How to Optimise Computer Performance for Music

hello everybody in this video i am going to give you probably at least another 20 performance out of your computer imagine that without you spending a single penny because there are so many different ways you can optimize your system to give you that little bit of extra headroom because let's face it however much computing power you have however many gigabytes of ram you have installed in your machine you always want more don't you and i'm going to show you how to get it today we're going to be looking at tweaks you can do on both a mac and a pc using both uh cubase and logic so whatever your system i bet i'll have something uh of use for you even if you're not a logical cubase user quite a lot of these things are more to do with workflow than the actual sort of intricacies under the bonnet of your computer and so it'll be of value to you as well okay now let's first of all talk about what are we talking about when we're talking about computer performance um the two things which that's four the two things that really matter to most musicians are computing power processing power which i refer to as cpu um and memory or ram and if you are a um if you mix a lot of music and you have tons and tons of plugins or you use lots and lots of virtual synths then it is more than likely you're going to run out of processing power cpu before you run out of memory if you have enormous orchestral template with thousands of tracks with strings of woodwinds but everything else it's quite likely you're going to run out of memory before you run out of processing power so we're going to be talking about optimizing your workflow for both of those things yes it's that good okay the first thing we need to do though is to work out how to monitor how your system's actually working because it's it's all very well just sort of playing away and then sort of suddenly going ah i'm hearing crackles and pops and those are the sort of things you'll hear when you run out of processing power okay first of all on the mac if you go shift command u it brings up the utilities folder you then choose activity monitor double click on it and it will show you as you probably know because i suspect you've all been here before um how your processing is going how your uh you can see nice little diagrams right left and center it's actually most useful for system memory um and i'll explain why it's more useful for some system memory than it is for um processing power in a moment but that tells you that you've got tons and tons of memory at the moment because we're not using very much meanwhile here on my pc uh if you right click right down the bottom there um on the taskbar and then you click on task manager you get all the detail you could possibly want there you go look it'll give you an overall summary of your performance it'll give you um the processing it'll give you memory it'll give you everything there you go now processing power is better looked at within uh the individual door itself because it's a measure of how the door is managing and a lot of that is not to do with the overall cpu it's to do with real-time performance and that is a different thing in cubase you go to studio drop down audio performance and it tells you there that all important real time performance there um it's another thing called as your guard there and it gives you peaks on any one chord there and if this if this thing here goes red processing overload that's when you start hearing clicks and pop so we're going to work very hard not to let that happen right hello logic okay now logic um if you want to see the audio performance meter up all the time go to the this little bit up here click this arrow here go to custom and then mysteriously up on the right hand side you'll see cpu so what it's going to give you is that top one is processing and that bottom one is how fast things are going on and off your hard drive which is really useful so those are two things which we this is how we're going to keep an eye on things um what will happen if you overload either of these systems you get big warnings come up and says you have transgressed you have run out of cpu or something like that right um the first and most obvious thing um if you live in a big house do you leave all the lights on in all the rooms all the time no you don't and so why if you have a big template with say 100 tracks in it do you leave all the tracks enabled all the time when actually you're not going to be using them so the most obvious thing to do is disable tracks which you're not using okay now let's start with cubase is fairly straightforward uh you go into uh the if you select the track like that control click the track and what you want is disable track that down there and then it'll go grey and as soon as you disable it you're freeing up both the memory and the processing power um now if we go into logic it is a little less obvious sometimes because at the moment if you look at this there's no obvious way of turning off these tracks what you have to do is go uh control oh no it's not ctrl t it's option t there we go and it brings up the um the track header options now you can see some things are not being shown so you go option t we want to see the on and off button uh and so we'll do that now each track has an on off button so if you want to disable the track you can just do that and every time you turn the thing off you're freeing up all the processing panel okay so that's pretty straightforward and there's no real sort of magic about that but if you use that uh cleverly you can run a really big session but you're only actually using you know one or two things at the same time