Christopher Carvalho

basically ive created some patches that are quite heavy on the CPU,

Im using an iMac 2.66 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, 640 GB HDD,

and a Mackie Onyx Satellite sound card/interface

what are my options?, software/hardware, avoiding the need for a new computer,

cpu-overload-how-can-i-avoid-this-options

Increasing your I/O vector size and signal vector size can help. Although this will increase latency.

It's a little hard to generalize, but optimize the core of your patchers. For example, if you use poly~, spend time optimizing the poly~ voice. If you post the parts of the patches you want to optimize, people can probably point out where the CPU cycles are going (signal rate modulo/divide/multiply, log/exp functions are speed killers, for example).

Use wavetables where possible (instead of calculating values at signal rate).

If you can program C, consider writing portions of patches as C-externals. I've had dramatic CPU efficiencies doing so.

It's a little hard to generalize, but optimize the core of your patchers. For example, if you use poly~, spend time optimizing the poly~ voice. If you post the parts of the patches you want to optimize, people can probably point out where the CPU cycles are going (signal rate modulo/divide/multiply, log/exp functions are speed killers, for example). 

Use wavetables where possible (instead of calculating values at signal rate). 

If you can program C, consider writing portions of patches as C-externals. I've had dramatic CPU efficiencies doing so.


unfortunately i dont have any experience with C, although i will look into this,

CPU overload: how can i avoid this? options?