draco

I'm thinking about making some fairly long tracks in  and I find myself wondering about technical limitations that I might run into. My machine isn't the youngest, and it wasn't top of the line back when I bought it in 2017. (It's still going pretty ok!)

Does anyone know which hardware factors might play a role for the maximum length of a track that I can still process on my system? What is the impact of bit depth and sample rate? Is RAM a factor?

#SuperCollider

May 20 at 2:20pmWeb
Show threadpulusoundMay 20

@draco length isnt really a problem in itself, its more about how much processing you have going on at any given time. this will be limited by single-core performance of your CPU (unless using supernova, which can do multithreading. but i have no experience with it)

RAM is mainly a factor when dealing with lots and lots of samples loaded into memory

Show threadpulusoundMay 20

@draco when bumping up the sample rate you can expect roughly a proportional increase in CPU load, e.g. going 48kHz -> 96kHz about doubles CPU usage (but it depends on DSP algorithms in use, buffering etc etc)

i dont think you can change bit depth in SC? afaik it is always 32-bit float

Show threadpulusoundMay 20
@draco as a concrete point of reference, i used a 2013 macbook air (1.7GHz core i7-4650U, 8GB RAM) until last year for all my live sets at 44100Hz and had very few problems, just occasional stutters with my most complex tracks (10+ simultaneous Tidal patterns). i had to upgrade because web browsing got too demanding 😭
Show threaddracoMay 20
@ahihi I don't know if it has an impact on the internal handling of sound, but for the recording, there is the .recSampleFormat option: https://doc.sccode.org/Classes/Server.html#-recSampleFormat
(it is 32-bit float by default, though)
Server | SuperCollider 3.14.0 Help

Show threadpulusoundMay 20
@draco yeah, thats only for the recording
Show threaddracoMay 20
@ahihi good to know!
Show threadAaron ðŸ––May 20
@draco I think the length of the track doesn’t matter so much as how much active processing is happening simultaneously. RAM and CPU will be your bottlenecks on a 9-year-old system.