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Compressed file format
I’m trying to optimise my live rig to minimise the risk of running into the IOS AUV3 memory limit.
From what I understand it isn’t as simple and likely not limited to AUV3s and that the complexity of the project may impact loading (or not) of individual apps.
Because of this I’m considering converting all of the audio samples in Drambo to mp3s and setting file format in loopy to compressed for projects I intend to run from IPhone 12 Pro which has less Ram than my iPad Pro 11 4th gen. 4Gb vs 8Gb respectively.
My question is:
Will it achieve my objective of reducing Ram load and potentially CPU load too or is the compressed format only there to reduce the project size? @Michael
Comments
Also, will it require extra CPU processing with mp3 conversion or is it roughly equivalent to uncompressed?
This being the apple ecosystem wouldn’t you be better off with m4a than mp3? Anyway nothing beats plain old wav files. Unless you’re using multisampled grand stage pianos or something, I don’t think it will make much difference. To my years a 320k mp3 is as good as lossless, but it doesn’t take much less space, so I don’t feel the need to bother.
But if you use long samples or multi sampled instruments it my save you a few bytes.
And afaik yes, all samples have to reside in memory, at least at play time, but developers sure must go through hoops to optimize that.
And I remember @brambos stating there’s no way for devs to know when the ram critical limit will be approached, it just crashes (which sucks on apple’s part)
@supadom : loopy disk streams audio. So, using compressed audio won’t affect RAM related issues. Compressed audio in loopy is almost entirely for reducing the size on disk.
Compressed audio will somewhat increase the CPU load.
I know nothing about Drambo’s audio file handling and how it might affect things.
Loopy uses aac for compression, not mp3.
Can loopy stream audio from an external disk? Like an ssd? I seem to recall the answer is yes.
@espiegel123
How do we get Loopy Pro to stream from an external SSD?
Are the files supposed to be on the SSD first then Loopy Pro can stream them?
Can Loopy Pro record to an external SSD as well?
You can load projects on external drives but Loopy Pro may actually be running a local copy—as whenever a project is loaded Loopy copies it into the workspace which is a local file.
That’s what I thought. It might spare on ram but still has to fit samples (or chunks) in memory, and at the cost of internal storage. Nothing wrong with loopy, these are apple restrictions
@supadom - you can’t achieve ram reduction by using compressed audio files. Any app will just have to convert them to wav format in memory for processing. All you’ll achieve is a disk space saving, at the expense of higher load times and decreased quality.
As mentioned, Loopy makes use of disk streaming to use RAM as efficiently as possible.
Note, samples in other apps running in Loopy, such as Drambo, that don’t stream from disk, do fill up the RAM allocation for that AU. There’s nothing that can be done to overcome that.
The moral of the story is: maximize use of loopy’s audio clips to minimize ram usage. Using apps such as AudioLayer that do use disk streaming may help as well.
Thanks.
I was told by Drambo dev that there’s no extra processing for compressed files because it streams directly from disk.
So Loopy Pro will always decompress m4a audio on the fly?
That's impossible. Audio has to be decompressed either on the fly, adding more audio latency, or once when loading into RAM, requiring the uncompressed equivalent of memory.
I couldn’t say for sure, but I assume it’s decompressed on import. Then the WAV data is streamed to/from disk if needed. I think it would be crazy to do it any other way.