Hi fellows.
Can somebody please shine a light on this for me.
 
I have 75% CPU usage (task by Cakewalk when it is idle (no playing or recording) And rising to 90%+ when playing/recording.
i7-7600 / 16gb Ram. If I leave it idle for several minutes, CPU usage drops to 5-10%
Is this normal behavior?
I am asking because when CPU usage rises to certain levels audio gets shuttered.
 
I have roughly 25 tracks going. I have many take lanes in some, but vast majority of these are muted.
Using  Izotope Neutron and Nectar VSTs, no other plugins. 
 
Please let me know.
Thank you.
 
 

Is this after you've been using Sonar? You say it drops back to 5% or so after a few minutes, so I'm assuming you've been using Sonar for something previous to the high CPU usage. Or is it when you first open Sonar? Just a bit more info on your usage/workflow.

I would also explicitly check the frequency in the task manager, so check that power saving options are not on.
 

The real question to ask here is, How many instances of Izotope Neutron and Nectar are you using ?
Those plug ins can suck up CPU's. If your using them on all 24 tracks, you might want to rethink and consolidate some of your tracks to buses (or freeze some tracks).
 
What are your latency setting for your soundcard set at ?

rebel007, azslow3.
Thank you for suggestions!
I went to check and power plan was for "balanced" I changed that.
But that did not help.
 
What did... 
As I mentioned I had about half tracks muted.
Muted tracks had Izotope VST, as soon as I turned them off, (VSTs on these tracks) CPU usage went down 20-25%
I thought that muting the track, disables the VST that is on it until you un-mute it?
Silly me?
 
So after this homework, the right title for the post should have been something like:
Is there a way to automatically disable VST when tracks are muted? 
 
I would greatly appreciate if somebody can comment on it.
 
Thank you.
 
 
 
 
 
 

chuckebaby  
Thank you for post! 
 
:) was just writing this (see above), when your message came. 
 

You are right, muting does not disable or ("unload") the VST(i). And if you have a lot of VST/VSTi:s in your project, then Sonar will consume CPU even when idle. I suppose this is to "be ready" for what you will do next. But you can start and stop the audio engine itself to stop Sonar from draining the CPU.
 
I have assigned the keyboard shortcut ALT+X to "Run/stop audio engine", so I often use that shortcut to stop Sonar from using CPU after I have stopped the track.
 
I agree, this is not really ideal... maybe there could be some logic that disables/unloads VST(i):s when there is no input or output? (Or is there some logic like this already? I remember reading something about it...)

cyberzip, Thank you!
 
Seems like a valid item for "feature request".
 
To have an option to: "Disable VST on muted tracks" automatically  (and enable them automatically when un-muted) to stop those VSTs from gluttony.
Heading there now :)

Anything that can be done while the transport is running will consume CPU, since you can unmute a track with the transport running and they come online (because they are being processed even while muted).
 
Archiving a track will remove it from CPU overhead, and may be a better alternative to muting for you (but the transport needs to be stopped).
 
I forget now, but seem to recall that disabling an FX does not unload the CPU, but disabling the entire FX bin does. Freezing and/or bumping up audio buffers will also help with the strain on the CPU - those plugins you mention are for mixing, not tracking - during post-production, bumping up buffers will help prevent the heavier-handed plugins from crippling the machine.

Freezing a VSTi track unloads the synth.