how long to bounce to disk

[dannyjm]

Lately I've been frustrated with how long it takes to bounce to disk. I'm recording my band on 20 tracks or so with lots of UA plugins then mixing to a stereo track. Then I bounce the stereo track to disk. The bounce takes about as long as playback or longer? is that normal? I am bouncing to mp3 format but I tried aiff and it takes about the same time. When I look at process monitor it looks like no RAM or processor overload and disk read/writes are a few hundred kbytes/sec at best. I have a really fast ssd on a thunderbolt bus so I don't think that is a bottleneck.
Thanks,
Dan

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Try bouncing to the native format. It should be faster. Then convert that bounce to MP3 in DP or another app. At least to see if the native bounce is faster. It definitely should be.

[Kurt Cowling]

Larger buffers make for faster bounces. Try taking your buffers up as high as they can go.

[mikehalloran]

Lately I've been frustrated with how long it takes to bounce to disk. I'm recording my band on 20 tracks or so with lots of UA plugins then mixing to a stereo track. Then I bounce the stereo track to disk. The bounce takes about as long as playback or longer? is that normal? I am bouncing to mp3 format but I tried aiff and it takes about the same time. ...
I have a really fast ssd on a thunderbolt bus so I don't think that is a bottleneck.

Is your boot drive an HDD or SSD? What year is your iMac?

Try bouncing to the native format. It should be faster. Then convert that bounce to MP3 in DP or another app. At least to see if the native bounce is faster. It definitely should be.

Try that. You can convert a stereo file in iTunes or QuickTime

What is your native format and bit depth?

[dannyjm]

Thanks for all the response all. I guess I don't know what my native format is? I have a 2011 Imac with 24G of RAM and a HDD boot disk. Some of the larger buffer sizes are greyed out. Not sure why.

[Kurt Cowling]

Try a bounce to some uncompressed format (WAV or AIFF) using the largest buffer available to you and let us know if it is faster.

[dannyjm]

I was able to put the buffer size to a large size by unclicking the MOTU 828 and just using the M32r in hardware config. I bounced a 2 minute stereo track to the "session default"(.wav I guess). The counter was moving at slightly less than 1 second per second (faster than playback) but it counted around 4 minutes. So it took less than 4 minutes to bounce a two minute stereo track.
not exactly blazing eh?

[mikehalloran]

I have a really fast ssd on a thunderbolt bus so I don't think that is a bottleneck.

Do you boot from this drive? Is DP installed on it? How about your project and target folders?

If the answer to any of those questions is No, here's your bottleneck:

I have a 2011 Imac with 24G of RAM and a HDD boot disk.

The HDD more than anything else.

[Kurt Cowling]

Try a project without any UA plugins, just native MOTU plugins. Maybe your connection to the UA unit is the bottleneck?

[dannyjm]

Mike H: the problem isn't slow booting it's slow btd. DP is installed on the HDD but the program is loaded into ram and runs from ram. not the HDD. that is my understanding of how computers work. Am I wrong? All the project and audio files are on the SSD.
I'm curious- how long does it take you to btd say for a two minute stereo track?
Thanks,
Dan

[mikehalloran]

Mike H: the problem isn't slow booting it's slow btd. DP is installed on the HDD but the program is loaded into ram and runs from ram. not the HDD. that is my understanding of how computers work. Am I wrong? All the project and audio files are on the SSD.
I'm curious- how long does it take you to btd say for a two minute stereo track?
Thanks,
Dan

Your understanding is wrong.

It's bounce to disk and that means that reading from and writing to the disk is involved.

That HDD is the bottleneck. Quite possible it's not the only one.

When I installed an SSD into my 2010 iMac, the improvement in BTD was so fast that I thought it was crashing. Looking into my Bounces folder, I then saw the completed files.

You could have a bad stick of RAM but I've never seen that slow down BTD — crash it, yes. In fact, on the rare occasions that BTD crashes, I do not wonder if I have bad RAM, only which stick is it? There are other possible reasons why BTD can crash but the only one I ever experienced was bad RAM.

Asking DP to convert to mp3 during a bounce doesn't take forever—just seems like it. A recent example:

A 320 minute, 4 CD remastering project takes my 2010 iMac about 15 minutes to bounce to 44.1kHz .wav checking Dither and using a couple of noise reduction plugs from RX Advanced. Bouncing those .wav files to Variable Bit mp3 takes 5–6 minutes in TwistedWave.

My client wanted me to upload those mp3s to Dropbox every night so that he could proof-check my progress — sometimes there were decisions to be made as well. One night, I made the mistake of bouncing that project to mp3 in DP instead. It took nearly an hour.

[philbrown]

...lots of UA plugins...

The number of UA cores you have (and how they are connected) could be a serious bottleneck. UA uses those cores for its processing and very little CPU. That's my understanding anyway.
My experience was much like Mike's above, i.e. the SSD is a vast improvement in speed for this sort of thing.

[dannyjm]

OK Mike H. I'll put an SSD in and see if it works. I still don't see how the HHD is in the chain since all the work files are on the SSD and the program is in RAM.

[philbrown]

I'm curious how many UA cores you have. Also, you can use the UA meter and control panel app to monitor that aspect of the bounce.

[dannyjm]

Hi Phil, I have two quad cores for a total of 8. Hey I just noticed I don't have the bottom multicolored bar you show in your graphic. Is that for an apollo interface? I just have the satellite units. The UAD meter shows about 50% processing due to all the plugins in the session. It does nothing during the btd. I have an Ampex mastering deck, a fairchild master compressor and a
EMT 250 on the master track and maybe a precision eq.