Mac/PC Optimization Guides from Sweetwater

[Billy's Little Trip]

You're pulling my leg right? How could my music possibly get any better?

Cow bell....more of it.

[fluffy]

Remember that external drives (USB or Firewire) don't have NEARLY as much bandwidth available as the internal SATA bus. If you really want to speed things up, replace your hard drive with an SSD. (And don't worry about the write cycle limit; a modern SSD has enough write cycles that it'll last just as long under even a heavy load as a conventional HDD, if not longer. I think a modern 256GB SSD can be expected to last through something like 750TB worth of writes.)

Another trick that is pretty helpful on GB and Logic is that if you're running into 'audio system overload' problems, do an offline bounce. That will force the OS to re-cache the data that had previously been loaded. Logic and GB are written with the assumption that the OS will efficiently pre-fetch and cache data that is actively being used. Unfortunately, these days, OSX is pretty aggressive about paging this data out, especially in Lion (where the paging-stuff-out is taken to a ridiculous extreme and is actually made as a selling point for the OS, which is one of the many reasons why I'm so very sick of OSX Lion).

[Caravan Ray]

Another trick that is pretty helpful on GB and Logic is that if you're running into 'audio system overload' problems, do an offline bounce. That will force the OS to re-cache the data that had previously been loaded. Logic and GB are written with the assumption that the OS will efficiently pre-fetch and cache data that is actively being used. .

This post seems to be written with the assumption that people know what an "offline bounce" is.

Is it another way of saying "turn it off and on again"?

[roymond]

I assume offline bounce is not real-time (where all your audio and effects are rendered to a static track and then you work with that for new tracks as opposed to the system doing this in real time for all tracks)...otherwise known as track freeze?

[Billy's Little Trip]

Because of the way I mix my tracks, I only off line bounce. I don't ride faders, etc. like I did in the old days with an outboard mixer and equipment, so why mix in real time? Everything I do is within the box (I think they call it in the box or in the DAW or something), because I have zero need for anything outboard with Cubase, so why take up desk space, to look cool? lol. If I have a track that needs to get louder or quieter in a part, I simple cut it and paste it on a new track and give it the treatment I'm looking for independently of the main track it's on, with overlapping and cross fading as needed for smooth transitions. Basically using this method, when I'm ready to export my tracks to a wav file, I've listened to it in real time numerous times and made all the tweaks I want and it's exactly how I want it. Now I can export it, go make a sangwich and let my computer take all the time it needs to render down a lossless wav file.

Honestly, with the tools we have available to us these days, I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. The only thing that stands in the way is how many tracks and FX can your machine handle.

[roymond]

We're talking about the same thing. Offline bounce = rendering those tracks that may use up resources and eventually overwhelm CPU/ram. I don't call it offline bounce, but it requires telling it to render those tracks, and it's done faster than real time but not during performance. I can select any tracks I want to do this. It then allows in some cases twice as many tracks as I'd be able to use otherwise (on my laptop).

In Logic it's called "freeze tracks" so that those tracks are rendered out in the background to an uncompressed file, so when you're working on other tracks it frees up CPU and ram for whatever you need to do. The user sees nothing different, except a little icon on the track...the moment you want to further edit those tracks in any way, it deletes the rendered version and you're instantly back where you were. Playing an uncompressed audio file with no effects applied takes a fraction of the resources needed for a track that you've ladened with reverb, delay, crunch guitar effects, limiting, panning, volume curves, etc. The two sound identical, but one is just a clean file and the other requires all that stuff.

[Billy's Little Trip]

My limitation and blessing is that I'm only familiar with Cubase at this point in my studio life. I say blessing because I feel fortunate that I started with Cubase. That Steinberg fella certainly made sure to put about everything studio wise into his program. By default I've leaned a lot about mixing music.
But I am limited by terms of other DAWs. Not that I care too much, but it helps when collaborating or helping people with different programs. I can usually figure it out when I ask what their "fancy named" thing does. It's all standard, just with different fancy terms.

[Lunkhead]

Cubase has that too and I think they even call it "freeze" also. Look for a little snowflake icon on your track in the main window. For some reason I don't use that feature, but I really should. Even though I've got 4 2GHz Xeons I still manage to bog my Mac down, if I use too many fancy reverbs and multiband compressors and amp simulators.

[fluffy]

We're talking about the same thing. Offline bounce = rendering those tracks that may use up resources and eventually overwhelm CPU/ram. I don't call it offline bounce, but it requires telling it to render those tracks, and it's done faster than real time but not during performance. I can select any tracks I want to do this. It then allows in some cases twice as many tracks as I'd be able to use otherwise (on my laptop).

A freeze track is different than an offline bounce. A freeze track is a freezing of a single track; an offline bounce is rendering the entire project to a wav file or similar. Offline as opposed to realtime. When you do a bounce in Logic it asks you whether you want it to be offline or realtime. I think GarageBand just hides it in the 'send song to iTunes' thing (which I think does an offline bounce to AIFF if you don't check 'compress').

If I had Logic at work I'd make a screen shot. But I don't. But just look at the options on the "bounce" dialog.

Note that an offline bounce doesn't always produce the same results as a realtime one; there's a few subtle differences with how track automation works, some effects get confused in offline mode, and complex MIDI routing (retriggers, arpeggiators, etc.) doesn't work right at all. So really I'd only recommend using an offline bounce for priming the OS disk cache. (Also, for some reason, offline bounces only use a single CPU.)

[roymond]

So doing an offline bounce, like what one generally does when all done and ready to master, is the only way to clear and update the cache for a given song...during a session? How about quiting and restarting the app?

[fluffy]

That doesn't necessarily force it to touch all the song data, so it won't actually prime the cache. In my experience, a quit and restart does help with Logic realtime performance, but not as much as just doing an offline bounce. Quitting and reloading does probably free up a lot of memory that's keeping the cache from being as large as it could, though. It certainly doesn't hurt.

You would probably want to quit, reload, and then offline bounce to get the best bang for your pre-fetching buck (so to speak).

[Billy's Little Trip]

Note that an offline bounce doesn't always produce the same results as a realtime one; there's a few subtle differences with how track automation works, some effects get confused in offline mode, and complex MIDI routing (retriggers, arpeggiators, etc.) doesn't work right at all. So really I'd only recommend using an offline bounce for priming the OS disk cache. (Also, for some reason, offline bounces only use a single CPU.)

I've had this problem. I couldn't figure out why. So as I always do, I figure out another way to accomplish what I need to do. Cut, paste on a new track and treat the new track with what I'm trying to do.
But there I go again, adding tracks and adding to a heavy production. But ultimately, it works.

I don't know how many, if any do this, but the music is mixed down to a stereo wav by itself. Then a new session is started with the music stereo track as track 1 to start mixing in the vocal tracks.

[Caravan Ray]

That doesn't necessarily force it to touch all the song data, so it won't actually prime the cache. In my experience, a quit and restart does help with Logic realtime performance, but not as much as just doing an offline bounce. Quitting and reloading does probably free up a lot of memory that's keeping the cache from being as large as it could, though. It certainly doesn't hurt.

You would probably want to quit, reload, and then offline bounce to get the best bang for your pre-fetching buck (so to speak).

I knew this would all come back to turning it off and on again.