KVR Audio

Bombadil · Post by **Bombadil** » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:55 am

Ran about 17 instances of Tape 80 on the M1 Mini, along with other IK plugins on the channel strips. It strained the CPU and RAM, but I got no overload messages. Not bad for a €700 computer.

paolostylo · Post by **paolostylo** » Wed Jun 23, 2021 11:10 am

Interesting...
Can you specify this?
What Type of M1 Mac Mini is it?
How many cores, how much RAM etc.
Are 2 Monitoes possible?
Sorry for the questions, I'm on Windows...
Thanks in advance!

Bombadil · Post by **Bombadil** » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:53 pm

Basic M1 Mac mini, 8GB RAM, 256 GB SSD. It's the first non-Intel machine released last year.
8.
Yes.
Your welcome in retrospect!

jens · Post by **jens** » Thu Jun 24, 2021 7:44 am

Bombadil wrote: ↑Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:55 am Ran about 17 instances of Tape 80 on the M1 Mini, along with other IK plugins on the channel strips. It strained the CPU and RAM, but I got no overload messages. Not bad for a €700 computer.

I think what's a little special about it is that it probably stayed very quiet nonetheless, or did it not?

I can run +25 tracks with each one instance of Tape 80, VC-670, British Channel and Master EQ 432 on my sub 1000€ laptop that has twice the RAM of yours (which is upgradeable, unlike yours) and four times the diskspace (which is also upgreadable, again unlike yours), so I wouldn't say yours is really very cost-effective at all...

but it's an impressive machine all the while.

Bombadil · Post by **Bombadil** » Thu Jun 24, 2021 8:18 am

And cool. What's your point? The only thing I need is to upgrade the RAM to 16GB, and then it might be a fair fight. And that would still be under a grand.

jens · Post by **jens** » Thu Jun 24, 2021 8:47 am

As I already said you can't upgrade the RAM on your machine. Also that won't magically increase its CPU-power...

it's not a "fight" btw - you mentioned the performance of your new-ish Apple computer and its price-perfomance ratio, I mentioned that of my new-ish Lenovo - fair enough, me thinks? Or was everyone supposed to be frozen in awe at the sheer mentioning of your little toy?

Bombadil · Post by **Bombadil** » Thu Jun 24, 2021 11:18 am

No, you're comparing 8 gb RAM machine to your 16gb. And of course you're being disingenuous when you say you can't upgrade the RAM. You just have to order it with 16gb. How old are you, Jens?

PS: further, IK plugins are not officially M1 compatible, so that's 17 instances of unsupported plugins going through Rosetta 2. If and when IK gives us native code, even the 8gb machine will come close to 25.

jens · Post by **jens** » Thu Jun 24, 2021 1:02 pm

Bombadil wrote: ↑Thu Jun 24, 2021 11:18 am No, you're comparing 8 gb RAM machine to your 16gb. And of course you're being disingenuous when you say you can't upgrade the RAM. You just have to order it with 16gb. How old are you, Jens?

This is getting irritatingly silly.

The performance example YOU "Bombadil" posted above - i.e. it was your your choice and your choice alone to mention it here - has absolutely nothing to do with 8gb vs 16gb RAM as 8gb is easily more than enough for this.

RAM matters of course - just not here.

How many instances of Tape 80 you may ever load, this won't make much - if any at all - of a difference in regards to ram useage. And hence the amount of RAM my machine has is completely irrelevant in this regard.

The mind boggles at you seeming to be entirely obliviou to this fact. That's ridiculous - and a bit sad.

So I get your question regarding my age. You are most probably just way to old to comprehend any of this modern technical stuff.

I only mentioned my machines RAM in regards to value for money, which again you mentioned first.

It's beyond bizarre that you use the fact that yours only has 8gb of RAM as an argument for it. That'S literally some of the absurdest stuff I have read in a looong time.

And yet you even manage to top that yourself within the same post.

So buying another computer with more RAM is "upgrading" for you?

I know that understanding all this tech stuff is difficult for you, so I will try to explain it to you:

When someone talks about "upgrading RAM" that person usually refers to the process of actually opening up the computer (Yes, there are people who can really do this, as hard as it may ever be for you to believe this) and putting in more RAM and/or exchanging that which is already in there.

That's what Apple themselves mean when they mention upgrading the RAM:

Mac mini (M1, 2020) has memory that is integrated into the Apple M1 chip and can't be upgraded.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205041

How disingenious of them to say that, right?

