Mac users-Is there a performance hit to using aggregate device?

GroupDIY Audio Forum

Help Support GroupDIY Audio Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Mbira

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 4, 2004
Messages
2,422
Location
Austin, TX
Hi gous.  I have a Mac Pro tower, so I'm stuck with Firewire.  I have an Apollo 16 Firewire (love it!) that replaced my old Echo Audiofire 12.  I do a lot of CV control of my modular synth from my DAW sending CV over the interface.  I'd like to free up the outputs of my Apollo and create an aggregate device using the Audiofire for the CV output duties. 

Is there a hit in CPU performance on larger track count projects by not using a dedicated single interface?  Also wondering if using two firewire devices affects the bandwidth of the firewire bus. I have been working on much larger projects lately (100+ tracks) and so this is becoming a concern.  Obviously at the end of the day I should just try it but wondering if anyone has already been down this path.
 
100+???? Are you sure you can't get rid of some of those?

  Resources mangement was really a thing at the beginning of DAW work, now days seems overlooked but I've seen cases of people doing really bad management. 16GB of ram burned with a single track, single file, 3' project, must be a world record or something.

  Clearly you are not that wasteful or you wouldn't be handling 100+ tracks in any reasonable factory mac, but still, some automation or folders instead of that many tracks might be helpful, or you are and could solve with 20 tracks... hope not!

  I haven't worked with dual interfaces for years, other than multiple converters. Working on a single FW bus will take some extra bandwidth, but the only things going there are the I/O signals, not every track in the DAW so it shouldn't be a problem, as long as you're not trying to get 100 signals over a single FW400. The problem might be latency, you sure are working with something high for that kind of work, so probably not an issue. Higher latency would mean bigger buffers, so the concern is memory capacity in this case.

JS
 
Hey-yeah sure I bounce things down as I go, etc...so track count varies.  At the end of the day the actual aodio output is going to a stereo out and up to 16 mono CV signals out and 8 signals into the DAW at once at the most.  So I'm not tracking that much all at once.  Most of my track count goes up during production and then down during mixing.  I'm pretty sure the Mac Pro firewire ports are each on their own 800 bus,  so maybe there will not be any issues.  I still need to get around to crawling back there to actually wire up this change, but I'll post once I get around to it.  I'm in the middle of mixing a project right now so it may be a couple weeks.
 
Back
Top