Do you need a supercomputer to use plug-ins?!?!

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I assume not because everyone uses a zillion plug-ins. Here's my deal, I never really have and the other day was using Guitar Rig as a plug-in in Digital Performer 4.6, then, on another track, I added one of the built-in plug-ins and sure enough, Performer starts giving me "running out of processor juice" or whatever messages. What am I using? I have the first generation Mac G5 with 1gig of Ram. What's up? I used to sit in on sessions with friends using pro-tools on g3's running all kinds of plug-ins, focusrite, dinr, finalizer etc with no problems. Of course now that I think about it perhaps the Pro-Tools hardware did the work? I've got a MOTU 828 mk 2 but I don't think that's relevant.

Is it my mac? Is it Performer being a bitch? Maybe a preference in Performer set wrong? Is Guitar Rig particularly processor intensive(it is, effectively, several dozen plug-ins in one).

Any thoughts?

― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 05:46 (nineteen years ago)

It might be a combination of guitar rig being a processor hog (although I haven't used it myself so I am not sure, but NI plugs usually take a lot of juice) and your settings needing a tweak. One thing that can cause the computer to run out of gas is when the latency is set very low -I don't use DP, but there is almost certainly a setting in the preferences where you can change the latency. Try making it longer -if it is really short (less than 256 samples for example) then the computer has to work a lot harder to process the audio fast enough. What you lose in making it longer though is immediacy -there will be a tiny gap between playing the note and hearing it. Also, if your hard drive is more than 75% full that will start to slow things down too, and you should quit all other programs -these things can take up a lot of RAM too.
As for Pro Tools, it has dedicated DSP cards that do all the work so that's why you can run it on more modest machines...

― Conor (Conor), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 13:33 (nineteen years ago)

NI stuff loves to use your CPU, hell Guitar Rig won't even install on non Altivec Macs or none SSE2 Intel/AMD cpu machines.

If you want cheap cpu cycles AMD64 is the way to go.

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 14:53 (nineteen years ago)

I'm thinking my hard drive is way full, about to buy a new one, and it was the latency, I had the latency super short when recording, perhaps I didn't switch it back during playback. I can't play guitar clean then apply Guitar Rig when the effect is so crucial to what I'm playing. I definately had quit all my applications though.

― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 17:07 (nineteen years ago)

Number of plug-ins is pretty much a direct function of processor speed. Disk space has very little if anything to do with how many you can have working at once. (For plug-in instruments with samples, memory or disk space can make a difference, but for plain old effects processing plugs it really is mostly proc speed.)

― martin m. (mushrush), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 21:35 (nineteen years ago)

"Disk space has very little if anything to do with how many you can have working at once"

-that is true, although my drive got to the brim recently and i really noticed a drop in performance, so I think it is a good idea to keep a decent chunk of space free.

― Conor (Conor), Thursday, 29 December 2005 16:07 (nineteen years ago)

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