Or how truly embarrassing for you, old man.

pixel85 · Post by **pixel85** » Fri Jun 25, 2021 9:42 am

jens, can you show us a video where you running +25 tracks with each one instance of Tape 80, VC-670, British Channel and Master EQ 432 on my sub 1000€ laptop? Because I can run 'only' 24 tracks with Tape 80 on each and it's on Desktop 12 core 3900x CPU. Your laptop must be super extremely efficient or you're exaggerating.
Can you share the model of your laptop? I would like to test it.

jens · Post by **jens** » Fri Jun 25, 2021 10:14 am

Not sure I'll got to the length of making a video tbh...

yours certainly should be able to run a lot more instances than mine though - something isn't quite right on your system somehow if you can't, I'd say - I have a Legion 5 with a H4800, TRX 2060, 16gb 3200, 1tb M2 and doing a couple of benchmarks, it was always behaving according to specs... (Geekbench 5 multiscore of ~8000)

What's your Geekbench score? It should be ~12000 for your CPU and hence +35 tracks like those I mentioned should not be a problem for your system (I found Geekbench's multiscore to be a pretty reliable measurement tool when it comes to plugin-load)

Edit: this depends a lot on the host too though - I just tried in Studio One (before in Reaper) and I can only run 19 tracks of that same chain or 31 tracks of only Tape 80 before getting droupouts (with dropout prevention set to max and 128samples ASIO buffer)

Edit 2: since Reason doesn't have a hybrid engine, I have to set ASIO to the highest possible buffer for my interface (2048), then I can run 32tracks of just Tape 80 (i.e. similar results to Studio One, but no minimal latency input monitoring)

pixel85 · Post by **pixel85** » Fri Jun 25, 2021 1:37 pm

jens wrote: ↑Fri Jun 25, 2021 10:14 am Not sure I'll got to the length of making a video tbh...

yours certainly should be able to run a lot more instances than mine though - something isn't quite right on your system somehow if you can't, I'd say - I have a Legion 5 with a H4800, TRX 2060, 16gb 3200, 1tb M2 and doing a couple of benchmarks, it was always behaving according to specs... (Geekbench 5 multiscore of ~8000)

What's your Geekbench score? It should be ~12000 for your CPU and hence +35 tracks like those I mentioned should not be a problem for your system (I found Geekbench's multiscore to be a pretty reliable measurement tool when it comes to plugin-load)

Edit: this depends a lot on the host too though - I just tried in Studio One (before in Reaper) and I can only run 19 tracks of that same chain or 31 tracks of only Tape 80 before getting droupouts (with dropout prevention set to max and 128samples ASIO buffer)

Edit 2: since Reason doesn't have a hybrid engine, I have to set ASIO to the highest possible buffer for my interface (2048), then I can run 32tracks of just Tape 80 (i.e. similar results to Studio One, but no minimal latency input monitoring)

Yep, it will be 'the case of Cubase' which is not the most effective for performance. Also, I have a PC maintained for audio without any clutter affecting DPC, live performance.
I did this quick test at 128 buffer size.
I missed the part where you said that you used Reaper - which way more efficient than Cubase.

My Geekbench result is 12770.

EDIT:
On max 1024 Buffer, I can run one more track

I added a few more effects from T-racks to get smtg similar to your setup. These are not affecting anything as expected. Cubase simply can't do more than split channels per logical processors of CPU.

jens · Post by **jens** » Sun Jun 27, 2021 8:01 pm

No, you didn't miss me saying that I used Reaper for the test - I simply failed to mention it.
I seem to remember not experiencing nearly as significant differences when running similar stress-tests in the past. Perhaps this is machine dependent?

I see - so you might even be able to run two Tape 80 on each track (as little practical sense as that might make) and get the same number of tracks?

pixel85 · Post by **pixel85** » Mon Jun 28, 2021 3:06 pm

jens wrote: ↑Sun Jun 27, 2021 8:01 pm I see - so you might even be able to run two Tape 80 on each track (as little practical sense as that might make) and get the same number of tracks?

Probably. I can definitely run IKM Tape + comp + EQ... typical track/bus processing which is actually useful. I used Tape twice on the same channel once in the past tho

Anyway, it's not a big deal because I'm using Tape mostly on Master Bus, eventually Buses. If it's on Channel then I'm always moving it in Offline processing as I don't like CPU heavy plugins on Channel tracks.

jens · Post by **jens** » Mon Jun 28, 2021 3:30 pm

TBH I now religiously use the Tape plugins on every channel... mostly however the 24 and sometimes the 440 if I want more colour...

pixel85 · Post by **pixel85** » Mon Jun 28, 2021 7:48 pm

I seriously consider these Tapes as the "next-gen" plugins in the matter of audio quality and what it does without much tweaking. For me, it's the new standard of how new plugins ad 2021 should (sonically) perform. I don't really care about CPU usage because I know that this "Currency of CPU cycles" is worth it.

IK Multimedia T-racks Tape Machine Collection