User Manual

OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE
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Introduction
Record is a program of infinite possibilities. You can create extremely complex songs, with a vast number of audio
tracks and rack devices. While this is one of the most exciting properties of the program, it does have a drawback –
it means that you must be careful with how you manage your computer processing power.
Each audio track and device you add in your song uses up a bit of computer processing power – the more audio
tracks and devices, the faster the computer has to be. However, you can set up your devices to require more or less
processing power. For example, a sound on the Subtractor synthesizer (Record+Reason) that only uses one oscilla-
tor and one filter requires less processing power than one using both dual oscillators and dual filters.
Samples used in your songs also require RAM (memory) to load properly. The use of RAM can also be managed, as
described at the end of this chapter.
When collaborating on songs with other Record owners, you should do what you can to reduce the requirements for
playing back a certain song, both in terms of processing power and in terms of RAM requirements. Other users may
not have as powerful a computer as you do!
Checking Processing Power
To the left on the Transport Panel you will find a meter labelled DSP. This indicates how much processing power is
used at any given moment.
The DSP meter on the Transport Panel
The higher this meter goes, the higher the strain on your computer processor. You will note when your processor is
heavily loaded that graphics will update slower. Finally, when there’s too little power left to generate audio properly,
the sound will start to break up.
Optimization and Latency reduction
As described in “About latency” in the Audio Basics chapter, you generally want the lowest possible latency, to get
the best response when you record and play in Record in real time. However, selecting too low a latency is likely to
result in playback problems (clicks, pops, dropouts, etc.). There are several technical reasons for this, the main one
being that with smaller buffers (lower latency), the average strain on the CPU will be higher. This also means that the
more CPU-intensive your Record song (i.e. the more devices and audio tracks you use), the higher the minimum la-
tency required for avoiding playback difficulties.
Therefore, you may need to adjust the latency. This is done differently depending on which audio cards, drivers and
operating system you are using.
Making Buffer Size adjustments in the ASIO Control Panel (Windows)
If you are using an ASIO driver (Windows only) specifically written for the audio hardware, you can in most cases
make settings for the hardware in its ASIO Control Panel. This panel (opened by clicking the ASIO Control Panel but-
ton in the Preferences-Audio dialog) may or may not contain parameters for adjusting the latency. Usually this is
done by changing the number and/or size of the audio buffers - the fewer and smaller the audio buffers, the lower
the latency. Please consult the documentation of your audio hardware and its ASIO drivers for details.