Lessening the cpu load

[spiffincat]

Hi all,

I have heard from a few other laptop music making community members that keeping samples, sounds and perhaps even running the daw from an external hard drive will lessen the load on the cpu.

I am not a computer guy.

The only reason I own my macbook is to run live.

I am wondering if what I am told is true. If it is I am wondering if it makes a difference to use thunderbolt over firewire.

I've done a little window shopping and there seems to be a pretty significant price difference.

I would like to be able to run about an hours worth of music, (dj'ing) on my laptop with not cpu problems (I use a lot of audio samples,) and am wondering if I'm on the right track. If I am I'm hoping someone might be able to recommend a good external hard drive size, (do i really need a whole terrabyte?) and if thunderbolt is the way to go over firewire.

Thanks in advance for any advice response.

Rock on all!

spiffincat

[jestermgee]

Not sure if you have the info correct there.

The CPU load will not be lessened by placing samples on an external drive since the samples need to be loaded into memory, processed through live and delivered to the sound card which all takes CPU cycles no matter where you put the content. Maybe I am slightly wrong but I have never heard improvements in performance by having an external drive but I have no experience with Thunderbolt technology either.

For ease of use having your samples on your internal drive would be the go but obviously if space is the issue then an external drive can be used. What you want to do to help offload some processor power is check the option for the clip to load samples to RAM so they dont have to be streamed from the HDD first.

If it's just audio samples you are using, you should be just fine with hundreds of tracks/thousands of audio files as these are not too CPU intensive. Once you add effects and polyphonic synths then these start to eat your CPU. I'd really only worry about it if you started having issues.

[spiffincat]

Not sure if you have the info correct there.

The CPU load will not be lessened by placing samples on an external drive since the samples need to be loaded into memory, processed through live and delivered to the sound card which all takes CPU cycles no matter where you put the content. Maybe I am slightly wrong but I have never heard improvements in performance by having an external drive but I have no experience with Thunderbolt technology either.

For ease of use having your samples on your internal drive would be the go but obviously if space is the issue then an external drive can be used. What you want to do to help offload some processor power is check the option for the clip to load samples to RAM so they dont have to be streamed from the HDD first.

If it's just audio samples you are using, you should be just fine with hundreds of tracks/thousands of audio files as these are not too CPU intensive. Once you add effects and polyphonic synths then these start to eat your CPU. I'd really only worry about it if you started having issues.

Thnaks for replying mate.

This is news to me and a help.

I do use massive and fm8, within live 9. I was advised by an employee at the music store where I bought the software and told him what I was doing that he did something similar and said he started getting glitches while dj'ng until he started using and external hard drive and run live and his samples of an external hard frive.

It is notable that I was buying a bunch of stuff at the time and the store did sell external hard drives, might have been trying to boost commision.

[fishmonkey]

the store dude might be confusing CPU load with disk load. both are important.

what kind of Mac have you got?

[spiffincat]

the store dude might be confusing CPU load with disk load. both are important.

what kind of Mac have you got?

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012)

Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5

Memory:8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

[jestermgee]

There may be something I am not aware of but "normally" it's the opposite where people have issues with external content causing the issues. As fishmonkey mentioned, he could be talking disk load issues but that really would need a shitload of samples to be streamed and this applies only to samples, not any soft synths as these are purely CPU.

I'm a manager in sales and support and trust me, sales guys will say anything to sell a widget for the most part especially when you are trained to pick up on the level of knowledge someone has on a subject.

Just keep it simple and if you have the room, put it all on your internal drive. Just one less headache and less cost.

[spiffincat]

There may be something I am not aware of but "normally" it's the opposite where people have issues with external content causing the issues. As fishmonkey mentioned, he could be talking disk load issues but that really would need a shitload of samples to be streamed and this applies only to samples, not any soft synths as these are purely CPU.

I'm a manager in sales and support and trust me, sales guys will say anything to sell a widget for the most part especially when you are trained to pick up on the level of knowledge someone has on a subject.

Just keep it simple and if you have the room, put it all on your internal drive. Just one less headache and less cost.

Sounds good to me.

I very much appreciate you taking the time mate.

[fishmonkey]

the store dude might be confusing CPU load with disk load. both are important.

what kind of Mac have you got?

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012)

Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5

Memory:8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

the stock hard drives in those MacBook Pros were quite slow 5400 RPM hard drives.

if you are experiencing glitches, keep an eye on Live's processor and disk overload indicators.

if you aren't currently experiencing glitches, don't worry about it.

if you do need to add external storage, USB 3.0 would be the most cost-effective way to go. Firewire 800 is much slower than USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt, so don't go with that.

before that though, the best upgrade would be an internal SSD...