I am not here to report an anomaly...

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

Don't get me wrong I think CBB performance is very good and yes, individual mileage may vary and you may still be fine with CBB.

But as Noel says if you compare the theoretical capabilities Sonar is significantly ahead in stability and performance and there are further improvements coming all the time. Recent updates have focused on the audio engine but there's more recent developments on general operations and particularly midi, one of these processes was I recall several thousand times faster now.

I run a variety of projects from small to extremely large (500 tracks) and I see noticeable improvements consistently in all of my user-cases, which allow me to work more efficiently/effectively. More music in less time!

For me it's about being on a platform that is being scaled to meet the demands of new instruments/technologies and also get the best result of the equipment I already have. I did have three servers running all of my VST's, but I now often only run two, despite increasing my workloads. That's the efficiency/scalability/performance benefit.

 

Edited September 4 by Matthew Simon Fletcher

[Starship Krupa]

2 hours ago, Matthew Simon Fletcher said:

I did have three servers running all of my VST's

I seen people refer to this, plug-ins running on servers, but I've never seen a company offering such things for sale. I know about hardware coprocessors a la UAD. I've heard about server clusters for rendering video FX.

I'm interested to learn about it. I used to be in IT so I'm familiar with client-server applications. How do you offload audio signal processing to a server? Who makes such systems?

[Xoo]

https://www.vsl.co.at/en/Vienna_Software_Package/Vienna_Ensemble_PRO

Plus add any PC (server here is as in client:server, not as in server hardware or OS).

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

35 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

I seen people refer to this, plug-ins running on servers, but I've never seen a company offering such things for sale. I know about hardware coprocessors a la UAD. I've heard about server clusters for rendering video FX.

I'm interested to learn about it. I used to be in IT so I'm familiar with client-server applications. How do you offload audio signal processing to a server? Who makes such systems?

I use Vienna Ensemble Pro which @Xoolinked

There is a free alternative;
https://audiogridder.com/

Basically it runs as a stand-alone application on one machine and then as a plugin in DAW. You load whatever VST's you want in the app and then as long as you're connected via LAN they'll be visible/audible in the project with practically no latency (as long as you use a high capacity internet cable  capable of 1GB).  Happy to send you some screenshots or whatever if you're interested further! It is really cool. I used to find an advantage to hosting instruments in it even on the same machine, although with Sonar improvements recently that's probably less useful.

The perk for me was I didn't need to buy a super computer - I just bought lots of cheap second hand off the shelf mini-PC's and I can just keep stacking up as needed.

[Noel Borthwick]

A secondary advantage with those is that if a plug-in takes the system down it won't crash the host.

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

Hadn't thought of it like that, but yes absolutely also a nice benefit!

[Starship Krupa]

This is really cool.

It relieves the load on the host system, obviously, and I can see where the server systems don't need to be powerhouses in order to do their thing, they don't have to do any of the heavy lifting of drawing the GUI, etc. They can even be headless.

I have a nice fast hard-wired ethernet network in my home and always have another system sitting there for file server/backup duty. Didn't realize that I could also utilize its otherwise mostly idle CPU to offload audio processing.

I thought GPU Audio was an interesting concept, but now I see why so many people think it's kind of superfluous. If you really need to offload number crunching, hook up another computer to your network and the sky really becomes the limit.

I'm going to try this out, I'm very curious about it. Among other things, I set up and managed a high-availability Citrix Winframe cluster, so this stuff is right in my wheelhouse. I wonder how it handles things like load balancing among multiple servers, how much admin must be done either at console or via remote desktop, etc.

[Matthew Simon Fletcher]

I was playing around a bit with the GPU Audio stuff and I think if more companies adopt it it'll be great!

The company who make Vienna Ensemble (linked above) have another product who make use of that capability to improve processing performance on reverb for orchestral instruments and it has some big performance benefits.

It sounds like you're having a similar thought pattern as I did "wait a minute, look at all this spare processing power going to waste!).

There should be a free demo of Ensemble for 30 days (if not I think if you email them they'll sort it out).
So currently you just assign the instrument to an instance/channel on the host machine and there isn't any loadbalancing other than you manually doing. It is a feature request that comes up quite often to have VEP be intelligent enough to move workloads between devices, but there is some complexity here, especially as you'd need to ensure all machines had equivalent licensing for any plugins.