What drains CPU?

[AverageJoe]

Hello all,

I'm a new 001 user with a G3/333 (upgraded from a UMAX s900). The 001 works great on my system, but obviously I do run into CPU drain with hogs like verb plug-ins, etc.

What I am wondering, and this may be asking a lot, is what are the things that tax the CPU (or system as a whole) the most- specifically, if a plug-in is bypassed, does it still have an effect on CPU usage? How about an unused audio track? A muted audio track? If a track has lots of audio edits, I know it has an effect so it seems that muting it would help, but I'm not sure.

As you can probably see, I'm trying to find some tricks when I need to squeeze a bit more out of my machine. If I can mute plug-ins and some audio tracks while recording to get more 'juice', that's no problem, but if I have to actually take the plug-in out, that will change my recording process.

A list of some sort of things that tax the CPU would be great!



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Joe Mazza
Average Joe Music
www.averagejoemusic.com

[latenights]

The CPU drain thing would have to be the biggest reason that I constantly want to throw the Mac out the window.but as I am presently listenning to a mix of 7songs done on Ple and burnt on the same mac.I suppose things aren't all bad! The pluggins take load in my rig every time they are in a track.The empty tracks don't seem to draw much at all. i usually run at least 3 stereo aux as returns for my outboard revs etc.and now find it sounds a who;e lot better than any cpu hungry software pluggin.get as far as 60%or more on your cpu load meter and are happy with your mix??then copy those settings of your RTAS plugs then go audiosuitte and print those effects.Take out the Rtas plugs and continue building the mix..etc etc It's the only way that I can get anywhere near the density of mixing that I like..goodluck..