CPU speed VS # of vst's perproject

I have an athlon that about 1.6-1.7 in speed and 1 gig mem S7 and 2 80g HD and a m audio delta 44. Since I'm just learning the vst side of this new upgrade for me, where is the practical # of vst's and tracks before this type of system bogs down. Example might be a drum track, a real guitar chord track and a Dim Pro guitar plucked melody track.
These are totally hypothetical but with a system like this would some vst's from say a Kontakt player be too much of a cpu burden.
I would like to have at least 3 tracks to work with and since I tend to want a mellow acoustic backing track for a live vocal, not a lot if any extra effects might be needed.
I may be asking an overly simple question but if I need to upgrade first before the VST's it would be helpful to know as well as if some are greater CPU hogs than others.
Thanks Wyndham

To add to what fac said:

If you want to work live, with the FX running on your input and several tracks, either by guitar to AYdio or keyboard to MIDI, you may have some trouble.

The first thing that you need to do when you start getting crackle and dropouts is to up your latency time setting in Options/Audio. Latency of 50ms or even 100ms _may_ be tolerable, but takes some practice, unless you have practice at lousy work locations. You start to hear or feel a slapback effect at around 100 ms. Each ms is like being a foot further away from a speaker on your amp, to give you an idea.

The stage at which you can no longer work with the latency needed to let your system run smoothly is where you stop, except as fac suggested by freezing tracks. Even freezing tracks still requires that a track of Audio be played instead of the track with FX. But this reduces the load a lot over active FX on a track. This applies to both synth and audio tracks.

1.7-1.8 Ghz is minimum for this IMO. I have a 2.7Ghz machine, and I start to get into trouble with only 3-4 tracks of FX'd synths. I then need to up the latency. I am working now at 50ms, which is fine for me. However I have less RAM (512) so I will be running into Virtual memory faster than you.

However, there is an upside. If you are happy to keep your FX to a minimum while laying the sounds down, once it's all there, you can set your latency way up while engineering or inputting MIDI by Piano Roll, staff or Step Sequencer, because everything is affected the same. 200ms of latency will be irritating but not debilitating.

HTH

Nick

ORIGINAL: wyndham

Is there any practical reason to sending midi out to another PC and distribute the synth processing over several machines.

Not really. With the new quad-core CPU's it's much easier to build a single machine that can handle everything you throw to it.

ORIGINAL: wyndham

Thanks Nick, your new avatar looks like a Meerkat that got a hold of something that disigreed with it's dinner plans very interesting.
Since I'm new to this part of Sonar, the whole soft synths and all. I figure I've got a few more left field question before I use up the good will of folks like yourself(btw is there a smiley for blow'en smoke)
Is there any practical reason to sending midi out to another PC and distribute the synth processing over several machines. I can see it in my head but have not thought it all the way thru. More like a network over lan(midi over lan, which can be done) but would there be a sync problem with the other systems.
This might be new to me but old to the rest here. I can see using some older syst that don't cost much to handle a dedicated synth channel or 2.
Thanks again Wyndham

HAH! Yes. I made that picture years ago, and I have always had a chuckle from it. I found it again the other day, and figured why not. It does rather look as if the all-day-sucker sweet went down too early! <G>

Don't worry about asking questions. I have come back to SONAR over the last month or so and I for one can NOT complain about people asking questions! <G> Once I start picking stuff up, I always like to try to give back what I was given.

As fac said again (I keep having to quote the guy. He must be right all the time! <G>) it is questionably worth it. However I suppose if you had another machine lying around you could do it. I don't know about network or USB support, but MIDI cables would do the trick, because you are only sending start and stop and sync code. You would need a mixer to mix each machine to your amp and speakers though. AFAIK, because the vst stuff is "wrapped", you would also need another sequencer for each machine, although it would not have to be SONAR. The alternative is to use standalone versions of FX or synths, driving them via MIDI again. Once again you are only sending MIDI data. Now if you wanted to start working on Audio without a foreign seq, then research or another answer here would be needed (which is a pompous way of saying "I don't know" <G>)

Nick

Thanks for the pointers.

I will check it out FFR. But I am about to upgrade to a multi-processor PC. I suppose there is _always_ need for more PC power....

and you always have to have the last word! <G>

Nick

ORIGINAL: Nick P

ORIGINAL: fac

Not really. With the new quad-core CPU's it's much easier to build a single machine that can handle everything you throw to it.

I thought that so far quad-core is not that much of an advantage for music-related apps.

Well, I don't know about quad-cores, but I do have a dual core and I can run 50%-70% more plugins in Sonar when multicore support is on. I've also read some interesting threads in the Sonar forum about people with quad-cores who are able to run literally hundreds of plugins, so I guess it depends on whether a program is optimized for multi-core or not (for example, Sonar is, but Project-5 isn't).

Just BTB. One of the reasons I sit here writing is that I failed the _touring_ test! <G>

Nick

I remember hearing that Frank Zappa could score 12 instruments at a time in his head and that rock & roll was a way to pay the bills for his passion classical music.
Speaking of the Touring test: There was a fellow named bright, who could travel much faster than light; he left one day, in a relative way, and returned the previous night.
Wyndham

And let's not forget - Beethoven was deaf too !!

The mind boggles........

Cheap headphones I reckon

ORIGINAL: OldNick

Beethoven used to wander about the place with several symphonies on the go at once, with pieces of paper to write on. Mozart could reputedly sit and write an entire piece without one change, in one go, about as fast you can type. They had nothing but their minds and bits of paper, and they produced the world's best music, ever and certainly thew most complex. They did not have the ability to hear every passage played for them in multi-track, at the push of a button

I love rock and most modern music that is not pop, but those guys.....well....rocked.

Nick

Somewhere around the internet is a quote from Mozart taken from one of his letters where he talks about how hard he worked at composing and how these myths about music just "flowing out of him" were not true. But when you consider the volume and quality of his work in his relatively short lifetime, you have to believe he didn't use the eraser much!