2016

I think you are getting confused between installing plugins to your hard disk and what is actually loaded into memory. You can install as many plugins as you wish to your hard disk. They don't load into memory until you use them within your DAW (Ableton, Logic etc.)

So as long as you are not using them, they are not being used!

Things indeed slow down if you load lots of them within your projects. Oh and memory always helps!

 

Ok, So if I use memory pigs like Kontakt, I'm gonna have to bounce the tracks to wavs, then hide and whatever it's called to turn off the instrument track or heat my room? I literally was able to play 30 measures before the lappy threw up on me.

 

RAM means Random Access Memory, as mageye said, it's only used to read and write tasks eg: running your file explorer, run your DAW etc, once your computer is off, all that data vanishes and so goes the process.

If you want to maximize your computer's performance try and:
- Always have more than 4gb of free space on your HD that run's your OS eg: Windows/OSx.
- Run Disk Cleans and Defragment your disk once in awhile.
- Run your Wav. samples off a USB external HD
- Run your VST's off your Main drive.
- Delete EVERYTHING you don't need on your laptop.

I've got an i5 desktop with 8gb RAM and no external GFX card but my pc is doing pretty cool coz I show it some love.
In terms of Heat, I remember my laptop would also FRY even in winter, consider lifting it off the table somehow to give the fans space to breath, also make sure the vents are clean.

Good luck mate.

Do you have an Audio Interface/Soundcard? That could be the issue here.

 

have you set it to asio driver with a high buffer setting in the audio settings of your daw?

 

Yes of course! Everything you install is eating up a certain space, no matter if they're active or not.
Furthermore if you have thousands of Plug-Ins the DAW's scanning process will slow down drastically.
Samples based instruments can be real memory monsters! Not to forget that 64 Bit Plug-Ins consume
more memory space than 32 Bit Plug-Ins.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

It's right what you say but in the context of his question it is wrong. What mageye said is right. He is confusing RAM with hard disk space. Yes, plugins use hard disk space and many plug ins slow down the start of your DAW. But they are not loaded into the RAM and slow down the performance without beeing used. Actually most plugins will not need much or any RAM until they use samples of some kind.

 

i7 and 8gbram should be sufficient enough. A proper audio-interface might help with the throwing up issue. or increase the samplerate and buffersize

 

Last edited: May 8, 2016

The DAW scans for plugs and writes that information somewhere... so, it is true that you loose some minimal amount of memory, but I think, it is negligible ?!?

 

Plug-ins don't figure into processing until they're loaded into the DAW; moreso when signal active through them.
Put your effects on spearate channels and buss-send to them, whenever possible.
You might find it good to automate "on" and "off" (not just muting) of effects, especially those in-line so that they're not live in RAM while not called-upon.

It sounds like you know the drill about CPU, and about heat. In summertime, I can't use my Macbook Pro for audio between noon and 6PM, due to how hot the Sun makes the interior of my domicile, even with A/C going and curtains drawen.
Max-out the RAM. If you can go from 8GB to 16GB, do it.

One thing I did: 500GB SSD, with OS and applications on half of it; the other half has sample librarires (non-Kontakt; such as Studio One's and Maschine's) and large IR libraries (such as Altiverb's 5GB) symlinked to where they had been on the system partition.

 

@Nimbuss My laptop still runs hot, but Idc cause it really doesn't heat the room. I just have a laptop tray fan under it and a little "personal" fan if I hear the laptop fan stay on too long. I mean my workstation with a 750W power supply and 5 fans, with extra holes drilled in the side, even with a water cooler on the CPU makes my room in the 80's in the winter time with the house temp set at 65 degrees. The GPU is an old pig, I have to admit, I'm waiting for a Titan X to fall from the sky or my bro's GTX 970 hand me down. Idk how well plastic keys will be played with sweaty hands...

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@Wuji Hey, you be assuming yo. No, I was testing my assumptions (even the most basic like, if I work and pay taxes, why can rich ppl send money to Panama and evade those same taxes? Am I truly free?), i.e., PT can't be stupid enough to load in the plugins, just make a huge list of pointers...my bro is the programmer and IEEE guy...the tool maker and I'm the tool
user, (I have an adv degree in Applied Math and Statistics)...I just care about getting this stuff to work and wouldn't even mind being called a dumbass for not pushing play too after I pressed record and record, if it would have saved me time that I had to use to figure that out myself.

