Superior 2.0 question

Hey guys!

I'm asking this question here because the Toontrack forum confuses me.

I'm working on a project where I want the drums to create more of an "atmosphere" rather than a driving groove, and for that I'm using just the room mics inside SD 2.0 Music City SDX and playing them with the brush tool setting on my E-drums.

So I was wondering, since I'm just using the room mics, if it's possible to "unload" the kit's close mics to save ram?

Sven

On further thought, you might try loading all of the drums as XDrums and not assigning any close mic channels.  I doubt that will work but that would be my first experiment.

bitflipper

I was wondering, since I'm just using the room mics, if it's possible to "unload" the kit's close mics to save ram?

Yes. Use the "Cached" option. Play the project once through and SD2 will load just the samples that are needed.

That was my initial idea but I think that the only samples that won't be loaded are the articulations and velocity layers not found in the project for any given midi note number.  IOW, it will load the close mic samples of any articulation presented to it regardless of whether the mic channel is muted or playing back. 
 
Have you tried this to verify it?

bitflipper

IOW, it will load the close mic samples of any articulation presented to it regardless of whether the mic channel is muted or playing back.

I just tested this. I opened an existing project and checked the RAM usage for SD2. It was 799MB (16-bit samples, most bleeds already disabled, as is my practice). Then I cleared memory and played back in Cached mode. Memory usage dropped to 197MB. Then I turned off all remaining bleeds. Memory usage dropped to 45MB.

So yes, turning off unnecessary bleeds is an effective way to reduce memory usage.

The OP indicated that he was only using the room mics.  So bleed usage wasn't what I was talking about.  In that case he's only using the bleeds into the room mics.  He specifically talked about unloading the close mic samples.  (Which could also include bleed samples as well.)

Thanks for the input Dave and Dave!

It seems it's not possible to unload the close mics (which is kind of a shame, cause even when I'm going for punchy close-miked drums, I usually don't use the kick "sub" mic or the compressed snare from the Avatar library so they just sit there taking up RAM).

The cache feature is a great way to shrink the RAM footprint of a given song, though! Thanks for reminding me!

Sven