CPU and Ram

M

McShredsAlot

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Hey guys. So I have decided to cave and get a MacBook Pro. Mainly because the school I'm attending in the fall is strictly Mac based and I need a laptop a well.

Anyways, I had a question about ram vs CPU with recording. What uses CPU and what uses Ram?

My current laptop ha an i5 with 4gigs of ram. My DAW is Mixcraft 6. I loaded one of my average sessions today (4 instances of Amplitube, Ez drummer, acoustic guitars, 3 or 4 vocal tracks...all with plugins like eq, compressors, reverb etc) and I notice once I start getting to this point my computer will skip, playback will slow to about literally 1bmp to where all you can hear is cracks and pops.

Anyways, would it be wise to upgrade the MBP from 4gigs of ram to 8? My daw seems to use about 1.6gigs in that session. My main question though is what types of FX use CPU and what uses ram. Thanks guys.
 
It depends by the plugin, but most fx units should use mainly cpu. However I can imagine plugins that need to load up audio files (convolution reverbs on fx side, samplebanks on instruments side) use ram to store it.
 
McShredsAlot said:
My main question though is what types of FX use CPU and what uses ram. Thanks guys.
Click to expand...

This isn't easy to answer, but here is some general information that might be useful.

There are a few things that could be going on here, but they are all things that you can check out yourself.

You've already looked up RAM usage; That's great.
You should be able to monitor CPU usage and hard drive access too.
The figures should be fairly self explanatory.
Some DAWs also allow you to monitor usage within.

Another thing to factor in is your buffer setting within your DAW.
I don't know how much or how little you know, but the basics are as follows.

High buffer (1024/2048) = stable performance with high input latency.
Low buffer (32/64) = much less stable performance with low input latency.

If you're working on an intense session, you may want to up the buffer speed.

Whether it's hurts the cpu or ram I don't know, but virtual instruments are by far the most intensive tools I have.
 
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