I’ve posted on the MixBus forum, but here also since it applies upstream to Ardour.
Perhaps only a MacOS thing (unknown) but really high track counts in Ardour/MixBus fail miserably. I specifically compare to something like PTStudio with a limited track count of 512 which can be up to 7.1.4 wide each. I suspect the team doesn’t test anything like this and maybe does not realise the issue.
h
Make 128 new 16-ch tracks from template across several test Macs. Takes from 1:45 to 5:00+ for the spinning beach ball to stop and tracks to appear. A little more time before the timeline can move. Subsequent playing (of empty tracks) shows on and off 100% red DSP usage. No audio yet, no plugins yet. Activity monitor reveals Macs largely idle.
Subsequent testing brought the time-to-play down somewhat by saving the template with inputs and outputs disconnected and the panner bypassed, but heavy DSP load still shown while activity monitor shows bored Macs.
Having used MB for a while, and Ardour recently (since the v11 licensing fiasco) I’m neither surprised nor complaining, just want to encourage the team to find out how Ardour compares when under loads.
I use, but do not prefer PTStudio, but do rely on it comfortably when I need big sessions. Even a lowly i7 with High Sierra can start a PTStudio session with 512/7.1.2 tracks in just a few seconds with no spinning beach balls. I’m having trouble seeing that success with Ardour/MB.
h
Paul - when @hodger mentioned this on the Mixbus forum I tested it here with Ardour on Windows (128 tracks each with 16 channels). Admittedly the session would take over 30 seconds to load but once loaded the DSP readings weren’t too bad.
And it reminded me… wasn’t there a version of MacOS where apps were being expected to redraw an entire window, just because a small section needed to be updated? I can well imagine how that’d make things less efficient. Or did you & Robin manage to find a fix for it?
We did fix the macOS drawing issue, but there still seem to be drawing issues on some macOS systems with some monitor configurations under some circumstances that we do not yet understand.