I’ve searched the forums and I’m aware of how to convert stereo tracks into mono, but that’s not my problem. I don’t exactly have the most powerful computer so every track I add pushes my system to the limit. When I’m using pro tools, I basically just make ALL tracks mono (except for maybe pianos and live drum kits) which saves my computer a lot of work.
Is there any way to do this? Again, I’m not concerned about the sound or fancy routing, I’m just trying to cut my system’s workload in half as I like to add a LOT of instruments at once (like the outro sections of NIN songs on The Downward Spiral such as “Closer” or “I Do Not Want This”). I’m working on something right now with 6 separate synths and it’s already got my system pushed to 60%. I’ll soon be busting out multiple instances of Kontakt and I’m not so sure if my system will be able to hang.
Is it really saving any CPU cycles if you play something mono? I’d imagine computer still plays both left and right channel but just single waveform, instead of two so I don’t see the gain there? Maybe try reducing the quality of playback, redcue the number of VSTs or render them to samples as soon as you have the track ready?
I’ve read before that it reduces power and I’m pretty sure I’ve tested this myself, but I’m not sure.
Here’s the weird thing though, since I’m not really recording any acoustic instruments in this DAW (I’ll use pro tools for that), I thought that I didn’t really need the headroom I get from high sample rate and decided to drop down to a lower sample rate (which dramatically drops my cpu usage). The weird thing is, every instrument except for Synthmaster can accommodate this and I don’t know why the synth is having the problems. I reset the sample rate to something 44.1 and it just makes static. I restarted the session and Renoise and the same thing happened. I tried saving in 44.1 then closed renoise and re-opened and same problem.|
I’ll have to see if synthmaster has this problem in general or if this is just something tied being used at 88.
EDIT: Still can’t figure out how to get that track to play back in 44.1, but synthmaster works when I start out with that sample rate. More importantly, I figured out the real culprit: U-he’s beta version of Repro-1: the thing literally takes up more power than 4-5 other individual instruments (maybe more). They’ve talked about how power-hungry their stuff can be, but hopefully they can take this thing when the final version comes out.
I should also be more conscientious of using VSTs instead of AUs (using Pro Tools, AAX is more only choice so I’m not used to worrying about that).
Renoise doesn’t have mono tracks. You can make a sample mono, or collapse a stereo signal to mono using a device, but ultimately the signal path throughout Renoise is stereo.