Does IAC “All Devices” include IAC itself? That would make midi clock go around in a loop (?)
Try changing that, and see if it has an effect on the CPU usage.
Edit: I’m not a mac user, but i have seen post about “feedback” loops on the IAC bus here and on other forums.
Yeah, not an issue. I have so far not had any problems to do with MIDI in VCV, and even when I delete the MIDI module entirely it doesn’t have an effect of the CPU usage
I’ve seen it before - when you just have an audio module in the patch, un-connected, it uses a lot of CPU. It’s an artificial patch. Try and connect just an oscillator to the audio module and see if the CPU goes down.
Hi there, you need to connect modules and start building a patch. What you are seeing is “normal” in an empty patch.
Also the fork by Dim that enables realtime priority has noticeable benefits over the official version, both on older macs and M1:
You need to enable “realtime priority” in the menu, and start with engine threads @ 1, only use more if you actually need more.
Diimdeeps version is definitely better, at least on my activity monitor.
But it turns out my problem was exaggerated, it is just one module that causing problems; Rackwindows Console. I don’t know why but it guzzles CPU like crazy and noticeably slows down my system.
Thanks for the tips.
I just posted a pretty long post on using the CPU meters in VCV to find this kind of thing "before it’s too late. Tell me if this is useful: Tricks for using the CPU meters effectively
btw, I just tried Console, and while it does use a lot of CPU, it only does it (for me) when I feed all the channels. By that time the modules I’m feeding it with are using more (or much more) than it.
Yes Rackwindows Console is known to tax the cpu, set it to “eco” / use it moderately.
Find the thread of Rackwindows developer, he once explained there why it is cpu taxing.
it was just surprising because on my PC, on identical patches, Console barely seemed to at all.
I been using it for a while, first on pc, and now rarely on mac.
In both cases it was taxing the cpu for me (the pc cpu is quit beefy).
Now instead if i wish to have digital “drive/saturation” i use Debratius.
Just wanted to share a comment/answer from Andrew, on the V2 teaser YouTube video:
“An ARM build (for Mac, Linux, or Windows) won’t be available for Rack 2.0, but this is in our feature request list.”
thanks for that. sorry for necro bumping this thread but was looking for info on arm build status. i guess it own’t happen until a later more substantial update… or has there been some news on this i missed? searching the forum leads back to this thread.
Nope
My bottomline: For what most people in here probably do, the M1 Mac Mini is still the absolute sweet spot.
indeed, it is surprisingly capable. I have yet to get it to hiccup and that is on a single thread given to audio engine in Rack. And the kicker is that it uses mere 47W at full tilt, One can’t idle most all other machines at that power draw…
I’m very much looking forward to the high-end Mac Mini with M2 Pro. It is expected towards the end of this year.
A while ago I switched to the Mac Mini M1 after running only Linux here for the last 20+ years. I’m happy with the change, the machine itself is far more powerful than my desktop Linux box (6-core AMD FX6300, 16G memory), so performance is naturally enhanced. I think I prefer Linux wrt to normal system operations - the Mac has some really annoying aspects - but there’s no denying that I’m getting much better results with my music work with the Mac.
Curiously, for all the extra software options I now have for the Mac, I’m still mostly running software that I run on Linux (VCV Rack, Bitwig, OpenMusic, Csound, Pianoteq, etc). Very few plugins here.
I have a very well specified recent CPU i7 “Hackintosh”, but once the better spec M2 mini arrives I plan to switch to ARM platform. Do the Valhalla plugins run well in VCV on ARM? Bitwig on ARM?
I run Valhalla Supermassive within VCV HOST-FX all the time on an M1 MacBook Air - works great.
VCV pro + Valhalla (room, vvv, supermassive, delay) works great for me on m1 pro (14 inch base model) in bitwig 4.3.4. (Valhalla plugins are m1 native so that’s to be expected.) I haven’t done extensive testing yet, but I seem to be getting better performance from runnning vcv pro in bitwig and hosting all my other VST (E.g. TDR molot & Kotelnikov) in bitwig than when using vcv standalone and the vcv host module.
But vcv host for Valhalla things is totally usable in vcv standalone too.
(The one issue I ran into was recording using vcv standalone and 5-6 plugins in host. I was getting audio crackle on files created with the record module, even when the cpu meter was under 20% and the audio sounded fine while monitoring. Bumping up the latency seemed to help. But I figured I should give a more serious shot to a bitwig + vcv pro workflow for more reliable audio recording, and to take advantage of the m1 optimized plugins.)