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@Rhodes I found where PT writes the stuff...in the file c:/users/.../AppData/local/temp/Avid

I know the hdd stuff is not related to CPU load, but I used CCleaner, Total Unistall's scan and clean and WinUtilities registry cleaner too, to hunt and deal with all that bloat. I do have a terabyte drive in the laptop...and it's only half full without Omnisphere installed on it yet...
There was 5gb of bs history saved just from PT in there, wtf. Over 7 gb total. Ty Avid, Big Brother runner up. I don't need or care to save my history for every session I ever ran in PT.

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I did find out I missed I have this stupid "Beats Audio" as part of my laptop sound hardware. So I made sure it was up to date, reset to default settings then shut all the bs "enhancements" and everything else in that thing to minimize latency--PoS.

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@relexted Strangely, Cubase reads my audio driver as an ASIO but PT calls it WASPI and IDT High Definition Audio CODEC...idk wtf that means I'm hoping PT is not using the windows driver and Cubase is using the "sound card" driver...idk yet. I only get to chose a buffer size of 256/512/1024 in PT which means it thinks the laptop ain't powerful enough for anything lower 128/64/32. I also have NO option to choose a different driver in PT it gives me one, and f u. Cubase I think will allow me to choose the PoS windows driver...but also calls it something else not WASPI.

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@Kwissbeats I know for recording I should use the smallest buffer size for min latency, and then use 1024 or 512 for mixing hoping that it really will allow for more simultaneous plugins but if I use the AU versions of VSTi's I'm potentially screwed cause that needs more buffer size to allow more plugins. I assume. And then I have to install all this crap onto my workstation. Oh boy, windows and installing, makes a wasted day of fun.

So far, after taking a dive into the audio sound card drivers, and noticing that large beats audio icon in my systems tray, I ran 2 instruments of Symphobia, a chocolate 88 piano, Exhale girls going Ahhh (they like going Ahh and MMM), and the laptop didn't grab it's chest, make a growly screaming sound and die like before (heart attack victims tend to throw up...I was a Medic), but I did have multiple instances of Kontakt running in the DAW, instead of running multiple instruments in ONE instance of Kontakt that I wanted a midi track to drive...I just learned to peek under the hood of Kontakt, so I'm getting there.

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@stevitch Well what I was shown so far is: send FX on time like reverb and delay (up to many -> 1), but insert FX on dynamics (1 -> 1) as a rule of thumb. Strangely, after I learned to push F12, or record and record and play (instead of just record and record and not recording anything, mofo), I could record the midi sends of my keyboard thru the instrument track containing the instrument as an insert. That seems weird to me but it worked. I'm coming from Cubase.

Tomorrow I'm gonna try to get timpani drums to turn into girl vocals that go AHH or MMM either thru a Kontakt AET layer or sends to Mmorph or Zynaptic's Morph thingie...my laptop is looking at me nervously though. It reminds me of my dates that half way thru, would be shaking like leaves. Idt my laptop cares that fear enhances the O response...but my dates did. [I'm old enough to have girls that went out on dates...never right swiped yet, and foregoing the need to celebrate getting an STD, no matter how many articles like this appear: http://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...ists-privilege-sexually-transmitted-disease/]

thx everyone for the feedback. I'm going on 7 weeks into this stuff, if I forgot a week or two (I thought at first only a month), and only 3-4 days with PT instead of Cubase.

 

Sounds as though you could probably still use some optimising of Windows. I am very careful to not install virus checking software and stuff (crazy I know!) Obviously if you are hooked up to the net on that machine it's perhaps unavoidable. But lots of software installs lots of crap in your system. I know you have run CCleaner, which is a good start, but it might also be worth looking into some of the things that are running from startup. Things you often don't need running. Like Google and Java updaters. This is especially important on laptops.

They say google is your friend (I use DuckDuckGo).

