Quote:
Originally Posted by pianomanharry
I know this thread is almost two years old, but a good read... thank you! I’m having a similar issue.  |
Wow, didn't expect to see this thread again! Well, all I can do is provide the information I've learned in the meantime. Yours to read if you want to, I tend to be quite wordy.
To give you the short answer to what I eventually found. You want a fast processor, specifically with good single threaded performance. If you run wide sessions with many tracks, you want more cores. To get both of these things you're looking at high end i7 and i9 processors. i5s don't have the core count still, and Xeons don't have the single threaded performance. But even with the best choice of processor, it's still unlikely you can do everything live with low latency without freezing to audio, unless you run slave machines.
If I were able to talk to myself from a couple years ago, I'd say to stop worrying about it. Keep the i7 machine and invest in some hardware synths and effects to handle the heaviest and more specialized tasks. This is more or less what I've done. My new machine has an i9-7900X, 32GB of RAM, only SSDs, and an RME HDSPe AIO PCIe audio interface. It can lift the world on its own, but I've also paired it with some hardware synths that I really enjoy. It takes the work off the machine, and it gives me unique sounds to work with.
The information is there if you're willing to dig forever (like I was
). It comes down to a couple things. Audio in general is hard to turn into a parallel task for multi-core processors. Most DAWs still do it by track, and only some VSTs offer beneficial multi-processing. So no matter what, a heavy synth VST will be a heavy synth VST until plugin designers change the way they're written. In addition, we don't really have great options for a dedicated add on card for sound processing, not like our friends in the video production industry. We have things like Waves soundgrid, but they're often proprietary and only run that company's plugins. Maybe one day we'll have a dedicated card for audio effects processing that's worth its cost and open to any developer.
Please feel free to ask any questions and I'll provide an answer if I can. Good luck with your journey.