Now, I have been doing this with my 2012 MacBook pro for couple of years and while it was impressively reliable, it's a 6 year old 4 core CPU.

If you see RT longest block going over this value then you have buffer under-run and clicks/pops are likely to happen. So, for example at samples the buffer is 2.67ms.

It tells you how much time in milliseconds total processing of the project takes out of the time available at given buffer. In particular, RT longest-block is the most useful metric. Also project structure like buses and sends can affect efficiency.įortunately, Reaper provides a very useful Performance meter, which reports crucial performance data. This required me to only use zero latency plugins, and to be very careful about how much CPU each plugin uses. The second challenge is to do this within limits of hardware/software capabilities, IOW to not get pops/clicks/buffer under-runs during shows and to keep latency to acceptable level. Things like what frequencies to cut/boost, what and how much to compress and so on. This has presented two challenges: one is the art of mixing, of which I only knew basics initially, but have gotten better over time. We record each gig so I can tweak eq, compression, etc on recorded gigs and save it as preset to use next time. This has all worked very well, in fact in some 30+ shows never did I have a single failure.Īdmittedly, I spent a lot of time preparing at home. I provide stereo master mix to FOH and separate monitor mix for stage monitoring. Over time I have made presets with appropriate processing for each track, bus and master. We're a rock band so I have a total of 9-10 XLR inputs (Lead vocal, two back vocals, 2 mic'ed guitars, DI bass and 3 or 4 drum mics). My use case is DAW (Reaper) as software digital mixer and effects processor. I have a mid 2012 non retina MacBook pro, top model at the time, with 2.7 GHz 4 core (i7-3820qm) 16 GB of RAM and SSD.įew years ago I bought RME UCX and Behringer ADA8200 and after experimenting with it for quite a while I started taking it to gigs. I gig locally with my rock band at small venues where sound guys and PA range from bad to decent. I'm a software developer and a guitar player for 25+ years now. Let me start with a introduction, but feel free to skip to analysis if you so prefer. Also I redid the test and added timings after locking the CPU. EDIT: My particular problem has been solved, and explained in this post, basically non locked CPU clock on windows was the problem.

Ableton live windows vs mac