Try search terms like:

Windows optimisation
Optimise Windows for audio

Here are a few examples:

http://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/pc-optimization-guide-for-windows-7/

http://www.ableton.com/en/help/article/optimize-windows/

http://www.computingunleashed.com/speed-up-windows-7-ultimate-guide-to.html

http://www.computingunleashed.com/list-of-services-in-windows-7-that-can.html

http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/

 

Last edited: May 9, 2016

@mageye ty for the references, I'm always will to learn more.

I actually go into my processes and end everything I know is not useful. Referencing google (well startpage.com's version) over and over to make sure I don't rip out my laptop's heart by ending the process. There's a svchost.exe I find suspicious but I'm not good enough to figure out what it's doing natively. I once uninstalled windows live and found Microsoft 7 Ultimate became offended and wouldn't let me log on to my computer! I saw it try to log on to a remote server when I was going thru watching what it was doing in the background just logged on to my computer...I thought wtf, and uninstalled it with Total Uninstall. So then I bricked the laptop. It's surveillance or brick...

After I end all the processes I don't want, block all the processes I think will return without my knowledge to the internet that I freakin air gap the laptop anyways because I have wifi in my house, and nearby, then I only hibernate instead of shut down, cause it's a pain in the butt to do that process of ending processes every freakin time. Then when I wake it up, I check again and end unsecapp both for my process and "systems" processes (it likes to be called from remote computers...and idk even though I stop the wifi device, not just shut off the wifi icon in the system tray...a program once turned on the wifi to phone home! before I shut it off at device level), and things like GWX, and trustedinstaller, which just by it's name has to be microsoft doing bad stuff. "Trust this" mofo.

I use virus protection but shut it off when I use PT or Maya. I gave up on Avast and the other one, now I forgot, cause their update requests most of the time are just sending usage info about what you were doing on the computer, and I have enough hands up my butt using me as a sock puppet already. Like wtf, really, an observed life is not free.

I also have programs like tuneup utilities that supposibly optimizes performance...but u never know...

I use startpage.com which everyone should use actually instead of google, since you have one name to bind you with it's offline tracking you consent to loggin' into youtube or gmail. They definitely need to track what you do offline right? I didn't even know I had more than 15k looks on my google+ page cause I never use it, but I use my real name in "real" forums commenting of propaganda (most ppl call them "news sites") cause I know a screen name is transparent to the govt so why not give them the finger by using ur real name acknowledging you know they know you? I mean how can you not comment on a woman trying to convince herself that her herpes makes her cooler? Ew. I'm all for the "Free the Nipple" movement, cause to me the only beautiful part of male women nowadays is the way they look, like walking art.

Overall I'm suspicious now that it's the bs "Beats Audio" crap that my laptop is using that is adding to the cpu overhead and latency, but I "fixed" that yesterday and will try it today...a little concerned it didn't help much...

I'm just psyched I have timpani(e)s (wtf is the plural of timpani?) so I can make a hook like "2001 A Space Odyssey"...but using a chinese flute for the melody and then turn them into Ahhing women...I hope. I need to use a higher pitched instrument cause I'm tryin to score a trailer for my FUCs (Feline Urban Commandos) and their voices are kinda high pitched too. That is my mission today.

 

Just want to share a tip, use an air duster to blow a way all dust from your cpu cooler, a huge different on my laptop!
Cheers

 

Yes its true,thats why professional producers like genius Kanye limit the number of plugins to 20 per project,usually 20 instances of ozone on a master bus.

 

@Von_Steyr Good to know. I've played with iZotope's stuff, but I don't think they're drop dead better than anything else...to my virgin ears.

Either way, that sucks. In the CGI field, if I want to render something that my workstation after it wets itself at the proposal says I can come back and check when the Universe ends, I use render farms.

Wtf given the processing power potentially needed for more advanced stuff have they not considered render farms or using GPU's powa (I mean in Bioinformatics, they use GPUs in parallel to produce super computer powa on a desktop) like using dual Titan X's? 3 or 4 GTX 970s? Or even just a local group of networked computers? Given what I've seen with advanced sound design guys, they have to be physicists, those guys aren't dumb...well, they still can't find 96% of the universe, so they're ignorant (Dark matter/energy, wtf is that? They don't know), but they're almost always not dumb in my experience.

 

No problem mate,always here to help.