ST4 standalone allows the loading of many great sounds without the processor displaying too much load.Īs an exemplary sound I used the, admittedly, very big Black LP Full Keyswitch as a test sound. I use a MacBook Pro with 4 cores and Cubase as DAW. Hence why my 1 ST4 with 5 C7s is unplayable - that one instance of ST4 just overloads the thread, even though the remaining threads are basically idle.īy way of a final (unreal world) test I could get up to 13 MIDI channels of 'Cellos Sustain' preset in a single multitimbral instance of ST4 before my CPU hit 100% on the 1 live core, so all this is very dependent on the preset used as well. whatever MIDI track is armed or selected, the CPU is ready to take the strain of an incoming performance and is ready to playback samples/record incoming MIDI. Logic has a slightly irksome way of distributing load across CPU cores/threads, but it always leaves thread 8 for 'live input' i.e. Now, I know why it works like this and it may be the same for other DAWs. If I need to, I render down or freeze, but it doesn't happen often as I'm not a heavy sample user.Ĭaveat 2 - the I/O buffer is set to 256 samples 1 preset of C7 Grand Binaural eachĬPU = 35% (1 thread) 5.10% (of total CPU) Plays nicelyĬaveat 1 - the drive that my sample content is on is a 5400rpm, so I don't expect masses of track count out of it.

1 preset of C7 Grand BinauralĬPU = 34.8% (1 thread) 3.84% (of total CPU) Plays nicelyĥ instances of ST4. 5 presets all C7 Grand BinauralĬPU = 103.9% (1 thread) 13.5% (of total CPU) Unplayable!ġ instance of ST4. I'll put my findings and then explain why, but I think the issue(s) that this kind of usage can lead to is to do with how the DAW addresses virtual instruments, rather than the instrument itself (in most cases anyway, not to suggest that you don't have a fixable issue).ġ instance of ST4. Finally got round to doing your test, as this kinda thing interests meĭone on my, now rather vintage, MacMini (specs in sig).

Sampletank 4 piano