right point number two um is about what are called bouncing and freezing tracks now in general um a virtual instrument or a plug-in or something like that is going to use massively more uh processing power than an audio track an ordinary audio track uses almost nothing so one of the techniques which is built into a lot of these doors is ways of turning virtual instruments into audio tracks and there's a couple of ways of doing that so if we look first of all at cubase um let's just put something in let's just because there's nothing in there at the moment is there [Music] i think it's playing both logic and cubase at the same time yep it certainly is okay there we go so let's get rid of that right so there we have um an intriguing little little thing on the on the pro 5. so let's um there's a couple of ways of dealing with this one is to simply render it in place if you go control and click it brings up this menu render in place render with current settings and it now turns it into a piece of audio the advantage of this is you've now got a piece of audio which you can edit move around duplicate whatever else and although it mutes the track here it has not disabled it it's still active so what you need to do is go in there and disable the track and now you save the cpu there's a quicker and easier way of doing that but it also has slight disadvantages as well and i'll show you how that works so if we undo that oh i didn't mean to do that come back go back okay um right so this time i'm going to play a little piece in which is going to be even more exciting [Music] i lied it was no more exciting than the first one okay right the other way of doing this is freezing and what freezing does is it turns a virtual instrument into an audio file but behind the scenes um so in cubase you go here and you click this little uh button there and now freeze instruments only yes please and you can control all kinds of bits and pieces which i'll leave you to go off and experiment by yourself and learn and there you go now it is frozen what you can't do it still sounds the same [Music] but what you can't do is edit it if you want to edit it you've got to unfreeze it and that means re-clicking that okay unfreeze there we go right logic does exactly the same thing so with our um here we go let's get rid of some of these tracks here yes i want you to go away let's disable the make sure we're not recording in there as well it's so weird running two okay here we go that'll do right let's record some epic music [Music] i'll do right okay two things we can do here we can bounce it in place which turns it into an audio file which is control b uh yep we'll have one of those thanks and it puts it on a new track for you and then you can just disable that track and then you've saved all that cpu um or you can um just turn that off or you can indeed um let's unmute it um you can freeze it now oh but there's no little freezy button so once again we have to go option t to the track header okay there do you see there we need to enable that so you can see the little freezy thing come up okay click the freezy button and as soon as you go to play it it does the freezy thing like that now although it looks the same and sounds the same if you're going to try and edit it it won't do it until it unfreezes there you see what i mean comes up and says do you want one freeze me and i say yeah i want one freeze you and then it's unfreeze frozen so it's a really quick and easy way of saving um processing power memory whatever else um so those two things bouncing in place and freezing are super important on both macs and pcs and any door which you may be using now there's other stuff which you can also do with this which is super cool so if you wanted for example to add lots of plugins this is another way where you can burn through your processing power um you know it's really tempting oh yeah just kind of throw loads of them in them you know i'll get the mixer up and i'll put loads of plugins on this track i'll have hundreds and hundreds of them you know compressors and guitars and chrysler as well anyway um that's not always the most effective way of doing it so if you don't want to add hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of um plugins to your track control click the thing itself and go to selection based processing or you can do uh what is it can this option shift p that would do there we go and what this allows you to do is to apply a plug-in to that track um any way you like doesn't really matter what it is any old thing let's do that um i don't mind what it is i don't even know what this plugin is goodness knows what it's going to sound like okay apply and then it's done it that's it actually didn't do very much did it but that's the idea selection breaks probably it's an offline process rather than an online one which uses up um cpu in cubase there is an i think even cooler thing if we uh first of all bounce this um in place let's go render in place this little friend down here up comes the audio now once you do that there's a really cool thing um called direct offline processing and it brings up this little thing here and i'll show you okay i'll show you the difference i'll show you how much difference it makes if we add uh something quite heavy hitting like atari um it's really really good guitar but it it's quite heavy on the old processing okay put one of those in right and now let's just do the same okay let's let's bring up our um where's our audio performance just so you can see how these ramps up as i copy a few of those down so two of those oh look it's gone up again three of those oh bit more four of those whoa five of those okay so five of those