MIDI or Audio?

My computer is getting bogged down with too many VST tracks and as a result is choking hard while I try to arrange some of my songs.  The cpu at times jumps past 100%!!! 

It has been suggested to me to covert some tracks to audio because it will be less stressful for the computer to process the data.  I agree and see the benefit from a technical perspective but from a creative point of view I seem to lose my flow.  I like being able to adjust midi notes or change other aspects of the MIDI tracks and feel like this gets lost once the sound is made into a waveform.

I am running a Toshiba with 2.0GHZ and 2GB of RAM so my computer is not the best for making beats but surely there has got to be some sort of solution. 

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions???

You can manipulate audio in different ways, so you’re not limited.

Decide which parts you’re happy with and bounce them down, keep the midi channel but just turn all the plug ins within it off and mute that channel. That way if you REALLY need to do something different then you can go back, unmute, switch on the plug in’s and do what ever it is you need to do then bounce again.



Anyways it’s good to bounce things down, makes you stick to what you’ve got, which can sometimes be a blessing in disguise.

When you bounce something down, you commit pretty heavily to that sound. I know someone that does that. I do it sometimes too. Although, I understand where you are coming from. Here is what you can do…



You can bounce the audio down (which I wouldnt do right away). But what you can do is this… Make a part, and right click the track and hit the freeze button. That way you can move on to other parts of your track. When you come back, you can unfreeze. If you are completely satisfied with what you have done, you DO NOT have to bounce down to another channel! All you need to do is freeze the track, and then right click and hit FLATTEN. That will turn that same track into audio.



You can also create a duplicate of the track, freeze/flatten one of the two. On the other one, you can turn the channel off and turn off all the effects and synths you have going on that channel. That will save CPU.



Hope this helps. If you need more help, just ask.

my computer is 5 years old, never been formatted, but it’s a chugger!



i think it’s important to bounce stuff down as it stops you from going over small details, also you can do micro editing with audio that you can’t do with midi



if i bounce something down i save a new version of the project so if i need to go i can go back to it



a lot of stuff now is through my virus so really gotta bounce it down and then can freeze it if i put loads of effects on that channel


most of the Daws have like a freeze options  i think !!  .

i still sequence with my ****ty pentium 4 but still manage to Freeze most of the tracks. and sometimes i get the blue scree of death  :).

by the way does someone have tried the Pentium I7?

Hey, freeze is prety much spot on especially in ableton, you can also try to increase latency (buffer) of your sound card if you just arrenging stuff and maybe leave out the CPU intensive tasks…reverbs etc for the mixing stage, hope it helps