Question About Processor Speed and RAM

Xcaliber

Xcaliber

New member
I've searched the net and these forums for this info, but I can't seem to find exactly what I'm looking for. Tonight I tried downloading a song from the Mix This! forums to play around with on my 2006 Macbook Pro. I imported the wav files for each track (I think there are about 10 tracks) and began applying plugins using the presets in Studio One and adding some compression and EQ with my own settings. As soon as I began playing the music and adding plug-ins my laptop began to slow down, I got the "spinning color wheel" and it even crashed on me once. Long story short I need a new computer.

So here's the question, I've read all of the "guides" and "guidance" I can find about buying/building a new computer for a home recording studio and I can't find the answer to one simple thing: Is there a "CPU power/RAM/number of tracks and plug-ins" ratio? I've read lots of articles that say "get as fast a processor as you can afford" and "get as much RAM as you can afford", but that doesn't help me figure out how fast a CPU and/or RAM I need to accomplish my tasks. That being said here are the things I plan to do with the computer in my home studio:
  • Mix songs with 10-20 tracks (possibly more) using lots of plug-ins
  • Record rock/metal songs that will rely heavily on virtual instruments (EZ Drummer, Bass synth sounds, amp modeling plug-ins, etc.)
  • Possibly record band with real instruments (which could include an acoustic drum set mic'd up with 8 simultaneous microphone inputs on my interface)

The crux of the problem is I have a limited budget for the new computer (of course). I'm eyeing this Mac Mini due to it's insanely low price point ($599):
2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5
4GB memory
500GB hard drive1
Intel HD Graphics 4000
OS X Mavericks
*I have an external WD 500GB USB hard drive I will use with it too.

but I don't want to spend the money if that won't let me achieve what I want. I'm concerned about 3 things:

#1. It's a 5400 RPM hard drive in that "base model".
#2. 4 GB of RAM won't be enough for me to load all of the VSTs I want to use when mixing (and potentially mastering) the music I record.
#3. The dual-core CPU be a bottleneck for mixing with the number of tracks I plan to have (10-20, possibly more)

Thanks for any help/insight you can give on this. (It's actually keeping me from sleeping tonight).
 
I only have the built in sound-card, but my monitors are running through my TASCAM US-1800 interface. Should I have an external sound card too?
 
$600 over here would translate into £600 for computer hard ware and audio kit.

That is NOT cheap for that specification IMHO. I think you could build a stonking i5, poss' i7 machine for that money.

But, whatever new machine you buy/build you will be keeping the Mac book Pro?
So, you mention Ezdrummer and other softwares? Keep those on the mac and buy an interface with S/PDIF connections (I think I am right in saying MBPs have a digital out?)
Thus the load can be shared between the two machines.

We did this with an old P4 and a then new W7 machine. The P4 sent MIDI data to the much faster W7 jobbie to play Pianoteq but the USB kbd was connected to the P4 running Samplitude. The P4 could not cope with the MIDI rendering in real time without glitches but the W7 breezed it. Sam on P4 thus recorded MIDI data, the clean sound being S/PDIF'ed back from the W7 machine!

There is ALWAYS a way!

http://3xs.scan.co.uk/configurator/3xs-e97-music-production-computer/default

That ^ is only just over 700quid built and tested and 20% of that is VAT!

Dave.
 
Xcaliber said:
Is there a "CPU power/RAM/number of tracks and plug-ins" ratio?
Click to expand...
No, not really.

Mix songs with 10-20 tracks (possibly more) using lots of plug-ins
Click to expand...
Your cpu and ram are the limiting factors on the amount of plugs you can run. Define lots of plugs, because what you may call lots is very little to someone else.

Record rock/metal songs that will rely heavily on virtual instruments (EZ Drummer, Bass synth sounds, amp modeling plug-ins, etc.)
Click to expand...
RAM is the limiting factor on sample based VSTi's like EZDrummer. CPU is the limiting factor for synthesized VSTi's.

Possibly record band with real instruments (which could include an acoustic drum set mic'd up with 8 simultaneous microphone inputs on my interface)
Click to expand...
Hard drive speed is the limiting factor on how many tracks you can record. In your case, a 5400 rpm drive could be the choking point. Also, you mentioned a US1800. If you have other devices plugged into the same USB 'hub' then the you might run into time-sharing problems when streaming data.

The crux of the problem is I have a limited budget for the new computer (of course).
Click to expand...
If you're budget limited, you should really consider PC-based computers.
I'm eyeing this Mac Mini due to it's insanely low price point ($599):
Click to expand...
A Mac mini is insanely expensive for that price. But, I don't want to start another Mac Vs PC thread. Get what you want.

