Instrument/VSTi plugin suppression

Hey,

I got an idea. I hope I did not just miss an already existing feature.

It would be super useful if you could “suppress” an instrument. That means that it will still be here with all it’s settings, but it will be disabled, unloaded from RAM and not being executed at all.

Why is that useful? Typical usecase:

  • I got few instruments that are heavy on resources (mostly RAM, sometimes even CPU)
  • I render the track to a sample
  • I don’t need the VST loaded anymore, so I suppress it and it frees my resources to use more instruments
  • I want to change the track a bit, so I activate the instrument, the plugin loads again, I make the changes and then render and disable it again.

This means it should delete the plugin from RAM, keep all it’s setting and probably replace it with some “dummy instrument”, so all the automation could be still connected to it (having no effect).

You will get:

  • possibility to work with bigger projects with lots of high quality eg orchestral instruments
  • ability to work on worse machines
  • faster loading of projects!

What do you think?

You have auto suspend. Did you know that? http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Plugin

It just effects cpu usage. As far as ram goes… you could probably just buy more ram. Also, “rendering track to sample,” must take up quite a bit of ram.

but since your post mentions, “trouble with cpu,” check out auto suspend

Renoise just needs the ability to freeze tracks…

Well, the CPU thing is not the important one here, the problem is mostly the RAM. One rendered track of reasonable song length is nothing compared to more than 1GB instrument in RAM.