and the old azio guard thing is there right up at term 50 right now let's just take those off okay now let's add it um let's add guitar rig through the direct offline processing see if it's any better i know it's going to be better or i wouldn't have said it okay up comes direct offline processing it puts it in there and [Music] ding there we go so let's yeah and that's got the same thing up so that's one let's get the second one up two absolutely no impact so far three you see what i mean look we're adding all these but last time we were doing this it was climbing up with everyone which we were putting on this time it's not making any difference the reason is because it's processing it offline in other words it's not doing real-time processing it's going okay i'll go away work it out once and then that's done so it's not actually hitting your cpu in anything like the same way now that's extremely cool because you're still it's still it's gonna sound a bit yeah man okay okay so metal themes can really get their stuff together now what oh made it all go away okay there we go oh that's better right um what you can then do is you go to make direct offline processing permanent and if you do that it'll just write it to disk and that will be that how cool is that so these are two ways in both logic and cubase which you can massively reduce the amount of uh processing power you need by using non-real-time processing because it'll just save your poor your computer will love you it'll say thank you guy or you won't say thank you guys i'll say whatever your name is right okay let's move into let's go under the bonnet a bit because a lot of the savings to be made are to be made through adjusting the audio settings that's what we're looking at now just before we go any further it's quite important that i tell you about this wow [Music] [Music] oh there how exciting is that if you want to know more about that um there's details underneath this video come and have a chat with us and we can tell you how we can improve your chances of success okay right moving on so the way it works is this um if you go into let's start with cubase open up studio setup um go into whatever your sound card is open the control panel now this thing buffer size here this is crucial it makes all the difference the smaller the buffer size the more strain it's going to put on your processor and the more clicks and pops you'll get quicker if you have a bigger buffer size uh it gives it a lot more leeway and it reduces the pressure on your processing power on your processor oh great so you say so why am i using 256 why don't i just use 2400 2048 all the time the reason is that buffer size also includes what's called latency the length of time between when you hit a key and when you hear the sound now if it goes much above 256 a lot of people find that quite uncomfortable because they're going and it just gets in the way of the way you play your instrument so a lot of people feel 256 possibly 128 is the sweet spot i often go higher than that i can i can bet 512. but that is a primary uh function of the amount of cpu which your computer is going to use so if you change nothing else and you've got clicks and pops going on change that the other thing is if you're not actually playing in real time if you're just mixing there's no reason why you can't have a much higher buffer setting because you're not going to suffer half the any of these kind of latency issues so you can actually whack it right up to mix and you can get away with having more plugins and things like that that works um whether you're on obviously a mac or a pc or whether you're in logic if you go here into preferences into audio up it'll come [Music] and there is your i o buffer setting there and that's the same thing so exactly the same thing there so you can go in there and set that um there is um other stuff you can do now i always used to think i suspect the nice people who uh the the developers who write programs like logic the default settings will be the most efficient and there was a really uh good article um and i'll put a link in the description underneath because i can't quite remember where i found it we said no no no actually if you want best possible performance do this and they say okay set processing threads not to automatic but to however many you've got the maximum number so i've gone for 16. processing buffer range don't have medium or small have large um multi-threading you can either have playback tracks or live tracks depending on how you're working but it's these two 16 and large and i thought okay and apply and i did and on a test rig i got about 10 15 more performance just by doing that so it depends on the internet it depends on your setup it depends on lots of things but if you haven't played with that go and have a go if it makes it worse then turn it off okay what i tend to do is i'll load up a particularly heavy hitting synth or something like that see how many tracks i can run change something can i run more or less that's and then i know pretty much out of the box whether my changes are making a difference for the pod for the good or the bad um with um there's a number of other things you can play with in um advanced options so audio system advanced options down you go now activate multi-processing yes please absolutely activate azio god absolutely um there's a number of things you can change down here as your guard level you know use this setting for the highest audio processing performance to playback many vsc instruments this leads to increased latency and memory usage do you see what they said there memory usage so what they're do what is so many things to do with computer