*I have an external WD 500GB USB hard drive I will use with it too.
Click to expand...
Use it for archiving projects, not for realtime streaming. You can stream data to a Firewire drive, but I doubt you can stream data to a USB drive especially if it is on the same shared hub as your interface.

#1. It's a 5400 RPM hard drive in that "base model".
Click to expand...
This is probably the cause of your problem.
#2. 4 GB of RAM won't be enough for me to load all of the VSTs I want to use when mixing (and potentially mastering) the music I record.
Click to expand...
Should be plenty to run a couple of sample-based VSTi's and many plugs.
#3. The dual-core CPU be a bottleneck for mixing with the number of tracks I plan to have (10-20, possibly more)
Click to expand...
The cpu doesn't limit your track count.

Doing audio is easy for a computer. There is no golden ratio to determine what components to use for a certain number of tracks, mostly because everyone does things a little differently. Well, there is probably some kind of correlation, but I have never seen it expressed in defined terms.

Most plug-ins do not require a lot of cpu resources. Your simple compressors and EQ's are light loads. Reverbs use a ton of cpu resources. Limit the number of instances of reverb you are running. I use one and send all my tracks to that one plug.

I used to have a P4 based PC with 4GB of Ram and 2 hard drives (7200rpm) and it never hiccupped. My usual songs would have 10 - 15 tracks, 1 VSTi (EZD) and 2 plugs per track. I had some songs with much more: 2 instances of EZD, 25 tracks and associated plugs and the PC still never had an issue. And this was before I bought all my UAD stuff.

I don't know too much about Mac's, but I think you shouldn't be having issues with a light load (20 tracks). Except maybe your hard drive isn't up to the task or you are using wayyyyy too many plugs (which if recorded properly, you don't need to - but that is a discussion for another thread)

Having said all that.... get the most for your money and future-proof yourself.
 
That mac mini is around the same spec as my macbook pro.
It will handle what you're describing without issue.
Having said that I recommend replacing any 5400 speed drive with an SSD.
It's just soooo worth it.

Now, having said that, I don't see why a 2006 MPB (c2d?) shouldn't be able to handle your workload.

If it was me I'd buy an SSD for your current machine and see how it goes.
If you find you need to upgrade computer regardless, you can migrate the SSD to it.

Are you aware of the buffer size settings?
 
Basically you want:

7200rpm drives. usb3 on the mini. One for projects, one for sample libraries if you use them.
Dont get 'green' drives. They go to sleep to save energy...you dont want that on a daw.
Drives are cheap. You want multiple drives OFF THE BOOT DRIVE for more efficiency.

16gb ram. Ram is too cheap these days not to boost it (always get 3rd-party. OWC is a good source)
 
Xcaliber said:
I only have the built in sound-card, but my monitors are running through my TASCAM US-1800 interface. Should I have an external sound card too?
Click to expand...

Your US-1800 is an external sound card. You should be using this for input and output for all your audio work. In your DAW, do you have the ASIO drivers for the US-1800 selected? If so, try increasing the buffer size, you might be able to handle this project with some tweaking.
 
Here are some basics,
These days, the most cost effective option is to go for an i5 processor. The i7 will give some improvement but, IMHO, not enough to justify the significant increase in price.
Spend what you save on more memory. 8GB (assuming your operating system supports it, sorry I'm no Mac expert) will give you more benefit.
Optimally have the operating system and programs running from a small SSD. The latest ones from Crucial (MX100) are said to be very good.
But I don't know about compatibility with your intended system, though they should be okay.
If you can't afford that then try to make sure that the main HDD is 7,200 rpm.

The audio you're working on, and sample libraries are best put onto a second drive.
This should be, (if you're budget conscious) onto a 7,200 rpm drive minimum, 10,000 rpm if you can stretch a bit.
USB 2 will slow this down massively though. USB 3 should be okay but I've not done any tests yet on external USB 3 drive bays.
Ideally the drive should be internal running through an on board SATA interface.

However it is possible (and it works very well on my laptop) to have an eSATA interface, with the drive sitting in an eSATA capable external drive caddy.
I regularly use WD 7200 rpm 'black' 2.5 inch drives for this. I tend to stick to 500GB size as they're so inexpensive.

And 'no' there is no fixed ratio that has ever been published to my knowledge, because everyone's use and mix is nearly unique.
As an example I regularly use a well set up laptop to realise orchestral work of up to around 40 tracks using VST instruments, but with convolution reverb the only main plug-in.

