comparison of T3 audio engine with logic pro 8 test:

[Mr. Tingle]

Just thought I'd share my recent experiences with you all as you may find it interesting.

Using a penryn (new) intel macbook pro running os x 10.5 and boot camp xp I did a test to compare the Tracktion 3.0.4.8 audio engine vs logic 8.0.2. I'm using the same drivers (rme fireface400), hard drive (internal), cpu, ram, graphics and audiophiles and no plugins. This is purely a test to compare multiple audio file playback.

[this is a new laptop with all the appropriate tweeks for xp boot camp]

I took a big song in Tracktion and converted each track to 24bit aiff stem files (they all are identical in length), there were 57 in total, loaded this into a fresh edit in Tracktion and pressed play. The result was lots of stuttering and audio drop outs, cpu flashing into the red and going wildly up and down. Latency was 1024.

Loaded the same 57 stem aiff files into a blank logic template and pressed play. played ok. I then tried the latency at the lowest 32 samples and again it played back ok. The cpu meter was barely visible and the hard drive activity monitor flashed about every 3 secs upto about 50% and then dropped back to virtually no activity.

This in my book at least proves that Tracktion has some audio engine efficency redesign to do and is the reason that it cannot handle large projects. The difficulty Tracktion has is not cpu and vst plugin load but actually streaming all the audio files from the hard drive.

I got the feeling that logic could of gone on for some time to come adding tracks and vsts and would of coped. If you need large track counts Logic certainly does the trick.

[skipkent]

This is good to know, thanks for passing it along. Hopefully Beno, Laz and whomever else was associated with the project will come out of storage, shake off the mothballs and let us know what's up!

[drloop]

Interesting.
May I ask how many minutes was these stems were?

And you tried it on MacOSX?

Did you crank up the buffer of Tracktion?

I get on a typical 16mb $ 7200spin drive ~35 tracks.
All tracks ~4 minutes.
If I take up the buffer to 150MB I get ~38-40 tracks.
And my CPU utilisation is almost 0%.
If I use Cubase it is roughly the same figures.

Ofcourse this is on a Windows XP system.

[P.T.]

If someone did the same test on a windows system and got the same results it would mean more.
An apple application running better under an apple system may just make sense.

[jupiter8]

If someone did the same test on a windows system and got the same results it would mean more.
An apple application running better under an apple system may just make sense.

What relevance does that have to this test? Apparently Tracktion performs absolutley horrible on Macs. Those numbers,if correct, are just ridicolous.
Tracktion should perform much better than that.

[P.T.]

I was just wondering if the results might be reversed on a PC.

[valley]

I was just wondering if the results might be reversed on a PC.

If iTunes is anything to go by, Apple's Logic would run like hell under Windows, but either way, Logic is the competition on a Mac, and it's pretty much setting the benchmarks all round.

Tracktion has never been the strongest app for real heavy duty streaming anyway. It's performance is perfectly acceptable by and large, but it never led the field.

[HobbyCore]

He said tracktion was running on windows. So it's comparing the best platform available for tracktion to the best and only platform for logic.

[trunk79]

i love tracktion dearly but i have to admit when using on winXP sp2 i had a bunch of large projects (not that large) but 24-6 tracks no plug ins, when the track count went over 24 on my pc it would start to notcabley choke, cpu bar jumps around and glitches and clicks appear, opening the same bunch of files in sonar6 which i addmittedly hate to use because of the gui and controls i had no play back glitches and only 2-5% registering on the cpu metre.
tracktion maybe the most fun way to work but when you chuck on a lot of tracks it chokes.

[MasonAtom]

i love tracktion dearly but i have to admit when using on winXP sp2 i had a bunch of large projects (not that large) but 24-6 tracks no plug ins, when the track count went over 24 on my pc it would start to notcabley choke, cpu bar jumps around and glitches and clicks appear, opening the same bunch of files in sonar6 which i addmittedly hate to use because of the gui and controls i had no play back glitches and only 2-5% registering on the cpu metre.
tracktion maybe the most fun way to work but when you chuck on a lot of tracks it chokes.

yup. CPU efficiency (or rather, lack thereof) is why I've picked up Digital Performer.

[HobbyCore]

i love tracktion dearly but i have to admit when using on winXP sp2 i had a bunch of large projects (not that large) but 24-6 tracks no plug ins, when the track count went over 24 on my pc it would start to notcabley choke, cpu bar jumps around and glitches and clicks appear, opening the same bunch of files in sonar6 which i addmittedly hate to use because of the gui and controls i had no play back glitches and only 2-5% registering on the cpu metre.
tracktion maybe the most fun way to work but when you chuck on a lot of tracks it chokes.

yup. CPU efficiency (or rather, lack thereof) is why I've picked up Digital Performer.

Stability and CPU are reasons why I've switched to DP as well from tracktion in windows.