I've been trying the new Melodyne with ARA, and I love the plugin, but man, what a CPU hog!! I was creating some harmony tracks to each of a couple of acoustic guitar clips, and after making few Melodyne regions, I got audio dropouts, scratching, sudden playback stops, a maxed out core#1 on my Sonar "Performance" graph, the works! I had to extract just the tracks I'm working with and make a separate project in order to be able to continue working with Melodyne.
 
Before finishing with Melodyne, I decided to go back to my master project and fix it so that the CPU max-out didn't occur again. So after I cleared out the events in the new harmony tracks, the audio problems and maxed out CPU core were still going on! So I then deleted the harmony tracks completely, and restarted Sonar. After that the "master" project resumed its normal performance and played back smoothly.
 
So as soon as I'm ready to add the finished harmony tracks from the separate project for those, I'll obviously have to bounce the harmony tracks first in order to "flatten" the Melodyne effects and add only the bounced tracks to the master project in order to avoid spiking my CPU again. So at least I have a workaround, but what a pain...has anyone else experienced sky-high CPU loads when using Melodyne?

Finally we have an excuse to upgrade our PC's.
What is your hardware? Please update your footer like mine (well I suggest) then we can talk turkey.... ta

BTW is core parking/speedstep/power now switched on? Just checking (I don't know your hardware)

Thanks Alex,
 
I have a 3.3 ghz i7 Gulftown six-core CPU with 16 gigs of RAM. My interface is an RME Multiface II. I don't know where the "coreparking/speedstep"...etc. setting that you mentioned is.

Ok please disable speedstep in your BIOS and see how that pans out....

http://www.intel.com/supp...ssors/sb/CS-032349.htm

Yea, it spiked my 6 core AMD pretty hard as well. Looks like I'm back to Antares autotune until I decide to upgrade the machine. I'll check the stepspeed option in my bios tomorrow as well.

OK, thanks, I'll try that...

Hi John

As you have an AMD rather than an Intel chip you need to disable either PowerNow or Cool and Quiet instead.... Cheers.

Alex,

I checked my BIOS, and Speedstep is already disabled. Man, I can't believe I don't have enough power...a six core i7...surely that's enough, right?

Bad news...even my workaround didn't work. I only added the bounced harmony tracks to the parent project since I assume the bounced tracks are pure audio with no memory-hogging Melodyne data in them and therefore wouldn't spike my CPU. Wrong! It's as bad as ever!