Seeking the limits...

[LPChip]

In term of seeking the limits, I wonder what record you hold in the amount of VST and VSTi's

Since the max depends on your setup, please also post your type of processor including speed (eg. AMD Athlon 64 3000+), soundcard (with playmode in MPT (and mixmode tnx Snu)) and amount of ram. Also tell us if you ever reached the limit.

As there is a difference between vst's and vsti's please tell how many of which. I'd like to ask to exclude chainers from this and put them in a different cathegory, cus a chainer uses very little cpu power, if any at all.

My limit is in my latest song where i have:

30 VST Effects
08 VST Instruments
12 Chainers

My system becomes slow at a few patterns, so I am near a limit. Playing doesn't get affected that much, eg. no cracles yet, but sometimes the GUI doesn't get updated and cpu gets near 100. I had replaced 2 vsti's with sfz and over 20mb of soundfonts in total, and that resulted in cracling.

I have: an AMD Athlon 64 3800+, 2 GB Ram with an X-Fi Elite Pro. Soundcard setup in MPT: ASIO 30 ms using 48khz.

[Sam_Zen]

Since I'm running a set on 640 MHz, there's a simple limit to me : zero plugins.
But I like to know : What are Chainers ? Question answered in another topic.

[Snu]

heh, ive hit the limit many times, and indeed gone over it... but thats with 96khz mixing, which is far more cpu intensive.
so, i would say you need to specify your mixing frequency.
for the more vst heavy songs, i lower it to 48khz, and often temporarily lower the quality on the reverbs until im ready for the final render.
biggest cpu hog is SIR, which with a long reverb, could use up all my cpu in one instance...

tho, for my latest songs i have taken to writing it with only minimal vsts, then exporting to tracktion for mixing and mastering (which is much better at doing that than mpt anyway).

so i guess its hard to say...
my most cpu intensive song done completely in mpt (which is as yet unfinished) way maxes out the cpu at 96khz, but plays ok at 48khz... probably 80% of the usage is going to crystal and 2 instances of SIR.

just for fun tho, my specs:
athlo 64 3700+, 1gb ram, audigy2
50ms buffer 96khz 32bit

[LPChip]

Right... I've set it to 48khz.  Used to do 96khz, cus I though it sounded differently... It appeared that the plugin didn't do it well with 96khz so the different sounds were caused by a bug in that plugin. Since I now use 96khz compliant plugins, I don't hear a difference anymore. So why track in 96khz then?

[Sam_Zen]

I'm a little suspicious about the frequency values in this contest. For a long time 44 kHz, as 16bits (ok, 32 bits now) - stereo, gave a reasonable playback or recording quality. Enough to make audio-cd's with it. Of course this value can be increased, but think it's more logical to take a binary model. So if 44 is the base number, the next real step to a higher resolution would be 88 kHz. Then 176 kHz.

And LPChip is right : one can speed up the equipment, but there will come a point where it is totally useless to increase the quality, because of the limited range of the human ear. Or one would like to add bats to the audience.

[Snu]

Right... I've set it to 48khz.  Used to do 96khz, cus I though it sounded differently... It appeared that the plugin didn't do it well with 96khz so the different sounds were caused by a bug in that plugin. Since I now use 96khz compliant plugins, I don't hear a difference anymore. So why track in 96khz then?

my main reason is because i master it to a 96khz, and as you mentioned, some vsts behave differently at 48khz versus 96.
i probably cant hear a difference in listening between 48 ad 96khz, but i master to 96khz for purposes of downsampling (96khz to 44khz no doubt introduces less aliasing than 48 to 44...), and because some CAN hear the difference, and i might be releasing my music on audiodvds in the future or something.

and as a reply to samzen, WHY is 44khz the base number? it is a completely ridiculous number and the only reason it ended up that way was due to early analog to digital converters that used a cheap frequency crystal (taken from tvs i belive)
i really think 48khz is more logical and easier to deal with (and really IS 48khz, not like 44khz is actually 44.1).

[Sam_Zen]

2 Snu
You're absolutely right about that ridiculous number. I just took it as some kind of existing default to make my point.

And about logical : 'really 48 kHz' means 48.000 Herz, which has a factor 5 in it, which needs quite some inter-calculations in a binary system.
In this perspective, the frequency in this range should be 65536 Hz.

[BooT-SectoR-ViruZ]

erm... isn't this question sort of stupid, because all vst(i) use different amounts of cpu, so it's not comparable?

with my old system (PIII 866MHz, 768MB SDRAM, Hercules Muse XL)
it was pretty easy to reach the limit
(just put "cable guys curve vsti" and "breakdown vst" together in one module and good night...)
MPT-Setup: Wavemapper - 16bit - 44,1KH

with my new system (Pentium 805 D 2x2.66GHz, 1024MB DDR, Terratec Phase 88 SE) i didn't experience any limits so far
MPT-Setup: () - 16bit - 44,1KHz

:twisted:


btw: what's that sort of playmode with a speaker icon in front of the soundcard's port called? (e.g. Phase 88 Wave 1/2)
asio, wavemapper and directX have seperate icons