Here's a chart showing how some of the ones in my collection compare. Many musicians don't realise how much soft synths vary in their RAM consumption.
The CPU meter hits 100 percent because the PC can no longer process the song in real time, due to the extra time it takes to keep reloading that data. Thus every time the song tries to access a different Atmosphere patch, some of the data may have to be retrieved from the hard drive - hence the severe stuttering. With six instances, a PC that has 512MB RAM could well be struggling, and once the RAM is nearly all in use Windows will start to ferry whatever data it can to virtual RAM (a cache on your hard drive). This is simply because Atmosphere (and its stablemate Trilogy) load their patches entirely into system RAM and each one can consume up to 125MB. As an Atmosphere user myself, I instantly know which of these three is the real culprit: lack of RAM. The Diagnosis: This user suspects his RAM, processor and audio interface. If I don't need more RAM, would an external soundcard be the answer? (I have a laptop.)"
Should I get more? I think my processor is running at 3.19GHz. The CPU meter also hits 100 percent every time it starts stuttering. It takes up a lot of space on my hard drive (3GB) and it's now come to the point where, if I add more than, say, six channels of it into FL Studio, the whole piece stutters so much that I can't play it for more than three seconds.
The Problem: "I'm having big problems ever since I bought Spectrasonics' Atmosphere to plug into my Fruity Loops Studio software.
To help, I decided to take some typical problems reported by SOS Forum members, explain their most likely cause and point out the best solution, as well as offering temporary workarounds for those who can't afford to upgrade at the moment or have a project that urgently needs to be finished.
However, many musicians face the opposite dilemma: they have a PC that has problems running some songs and are not sure whether they need to upgrade their soundcard, install more RAM, buy a faster processor or get a larger, faster drive to resolve them.Īs you can see from the SOS Forum survey results in the box on page 70, there's no such thing as a typical song, so if you're in the situation described above you need to do a little detective work to find out what's causing the problems in your particular case. In my PC Musician feature of SOS June 2003, I explained how the various PC resources (CPU, RAM and hard drive) are used up by audio tracks, soft synths, soft samplers and so on, to help PC users decide on the spec that would meet their needs when buying or building a new model. But how do you know which is to blame, and do you have to upgrade or can you work around the problem? There are many factors that can cause your PC to struggle when playing back your songs – including RAM, your hard drive, your CPU and your system settings. You don't need to make 'guesstimates' about how much of your system RAM is being used in total by all your currently running applications - just use a freeware utility such as Cacheman, shown here.