March 7, 2008
Waves APA32 Review
I have a Macbook Pro running Pro Tools LE/M 7.4 with the Waves Gold/Renaissance Bundle plugins as my main audio plugins. The systems performs well but I use a number of software plugins such BFD as my drum software and it seems to dispose of a fair bit of CPU on its own without running any of the Waves software for actual audio processing.
So, I recently bought a Waves APA32 and had a chance to plug it in my system tonight. To test how many instances I could run, I took a stereo mix and initiated 5 instances of the Waves C4 Net plugin (to address the APA32 instead of the host CPU) on the track itself, ran the track into an Aux with 5 instances there and repeated this until I had 16 instances of C4 running simultaneously. At that point, the unit was running at 98% CPU. My Macbook Pro was running at between 5 to 7% CPU.
From there, I took all the same instances of the plugin and switched them to run on the host rather than the APA32. With all the same 16 C4s running off the host, the CPU was at about 45%.
I was quite pleased with this, considering that the usable amount of CPU on my machine before it starts to give errors on playback is about 60%. Working the CPU any harder than that is very frustrating resulting in very frequent stops while doing playback in the timeline. So, effectively I feel like I've been able to more or less sub-let about 2/3 of the usable off my host CPU to the APA32. That should free my up ability to run roughly double the amount of audio plugins as I was able to before.
I'll include the screen caps of both scenarios of the Waves Netshell software and the Pro Tools System Usage meters so you can see for yourself.
P.S. This thing is machine room material only. It's as loud as everyone says it is.
Posted by Derek Leverington at 10:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 17, 2007
Problem with Safari 3 Beta and Pro Tools 7.x
Heads up on this one...
Here's the support article I found tonight that corresponded to my problem - I couldn't get Pro Tools to start up. The icon would just bounce a few times and then stop.
I'm still working on solving this one but here's the link to the article I found on the Digidesign site.
http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?navid=54&langid=100&itemid=24834
Posted by Derek Leverington at 2:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack