Will other software (iTunes, Office, Photoshop, etc.) slow down Renois

Help, Support & Bugs Beginners Questions - Renoise
1

Hi folks!

I recently acquired a Lenovo T520 Thinkpad 4242 i7-2670QM, for the express purpose of running Renoise and Reaper. However it’s such a great machine, that I’m considering ditching my desktop computer and migrating everything over to it.

I would like to know if installing iTunes, Office [and/or OpenOffice] and Photoshop would slow down or otherwise interfere with the running of Renoise (and Reaper, for that matter). I’m currently getting nice low CPU percentages on Renoise, but I’m wondering if this is because that’s pretty much the only thing running on the machine. I know iTunes in particular is quite a bulky program, with lots of weird files like Bonjour & iTunes Helper (no idea what they do), so I want to know if this would be a bad move before I move everything over. Even if these programs aren’t currently running, would their presence on the hard drive (and start menu) impinge on Renoise usage?

Forgive my naive question - am new to the world of making music on a PC (Med user for many years on Amiga 500)…

Many thanks.

2

Obviously you are running some sort of Windows, but exactly what version? A lot of stuff is going to vary from machine to machine but what exactly happens you boot up does play a huge role in how your audio software is going to run.

You can expect to see a performance gain when you run the minimum amount of background services you need. Likewise, you will see a performance loss when running more than the minimum amount of background services you need.

If you go to the Start Menu, and type MSCONFIG in the search box at the bottom, you will see an application, and clicking on that app will bring up this window.

Pay attention to the box that I have painted with a green outline. A very simple way to optimize your machine would be to, “hide all windows services.” and disable whatever is left running. From this window you can also disable whatever programs are booting with your computer.

Fair warning: You must be very careful here. If you turn off antivirus, or turn off something you need, you will have to turn it back on, or you will not be running it. If you turn off windows services, you will not have them.

Now… I am using win 7 home premium x64. I haven’t seen windows 8 yet, but I am sure hoping these instructions above will work for v8. Like I said, “you basically gave us no info about your OS.”

Furthermore, the answer to your question is, “yes,” everything can impact everything and itunes, bonjour ( which is an apple service, and will be running to you turn it off ), antivirus, and whatever programs you install, that automatically turn on services or place themselves in your startup folder are all going to have an impact on the performance of your audio software.

3

Thanks, 2 daze j. I am running Windows 7 Professional x64 - forgot to mention this!

4

So are any of those software titles I mentioned particularly resource-hungry when running Renoise? I wouldn’t have iTunes, Photoshop, Office etc. open at the same time as Renoise, but I wondered if simply having them installed on my system would eat into Renoise CPU percentages, and if so by how much?

5

Just having them installed doesn’t eat the CPU, though I believe iTunes has a process that is always running, but the CPU usage is insignificant.

6

Cool - thanks, Veggies. I guess having these other things installed doesn’t slow down disk access times too much.

Still getting my head round the performance improvement of my new setup - my previous PC was an old Celeron XP beast which had trouble even playing YouTube clips let alone operating music software, so this is a whole new realm for me!

Thanks everyone for your help - what an exciting and seemingly limitless piece of software Renoise is.