I recently purchased (well, to be fair, it was bought for me) a new laptop, and what better way to put it through its paces than to make some music, right?
I’m not exactly new to Renoise at this point; I’ve been dabbling with it since version 2.5 was released on a number of older systems. But for some reason, I’m struggling to handle even the most basic tasks on this new computer.
As an example, while fooling around in a sound design session involving only a single, extremely short looped waveform and a few envelopes for pitch and filtering, I was topping out at over 80% CPU usage only by playing a few notes (maybe 10 or so simultaneously - I was trying to make something with a bell-like timbre and wanted to hear how a fairly intricate melody would sound). Now, bear in mind this was done with no VST instruments or effects, and only a single instance of the Renoise Reverb DSP for some color. I thought maybe it was just a fluke, so I tried loading some of the included demo tracks and playing them, but they almost all caused the audio player to go into panic mode and shut off after a few bars.
I don’t know too terribly much about computers, but I do know that a brand new laptop - and a fairly recent model, at that - should at least be able to run software that my laptop from 5 years ago (which, even then, was an outdated budget model) could handle.
I did some brief searching on Google and found that the processor in my current machine (an Intel Celeron N2830) has a clock speed of 2.16 GHz, which I think should be fast enough at least for simple songs and basic sound design like I was trying. I know it’s not a super high-end model, but I’ve read about people running Renoise on much slower hardware than that, so I should at least be able to get something going, right?
I even tried upping the latency setting in the Audio Preferences window, but unless I drive it to the upper 3-digit values, I’m not seeing any real decrease in CPU usage. Is pushing it that far and hoping for the best my only option, or did something go horribly wrong?