I am freezing multiple tracks to save CPU - help

[Max Arwood]

I seem to still lose CPU. The frozen track seems higher CPU than just an audio track. As I freeze the tracks, they seem to use more and more CPU. I will have to tell you up front this is a 100+ track orchestra / pop band arrangement.  32 frozen synths. I hate to turn them to just audio tracks because I lose the midi editing capability. 

I am freezing the OPUS , East West and other synths to save CPU. There is no way my computer could have played this full project.

Any ideas? 

 

[noynekker]

Hi Max . . . I can't recall from the 1000's of Cakewalk by BandLab users which CPU you have, and which audio interface ? . . . let's assume they are really new and powerful, with ASIO drivers and buffers set up correctly, and you have lots of RAM to load the samples. Now, what other CPU hungry plugins might you be using, with lookahead capabilities, compressors, limiters, perhaps on the master bus ? It could be just one of those causing this.

[Max Arwood]

The CPU and the sound card are the problems, but I don't usually do over 20-30 tracks in a project, and it works great on those.

I have an older Studio Cat Computer - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz   3.40 GHz with 20.0 GB RAM

Older Layla 24/96 sound card. It is set to 24/44.1

I ran the latency to 2048 to be able to even do this project.

I have a Focusrite Octopre and another Layla with Digimax D8 and a  Millennia Media HV-3D as the input pre. for the Layla.

I do not typically do not orchestra arrangements. (I leave that to Jerry G lol) 

135 tracks, only about 100 active. 30 copies Opus / EW player./ Kontakt 6 frozen. Freezing is the only way the project would play. This way I can un freeze - edit - refreeze a single instrument. Some have up to 4 voices like strings on one copy but never too many. I don't like to use all 32 channels and have to wait on it to unfreeze to be able to be able to do some editing.  The project will probably end at about 70-85 tracks in the final version.

185 plug-ins.  Didn't know I could copy the whole list LOL ProjectScope!!! I edited it a little. The *ones are a little high in CPU.

Sometimes I mute the master bus processors, and that helps a little, but they aren't really turned off. I wish we had on/off/disable on plugins and tracks/buses/folders. That would do the trick. Or solo special that would disengage all plugins except the soloed folder or bus. I think it is the quantity, not one plugin.. There are a couple I know use some CPU  "*" ed  them.

I was thinking about making a nowhere bus. This way I could make a FX chain and drag it to the nothing bus to disengage the plugins completely. If that bus is not routed anywhere, it might disengage them when they are dragged over. This way I don't lose any settings. I can work ok without those until the final listen and mix down.

*002    Weiss MM-1 Mastering Maximizer
003    bx_console SSL 9000 J
004    Maag EQ4
*005    GW MixCentric Stereo
006    Pro-Q 3
008    Pro-L 2
*009    IMPusher Stereo
010    WLM Plus Stereo
011    ADPTR MetricAB
*012    AR TG Mastering Stereo (his one is pretty bad - I changed this one to "lite version")
013    Auto-Tune Pro
016    Vitamin Stereo
*017    Butch Vig Vocals Stereo
019    J37 Stereo
030    SuperTap 6-Taps Stereo
031    Unfiltered Audio Sandman Pro
*035    Seventh Heaven Professional
036    LexConcertHall
037    LexVintagePlate
038    ValhallaShimmer
*039    Abbey Road Chambers Stereo (This one is a bad one too)
040    bx_saturator V2
*041    Chandler Limited Zener Limiter
042    Kramer HLS Stereo
046    PSP Saturator
047    RBass Stereo
048    Submarine Stereo
049    RootOne
050    TR5 Leslie
053    Pro-DS
055    MicroShift
056    MV2 Stereo
064    CloneEnsembleV42
067    bx_subsynth
*072    SoundID Reference Plugin (I turn this off too)
074    Tonal Balance Control 2
081    Shadow Hills Class A Mastering Comp
*084    soothe2
086    SPL IRON
087    Kramer PIE Stereo
089    Omnipressor
104    PSP Saturator
107    GainMatch
*108    Ozone 9 (Disengaged) 
*112    GW MixCentric Stereo
115    Little AlterBoy
117    CLA-3A Stereo
131    SDRR2 

added 2 - Omnisphere (not to bad) and SD3*(This one is terrible)
 

 

 

Edited December 3, 2021 by Max Arwood
added 2

[Byron Dickens]

Holy ****!

[John Vere]

I don’t think that would even run on a Mac😬

[noynekker]

You could also try toggling the Global EFX button when you want to do your midi editing, might help, but you are asking a lot from your computer system !

[msmcleod]

Rather than freezing, you might want to consider bouncing groups of tracks to an audio track, and archiving the original tracks.  

You can then just swap between groups of "live" tracks, and the bounced ones.

[Starship Krupa]

One thing I can say is be sure you have Windows Defender's realtime scanning excluded for your Cakewalk projects folder, your samples folder, and your plug-ins folder.

If you have realtime scanning enabled, Defender reads and scans every file that is accessed by a program. In your case, over 100.

Cakewalk streams every audio file in a project regardless of mute state, unless they are in Archived tracks. That's a lot of unnecessary malware scanning every time you hit play.

[Xoo]

It's not alone in doing this - I had a situation at work where (different AV) impacted a .NET image generation and http-ing job by a factor of about 100!

[bitflipper]

Max, are you freezing the fx on those tracks, too?

I'll second Mark's suggestion about bouncing tracks and archiving the originals. That'll guarantee that those tracks will require minimal resources like any other audio track, but you'll still be able to un-archive the original tracks if needed for editing. But you'll have to archive the originals so they don't remain cached.

If you're still losing performance after freezing/bouncing, take a look at your memory usage and see if it's going up with each bounce. There could be a memory leak with a plugin (or even conceivably - though unlikely - within the CW engine itself).

Try bypassing all fx to make sure your issue actually has to do with frozen tracks. With the global fx bypass on, any CPU snappy enough to, say, play a modern video game should be able to play back 1,000 audio tracks with ease. 

[Max Arwood]

On 12/3/2021 at 3:51 PM, Starship Krupa said:

One thing I can say is be sure you have Windows Defender's realtime scanning excluded for your Cakewalk projects folder, your samples folder, and your plug-ins folder.

If you have realtime scanning enabled, Defender reads and scans every file that is accessed by a program. In your case, over 100.

Cakewalk streams every audio file in a project regardless of mute state, unless they are in Archived tracks. That's a lot of unnecessary malware scanning every time you hit play.

Most projects will not run with defender on!!

[Max Arwood]

(Max, are you freezing the FX on those tracks, too?)

Yes, I am freezing with the effects. Does freezing actually supposed to release all the CPU strain and memory strain for these, or is there some residual something that is not actually frozen??

I also agree with bitfilpper - Marks idea is good.  I think a frozen track has more overhead than a bounced track. Is this right? Why? Can someone tell us the inside scoop of how freezing is processed? CPU / memory release?? The legato strings could be bounced to one track and archive 10+ tracks.

Is a frozen track more strain on the computer than an audio track?

I forget about the global bypass. It would work fantastic, if I followed the rules about not letting plugins increase the audio volume in a track! Thanks for the reminder. 

(Try bypassing all fx to make sure your issue actually has to do with frozen tracks. With the global fx bypass on, any CPU snappy enough to, say, play a modern video game should be able to play back 1,000 audio tracks with ease. )

After all the freezing what is draining my CPU are the bus processes. I usually have buses to save CPU - one bus might be a saturation plugin.  I use the Kramer Helios for the upper saturation. I typically send several track sends to buses like this. The bad thing is that there is no way to freeze or archive the plugins on a bus. My drum bus has PSP Vintage Warmer, U-he Presswerks and sometime Vitamin. I have a parallel bus with Chandler Zener limiter.  A lot of my CPU is tied up in these. Some are drastic and some are subtle effects. I wish I could click and archive button on some subtle ones to lower the overhead. Bypassing them has little or no effect on the CPU. I have reversed my strategy by moving some bus process with fewer feeds back to the tracks, so they could be frozen. Some changes are reverse of my normal setup, like 3 background vocals I would normally send to a Leslie bus and a pitch doubler bus, I moved the Leslie and the pitch doubler to the actual tracks and froze them. This eliminated 2 effects and 2 buses.

I was wondering if a bus to consolidate drum tracks (with no processing) use very much CPU?

As I add track sends to a reverb, does this add much to the CPU load.

I wish there was a utility to tell the CPU usage of a plugin. I thought about setting up a session with a plugin and then duplicate it 100 times and rate it in CPU usage and go through my most used plugins. This way I could decide how much do I "really" love those famous and  accurately modeled vintage simulations.

