Optimizing Performance

Introduction

Reason is a program of infinite possibilities. You can create extremely complex songs, with a vast number of audio tracks and rack devices. While this is one of the most exciting properties of the program, it does have a drawback – it means that you must be careful with how you manage your computer processing power.

Each audio track and device you add in your song uses up a bit of computer processing power – the more audio tracks and devices, the faster the computer has to be. However, you can set up your devices to require more or less processing power. For example, a sound on the Subtractor synthesizer that only uses one oscillator and one filter requires less processing power than one using both dual oscillators and dual filters.

Samples used in your songs also require RAM (memory) to load properly. The use of RAM can also be managed, as described at the end of this chapter.

When collaborating on songs with other Reason owners, you should do what you can to reduce the requirements for playing back a certain song, both in terms of processing power and in terms of RAM requirements. Other users may not have as powerful a computer as you do!

Checking Processing Power

To the right on the Transport Panel you will find a meter labeled DSP. This indicates how much processing power is used at any given moment.

The DSP meter on the Transport Panel

The higher this meter goes, the higher the strain on your computer processor. You will note when your processor is heavily loaded that graphics will update slower. Finally, when there’s too little power left to generate audio properly, the sound will start to break up.