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Looper's Delight
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> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Per Boysen" <perboysen@gmail.com> >> s I have come to the conclusion that the type of sound effect >> patches I like to play with in my TC Electronic FireworX takes up >> to the full hundred percent of my one processor 2 GHz Centrino. >> This means I would weight in at about half the available CPU >> recourse level, on a core 2 duo, and 50 % is pretty much the >> limit I've found you should not go over if you want to have a >> rock solid system for performing live with. On 23 nov 2006, at 13.11, Krispen Hartung wrote: > What sort of effects or stacks of effects are you proposing would > take 100% of your CPU power, Per? I gave one example on the last post. Typically the effect patches you find in a FirworX or Eclipse. > I assume you mean that of a single core, based on the above. I'm > confused why you would say that > 50% is a criteria for a rock solid performance system. That's like > saying the max speed of your car is 120 > miles per hour, but you better only drive if 60 miles per hour if > you want it to perform optimally. Have > you experienced crashes with the meter at over 50% on a duo core? > This is the type of behavior that > Intil ingineers would want to know about, becaues I'm certain they > didn't design the duo core to become > unstable above 50% processor utilization. Not only "unstable" but also increasing the risk of artifacts in the audio streams. With some applications you can simply hear that and listen "by ear" to where the CPU strain limit kicks in for fidelity. Also, on these matters you just can not compare engineers and musicians - as well as you can not compare cars and computers ;-)) The Intel or Apple engineers are not putting one percent of their working hours into matching the needs of musicians, simply because this is such a tiny segment of the market (you may not believe that by briefly looking at Apple's advertising, but truth is those ads rely on a lot of hype referring creative artists and this does spill over into sales to customers that are not in fact working audio artists themselves, but maybe fans). The applications typically addressed by Intel, Apple and other manufacturers are the normal office suites and as for multi media applications mostly following the non-real-time context where your final work is rendered to disk. This "manufacturer's bias" is not a problem for DAW applications (ProoTools, SX, Logic) but for real-time applications in music I would definitely say it makes the line blurred. I'm just saying that I like the Firewor'x better than my one core 2 GHz centrino, because with that hardware I can do sound design up to 99.9 percent of its CPU recourses and the audio sounds good all the way. In software you have to trust the developers and if they were serious they put some code into your software that puts other routines on hold (like the graphics for example) when the CPU is under heavy strain from audio processing. But not all audi app's or plug-ins are designed in such a "smart" way. When you rely on a system like Bidule plus VST plug-ins the computer needs that big CPU headroom. Headroom is also essential when looping in Mobius (or other looping applications) because when you get to eight tracks playing back eight one minute loops simultaneously it will tax the CPU a lot more than in the beginning of the concert where you were only using two loops. As soon as I get rich I will buy a faster laptop - hopefully a Four Core or a Double Duo... thingy ;-) Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international) http://tinyurl.com/fauvm (podcast) http://www.myspace.com/looproom