Slow Melodyne Question

[lunatic]

So I have a dual, Xeon 5160 (so four 3.0 Ghz cores), Dell PWS 690 with a whopping 3 GB of RAM running our HD 3 PT 8.0.4 rig with XP.

It takes a *lot* for us to max out the system but I will admit that Melodyne really *crawls* on this rig. I know these are aged processors and that it's really probably time to upgrade the machine (a whole 'nother can o' worms) but is there anything I can do to get a little more oompf and life out of this system, maybe 6-9 more months, 'til we go HDX?

If the Dell will take it, would putting in two X5355 processors and more RAM make that much more a speed difference? The benchmarks you find online would make it seem so.

Thanks guys.

[albee1952]

Well, your rig is getting long in the tooth Have you upped the buffer to the highest setting? Melodyne uses a lot of horsepower(and all of it from the cpu since its not a TDM plugin). If I don't up the buffer, mine doesn't bog down a lot, but sometimes it will crash(thank Avid for auto-save). Also, if I try to Melodyne several tracks at once, that will kill the rig faster if I forget to up the buffer. Sorry I can't offer advice on the XEON upgrade. More RAM might help a little, but I'd hate to have you spend money on old tech(all the newer setups run DDR3). My money would be on a new build(i7 socket 2011 on an X79 motherboard with 16GB of quad-channel RAM).

[lunatic]

I haven't up'd the buffer to the highest setting. I'll try that! It's never crashed on me just runs slow and we never Melodyne more that one track at a time.

Our machine is long in the tooth but at the same time it's gettin' work done with very, *very*, little problems and we don't Melodyne vocals all that often. Still, I can feel it being sluggish and just putting some newer Xeons would seem to make a difference but I'm kinda with you in that I'd like to not invest in older technology. I've been looking at an X79 build but we still have PCI-X HD cards so if I go that route I'd have to buy a Magma which isn't all that bad... I guess.

[brianjanthony]

don't know if it applies to you in this situation. but i've used melodyne for quite a few years now. i usually use Studio. One undocumented quirk is this, Melodyne chokes on silence. For example, if I were to scan a vocal file in, with the only audio being at the end of the song, Melodyne will take FOREVER. I always compensate by using the Signal Generator and printing a sine tone in the silent spots. If I had a dozen vocals to scan in, and didn't use the sig-gen... it would take 10x longer no matter if I used my Mac G5 or my Quad core Xeon. Before scanning a vocal, make sure there's not a lot of silence in your scan area.

Sorry if this is off topic or doesn't apply. Its just that I can save literally 10s of hours using this method. If it helps you awesome.

brian

[lunatic]

Interesting! I don't capture a lot of blank audio though. Just about a measure before and after where I need to sweeten the vocals. I will keep this in mind. Thanks for the tip!