performance are a trade-off if you reduce one you're building up you know you eat what you what but you know what i mean no you don't because i'm being incoherent okay sometimes there's a lot of things which you use more memory uh reduce the cpu or you go back so you're balancing the whole thing this is why you need to monitor your system all the time okay let's let's move on because i think we've we've got under the weeds of all this um a couple of fairly simple things which you should be aware of which you probably are some plugins use a lot more processing power than others and one of the big ones is reverb and a lot sometimes we see students come on to our courses and they say i don't understand why i'm not getting better performance and what they're doing is they're putting a reverb on each channel of their uh of their door that's a really bad idea you don't have to do that and every instance of it is chewing up cpu there's two types of reverb actually i'll show you in um logic because it's nice and simple or it's easier to illustrate in logic so what you need to do first of all is don't put reverb on individual channels in logic we go to the mixer we go to options we create new auxiliary channel strip and then we put our effect in there so this one i'm going to go into space designer here we go space hello space designer oh nice to see you guy you're not normally in logic no i'm not i just thought pop in and say hello right so we've got two different types of reverb synthesized and sampled and it is as simple as that the sample reverb is the sample of a real room they go in there and they go with a pitch sweep go play back through speakers which they then they do that and they re-record the sound of that sound in the room and that gives a sort of fingerprint for what the sample of for what that space sounds like and then you put it into a reverb like this and every time you feed the signal in of you playing the piano or something it simulates what it would sound like in the real room now that as you can probably tell uses quite a lot of processing power so sampled reverb or convolution reverb as it's known things like altiverb and stuff like that spaces from east-west uses quite a lot of processing power on the other hand synthesized reverb which is just an algorithm um also known as um yeah algorithmic reverb uses very little cpu so if you've got a choice between the two and you're running on limited um see a processing power go for algorithmic uh so things like valhalla for example are algorithmic synthesize is good anyway but there's lots of reasons you may want to use the sample one so don't stick it on each track put it on an auxiliary bus and then use these bus sends so here we go so we're gonna say the input for this is going to be bus one okay and from this track whichever one uh weird track we've got going up here uh the bounce in place one yeah let's shall we use that one yeah why not um we go to the sends and we go to bus one and now we send it to the bus one you know how to do that you've seen this you've been here before okay remember to turn it up but you won't hear anything there you go now the point is you can have loads and loads and loads of tracks all feeding to the same reverb and only using one instance of reverb exactly the same thing applies to every other door on the planet you're using bit tweak you say yes it applies to you oh ableton live yes it does and reaper yes all of those exactly the same in cubase we go here we create an effects track like that we put a reverb on cinematic rooms there we go add track and exactly the same thing applies but oh something i should mention when you do do um bus based reverb like this look for this little knob here which goes dry wet mix um if you're going to insert um reverb on a bus you want to turn it 100 wet you don't want any of the dry signal in there because then you're just going to send the drive signal from one of your tracks to the reverb and you just want to hear reverb you don't want to hear all that other shenanigans going on so here we go so here we go we're gonna send it to that we turn it on we turn it up we're in business anyway you get the gist that's reverb um it's it's a big saver if if you're one of those who oh yeah there's quite a lot of people out there here oh i didn't know that okay and it's a real game changer when oh all that cpu i've been wasting over the years what am i doing okay we haven't looked very much at memory but memory isn't is the next thing we're looking at and it's a big one um for orchestral musicians in particular oh yes like you dave in california like you cynthia in singapore barry in brazil alliteration no not necessary right okay let's get get this up um okay if we take contact for example here is um spitfire symphonic strings ensemble patch it is using 0.57 gigabytes half a gigabyte okay that's quite a lot and if we start using multiple mic positions it's going to go up a lot there you go now it's suddenly loading a whole load more so every mic position you add is going to add another load of memory so now we're up to one gigabyte and counting oh my lord okay so if you have lots and lots and lots of these instruments you're going to run out of memory very very quickly what you need to do is the way samples work is contact or any other sample player loads a little bit of the sample into its memory to its memory i pointed to my head really guy okay into its memory so as soon as you hit the key oh it starts playing it back and and then within a very short space of time i said okay i know what he wants now so it goes on to the ssd or onto the drive and it starts madly collecting date um the next bit so it's kind of shoveling