Chewing up CPU power?? Audio or Midi??

[rimisrandma]

What chews up CPU power more, Audio or Midi?? There is one technique that if I understand it, when recording, you save your tracks that are one or the other to the opposite to save cpu power. I don't know if I get it, but it's something like convert your audio files to midi, so you have all midi tracks or vice versa, but I am not am expert and can't remember how this goes?

 

[Steenamaroo]

It depends.
Midi is a data protocol. Reading midi notation takes up very little CPU power, but the softsynth that you using to turn it into sound might be a hog.

I think what you're talking about is this. Say you've set up a great synth patch that you love. Maybe you've got three or four them all sounding perfect, then your computer starts to slow down and can't hack it...

You'd bounce the synth outputs down to a stereo track per synth which allows you to disable the synth plugins and take a load off the computer.
The downside of course is that you can no longer tweak your patch unless you take a step backwards.

Make sense?

 

[mjbphotos]

As Steen said, bounce or 'Audio render' the MIDI tracks down, then disable the VSTi and mute the midi track (stem rendering in Reaper does this automatically).

 

[jonny deep]

As Steen said, bounce or 'Audio render' the MIDI tracks down, then disable the VSTi and mute the midi track (stem rendering in Reaper does this automatically).

In Cubase (and probably most DAWs, but not sure what it's called in all of them) you can freeze audio or midi tracks, which bounces to a wav audio file with all effects printed in the sound. If you need to go back to tweak anything, you simply unfreeze the track.