300 mb VST-plugins & 2 gb RAM - good idea?

[drjohnny79]

Hi there!

I'm starting to choose what vst-plugins to include in my Cubase vstplugins folder, organizing favourites etc.. I have a couple of questions:

1. I'm wondering, how much do the filesize of the plugins affect overall DAW performance? Are the plugins loaded into ram as Cubase starts?

2. What ratios between plugins vs ram do you guys use/recommend?

3. Is there a good solution to temporary include some plugins in some projects, where they are actually used and not include them as default? (In the Cubase's vstplugins folder)

Btw, I will use Kontakt2 in Cubase alot.

Thanx,
/Johnny

[BertKoor]

1) not. The plugins may be all scanned at startup, but are not stored in RAM.

2) 2GB should be allright. It depends on what your project actually uses, including large sample collections.

3) If you move a plugin, Cubase has lost track of it. So there's no good solution apart from keeping them in your VST folder. That's what it's there for after all... It does not affect used RAM.

[drjohnny79]

Thanx BertKoor! That's good news.

[drjohnny79]

I guess having a "favourites" folder will make sense though, to speed up the search for the right plug.

[scuzzphut]

2. As has been said , the ratio of plugins to RAM is largely irrelevant. You are not going to load up all of your plugins in every song, right ?.........right ?
2GB of RAM is huge and will be perfectly capable of handling all but the most extreme of circumstances. Any sampler that can handle huge sample libraries (kontakt, SFZ+ etc) will stream from disk rather than try to load a 1 Gig piano multisample into RAM.

3. The way I handle this is to rename a "once-only" plugin to .dlx, instead of .dll then , when I load that one song and it says "I can't find the plugin arsewinder.dll" I only have to rename it, instead of going and finding it, reinstalling it or whatever.

[drjohnny79]

Ok, I see what you mean scuzzphut.

Thanx all!