When I'm, rendering, not playing in live, then I set the latency to a high setting, 50 msec or so, so there are no major strains on the processor.
For live playing I can get the cardbus E-MU 1616m system down to around 5 msec which, for me, is unnoticeable.

Any help?
Regards,
John.
 
SysExJohn said:
Spend what you save on more memory. 8GB (assuming your operating system supports it, sorry I'm no Mac expert) will give you more benefit
Click to expand...

The modern versions of OSX are 64bit and that i5 mini supports 16gb RAM, despite apple's officially stated upper limit of 8gb.
This is a common enough thing. The modern iMacs/MBPs/minis will take 16gb.

I believe your current MBP officially supports 3gb but, as you know, will run 4gb.
 
Thanks for all the answers everyone. I've skimmed through them (I'm at work right now) and I plan to review them in more detail tonight and respond. I have an idea on what the issue is with the laptop so I'll try that and report back tonight too.

One question that comes to mind is that I've read (and most of you have stated) that it's important to have your recordings written to a drive that's different than your "OS/Boot drive". If not with an external USB drive (through a hub because I have so many USB devices) how could I have a 2nd hard drive with a laptop?

I really appreciate the feedback/ideas/info.
 
I don't know too much about macs so this may not be an option for you. But with ,y Dell laptop, I was able to buy a hard drive caddy that replaces the dvd drive. The dvd drive pops out and the hard drive caddy pops right in. I replaced the original hard drive with an SSD and moved the hard drive to the caddy as a data drive. Really nice little arrangement for a laptop.

If I ever need the dvd drive, I can simply swap them out again.

Other than that, does your mac have a firewire port? Firewire would be the way to use an external hard drive.
 
Chili said:
I don't know too much about macs so this may not be an option for you. But with ,y Dell laptop, I was able to buy a hard drive caddy that replaces the dvd drive. The dvd drive pops out and the hard drive caddy pops right in. I replaced the original hard drive with an SSD and moved the hard drive to the caddy as a data drive. Really nice little arrangement for a laptop.

If I ever need the dvd drive, I can simply swap them out again.
Click to expand...

Funny, I did the same thing with my macbook pro. It's a very straight forward procedure.
The same can be done with a mac mini but the process is a bit more involved.

Chili said:
Other than that, does your mac have a firewire port? Firewire would be the way to use an external hard drive.
Click to expand...

Yeah, modern apples have thunderbolt which is directly compatible with firewire. You just need the right cable/adapter.
 
My MBP doesn't have that option as it's one of those "slot in the side of the machine" type of CDROM drives. I also don't have firewire since it's so old.
 
The 15" 2.33ghz mac book pros from late 2006 have firewire (800 and 400), and can have the optical drive replaced with a HDD.
You'd need the caddy to do it, but I found a few pics in an online guide.

Maybe I'm looking up the wrong year? Is there an older 2.33ghz?
 
Nope, it's the 2006 one. I didn't know you could do that. And you're right about the firewire. I was at work when I posted that, but I just looked and it does have firewire.

If it were a firewire hard drive could I use it to record to/play from?
 
Absolutely. :)

With the unibody models it's very very easy to get inside and do these things, but with your model it's a bit more involved.
Rather than the bottom coming off, you have to strip off the keyboard and top panel.

I stripped one down last year. It's still only a 15/20 minute job, to be fair.
No where near as awkward as a dell/toshiba etc. ;)
 
So I tested my theory and it turns out the laptop can handle the mix I was working on. As suggested by a few people here it was the external USB hard drive that was the bottleneck. I moved the files to the internal hard drive and I've had no problems working on it tonight.

Thanks for the help. I might still upgrade in the future, but I can save some money and get something that will work better/last longer for me. I appreciate all of the replies!
 
One thing you can do if your laptop doesn't have an eSATA port, mine does, is to buy a PCMCIA/cardbus/whatever interface card.
These plug directly into the laptop's 'bus' and therefore have a high speed path to the processor/memory.
Most cards I've looked at are the early SATA standard, and therefore run at up to 3Gb/sec.
The newer one's, for the latest SATA II drives, should allow a theoretical maximum of 6Gb/sec.
Buy a good one, which will probably come with driver software, and check compatabilty carefully before shelling out.
The HDD caddy and the interface card need to be the same standard to get really high speed transfer.

Just a few thoughts.
Have fun,
John.

It really is 'the way to go'.
 
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