source or the the sound out just in time what you can do because it's loading something into memory if you reduce the amount it loads into memory called the sample buffer you massively reduce the amount of memory which you need to run the sample that's two ways of doing this depending on what your sample player is in contact there is a magical button called oh no sorry not that one go away go away go away please uh hang on here we go right global purge sounds a little bit kind of dodgy doesn't it okay look we're now using 1.7 gigabytes let's try globally purging this purge all samples none how good is that now as you play what it's doing is dragging those samples off the ssd wherever that is um in real time so it's not preloading anything or it's preloading hardly everything so all the memory is it's going to use is the stuff you actually play so it will start to creep up but basically you're going to get away with almost nothing and that's super duper in other instruments which don't have a purge function you will find a sample buffer and this applies to well east-west opus has a purge button uh sign doesn't i think you have to set the sample buffer in there vs vienna symphonic library you set the sample buffer and what you do is you just bring the sample buffer down as low as possible and you will massively reduce the amount of memory you're using and that's really really great news until it starts making clicks and pops and bangs and things because what you're doing is you're transferring the weight of this from memory to processing because getting this stuff from the ssd instantly is very processor intensive so again it's this balancing thing i was going on about before where you can't you know okay there's no such thing as a free lunch you don't you don't want to use so much memory you're gonna have to use a bit more cpu so again it's about maintaining a balance and for this to work properly you're going to have to um make sure that your samples are all on really fast solid state drives these little things which i won't play with right now so look um those are the main things you can do to try and maximize your system the actual system itself um sometimes um on the computer itself on some computers like on um pcs there is a on windows 10 there's a thing where you can go into super extra high power mode where actually the whole thing would use more power and give you better overall system performance and to maximize your performance on a pc this is a windows pc a xeon go to settings go to system within system go to power and sleep now this is where it gets interesting so you want to go to additional power settings they don't make it easy do they look and here you will get a choice you can have balanced or you can have ultimate performance of course we want ultimate performance um you can easily even dig into this in more detail and change uh some of the stuff but basically what this does is to make sure that your pc is running look minimum performance 100 so in other words it's it's not gonna faff about so that will give you um the best performance uh from your machine on a mac it depends on the mac you're on on um the new m1 max chips there's there's a sort of enhanced product um mode where you can turn things up a bit um so you may well find within your whole computer there's a way of making the whole computer run faster there's also on pcs all kinds of complicated things like overclocking but that's a completely different thing and you really need to know what you're up to because you can make your whole system very unstable again there's a trade-off between speed and stability the one last thing i'd say is if you've really if you've got a big fast machine and it's not really performing the way you hope there's more to the speed of your machine than just the benchmark figures you read on websites the what you may well need to do because it's about real real-time performance not just cpu and there's excellent video about the real detailed explanation of what how that works again i'll put it in the in the link below and but it doesn't necessarily give you a solution it just explains why looking at a benchmark won't tell you why this is going to work really well for audio so um but what the answer is you have to look at other things like your or like your audio card like your video card all kinds of other bits and pieces which might tangentially have a really severe effect on how well your computer's running so you may need if you've got a real problem you may need to swap some of those things around before you go out and buy a new computer but look that's all i've got for you for today i really hope that helps give you a bit more room for maneuver and you get a bit more fun out of writing music as a consequence or you get less stressed you can see i pulled all my hair out many years ago dealing with all this kind of stuff but look i'll be back very soon if you've enjoyed this and found it useful tell your friends subscribe put the little notification button on and um there's stuff to download underneath the video hope you enjoyed it and i'll see you very soon come back soon bye

Channel: Guy Michelmore

Views: 99,189

Keywords: thinkspace, education, music, film, scoring, games, television, composition, composer, guy michelmore, guy, michelmore, thinkspace education, cpu, cpu performance, best cpu for music production, best cpu, best cpu 2022, logic pro x, logic pro x tutorial, logic pro performance, cubase 12, cubase performance, cubase performance settings, music education, daw performance, speed up workflow, speed up daw

Id: iI-2ZgXg3WY

Length: 33min 18sec (1998 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022