Excessive System Load With Vsts

I’m currently in the process of getting up to speed with Renoise running on Mac and have just tried out the VST feature.

Unfortunately I’m finding the CPU usage to be several orders of magnitude higher than with other hosts - for example with LinPlug’s Albino 3, I can run 10+ instances (each playing a few notes) on this system in other software. In Renoise, I can manage about 3 notes in ONE instance before I see the CPU usage shoot up and the sound breaks up. I can barely manage two instances. What am I doing wrong?

I’m using my laptop’s internal audio with a latency setting of 10ms, sample rate of 44.1k.

System details: MacBook Pro, Core Duo 2GHz, 1GB RAM, OS X 10.4.

Renoise: 1.5.2 (Universal Binary)

Thanks,

Andy

You have a core duo i see… is there anyway that you can see or figure out what core is being used and if one of them can be turned off? (setting affinity to only one core).
It might increase performance a little (at least on a Windows machine it’s what it does).
But not much, because it only utilises one core, you won’t benefit the most of your CPU power.
Renoise is currently not capable of utilising a duo-core CPU.
On windows it automatically detaches one of both cores for it’s process.
I don’t know if it does so for the Mac, but i do know Renoise caused irregular behaviour on HT processors on PC for this reason.

Thanks for your reply vvoois.

Actually that all makes sense, given that I have discovered Renoise actually runs better inside Parallels Desktop for Mac (running XP) than it does natively! I think this is because the virtualy machine emulated inside Parallels only has one CPU.

With the current trend towards multi-core systems, I think this should be looked at as a matter of urgency, over and above fancy new features.

I agree.