Pro Tools very slow cause of plug ins

TheGmiester161

New member
These are the specs on my computer:

PowerBookG4 laptop
1 GHz
512 MB RAM
120 GB firewire drive connected

I only have 6 RTAS plug-ins running in my session and its going mind numbingly slow. I click something and it takes over 20 seconds for anything to happen. It works fine with no plug ins. I have my H/W Buffer Size at 1024 samples, my CPU ussage at 99%, and my DAE Playback buffer at Level 8. I think I should be able to use at least a few more than 6 plug-ins. How many is normal to be able to use with 512 MB of RAM. What can I do?
 
Real time processing is bottlenecked by the processor as your CPU usage would indicate. RAM and Harddrive bandwidth is more about raw track count.

You need a bigger processor if you want to use all those plugins. One way to save on processing is to use Buss effects and send all the tracks that need reverb or delay to the same plug in.
 
Really?

I thought 1GHZ was a pretty fast computer. How fast of a processor am I supposed to have. Is there an example chart that shows maybe how many plug ins are allowed for each step up in proccessing power.
 
They make processors over 3ghz now. It's not really that cut and dried that x ghz gives you y plugins.

6 plugins is already alot. Why are your running that many? If you need a plugin on every track you might want to retrack some stuff. Most of your tracks should be able to go raw in the mix with some slight EQ and a touch of buss reverb.
 
6 Plug ins

the song I'm doing now has three guitars and a bass. For each of them I Use an amplitube plug in. that leaves me only 2 other plug ins. I'm already using reverb and eq from amplitube but I like a little compression on bass and one of the guitars. also I'm using a sampletank plug in. What happens when I want to add vocals to a track and but compression eq and reverb on those? I wont have enough space, what can I do?
 
How Many

How many plugins are people currently running on YOUR systems? What is your RAM and proccessor speed? Just for a reference.
 
Re: 6 Plug ins

TheGmiester161 said:
the song I'm doing now has three guitars and a bass. For each of them I Use an amplitube plug in. that leaves me only 2 other plug ins. I'm already using reverb and eq from amplitube but I like a little compression on bass and one of the guitars. also I'm using a sampletank plug in. What happens when I want to add vocals to a track and but compression eq and reverb on those? I wont have enough space, what can I do?

ok look at what you just wrote..

you only have a 1gig G4 laptop and you wanna run 4 amplitudes, sampletank and other plugins...
amplitude is cpu hungry. it eats up cpu power... now if you had a dual 1.25G4 or a dual G5 then you could probably run as many plugins as you feel like..
me, i'ma a nuendo 2.1 user.. when i don't feel like using the plugin i process the files with the plugin.. i haven't used pt in so long so i'm not sure if you can process a file with the plugin but try it..

best thing to do.. insert the plugin as you usually would.. get all the settings set they way you like it, then write the setting down or save the settings and process the file... it'll free up all that cpu power that amplitude is using..
 
Duplicate the tracks and then apply the effects you want as an Audiosuite plug. This will write the effect to the track you just duplicated, but you'll still have your original unprocessed track if you want to go back to it.
 
You're running 4 amplitubes and sampletank and you think your computer is slow? Man, even on my ripping fast computer amplitube is a processor hog. Process the tracks through amplitube to disk, and then get rid of all those plugins.
 
right now i'm on a xp2500 clocked to xp3000. amplitude is an awesome plug but it eats up cpu power on my system..
 
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