Finally - So with my thousand tracks now, I can put each string of the 1st violin on a separate track? No No do get me thinking like this LOL!!!

 

Thanks for all the help!! These are going to help tremendously.

 

 

[Starship Krupa]

BTW, I just noticed that one of your plug-ins is Gain Match.

Believe it or not, this little mother eats up more than its share of audio engine. I wouldn't have thought so given the seemingly simple job it has, but even when it's not in analyze mode, it chews the cpu. It's a cool idea, and the plug-in works well, but when I want to use it, I let it do its analysing and then switch it off and use BL Gain set to the difference in levels Gain Match detected.

[bitflipper]

9 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

Is a frozen track more strain on the computer than an audio track?

Only Noel can answer this definitively, but my assumption would be that from the engine's perspective a frozen track appears identical to any other audio track. The only difference is that the original track is preserved and linked to in the frozen track. That linkage should not impact performance, as it's only referenced when you un-freeze.

 

9 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

I was wondering if a bus to consolidate drum tracks (with no processing) use very much CPU?

Not enough to notice. It's just a bit of addition and multiplication happening there. Nanoseconds.

9 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

As I add track sends to a reverb, does this add much to the CPU load.

No. See above.

Reverb, of course, can be very CPU-intensive. But how many tracks are routed to it won't significantly add to that.

9 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

Finally - So with my thousand tracks now, I can put each string of the 1st violin on a separate track? No No do get me thinking like this LOL!!!

Fortunately, there'd be no benefit in doing so. Though not unheard of, it's rare that in the real world separate mics would be  used for each violin. There is, however, an advantage to playing each violin separately as you're recording, assuming you're not programming notes directly into the PRV. Playing them separately simulates the tiny timing differences and vibrato between individual players in a section, adding to the overall thickness. You could also pan them slightly to simulate the width of a physical string section. If you really want to go all out in realism, give one of the virtual players a squeaky chair, another one a cough.

But I wouldn't bother. When you use a well-recorded ensemble sample you get all that anyway, with no effort.

[Max Arwood]

20 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

BTW, I just noticed that one of your plug-ins is Gain Match.

Believe it or not, this little mother eats up more than its share of audio engine. I wouldn't have thought so given the seemingly simple job it has, but even when it's not in analyze mode, it chews the cpu. It's a cool idea, and the plug-in works well, but when I want to use it, I let it do its analysing and then switch it off and use BL Gain set to the difference in levels Gain Match detected.

Yes I agree! Sometimes I put it in a chain, but I always disengage it after I find out how little those plugins actually did to improve the sound instead of just increasing the volume. I hate is when companies gain up their plugins just to make it appear to sound better.  What about plugin alliance Black Box HG-2?  When it is engaged it adds 4db! If it was 1db or less I might not have noticed it lol!!

[bitflipper]

This is why I avoid using the auto-gain feature on compressors. It usually ends up causing more effort than it saves.

[scook]

On 12/5/2021 at 12:17 PM, bitflipper said:

On 12/5/2021 at 2:27 AM, Max Arwood said:

Is a frozen track more strain on the computer than an audio track?

Only Noel can answer this definitively, but my assumption would be that from the engine's perspective a frozen track appears identical to any other audio track. The only difference is that the original track is preserved and linked to in the frozen track. That linkage should not impact performance, as it's only referenced when you un-freeze.

 

Freezing makes the track work just like an audio track.

Freezing a synth track, unlike bounce+archive, disconnects the synth, unloading it from memory.

Of course, it is possible to manually disconnect synths using the synth rack menu or the power buttons next to each synth in the synth rack view when the view is in the multi-dock or undocked.

[Starship Krupa]

14 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

What about plugin alliance Black Box HG-2?  When it is engaged it adds 4db! If it was 1db or less I might not have noticed it lol!!

A dodgy feature for something that calls itself "Black Box."

Surely by this point someone has created a plug-in that does nothing but add a 3dB boost, wrap it in a mysterious GUI with a needle level meter.

What was that thing that iZotope used to give away for free years ago? "Neutrino" or something like that. It didn't induce a level increase, but neither did it do anything else. They no longer offer it, I notice.

Gain Match is Lord Shiva the Destroyer of Illusions. Great way to reality check myself with my master chain. The track sounds amazing, it's breathing, it sparkles, it shakes, I can hear the detail, stereo image extends to the corners of infinity....and then I gain check it....