Hey guys.
I currently own a 6i6 f*ckusrite 1st gen for rec/mixing at home (win10pro, 64gb ram, latest i7 6core) and I need to know if I should be looking at a new interface because I've been "expanding" my tracks and aax/vst instances a lot lately. My question is that until now I thought it was all about cpu and ram for daw and plugins to run smoothly; so is vst performance interface based???
As a note, I only track the kpa via spdif and a sm7b for vocals (not simultaneously ) so number of inputs is definitely my last concern.
In need of a new Interface?
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Changing your soundcard won't help you run more plugins, it's cpu and ram which looks like you're set on.
Unfortunately it simply isn't possible to run 100+ plugins simultaneously, you'll eventually run out of oomph no matter how powerful the computer is. Fix for this is to bounce your tracks (apply track fx as new take etc) and disable the plugins when you know you don't need to tweak them anymore.
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Latency isn't an issue in the recording stage as long as you use the Direct Monitoring feature of your interface as opposed to monitoring your live inputs through the DAW.
Also, latency isn't an issue in the mixing stage either. If you increase the buffers while mixing, you'll not loose anything. You will not even notice it.
Latency only becomes an issue in 2 specific cases:
1. You record something that you monitor through the DAW incl. the total roundtrip latency. Why would you do that? You might do it because you want a touch of reverb and/or delay and/or compression on your vocals for a more comfy feel? Buy a vocal processor for the sole purpose of an improved headphones monitoring during recording. You record the dry microphone but have the wet vocal processor on your ears.
2. You play any kind of MIDI instrument, be it eDrums through a drums VSTi or some MIDI keyboard parts through some VSTi. In this case, first of all make sure you use MIDI over USB instead of the old MIDI cables. Much faster, less MIDI latency. On a side note, playing a VSTi gives you roughly half of the latency you would get by roundtrip latency. Basically you just use the output latency in this case since you skip the entire AD part.
This use case can be an issue if your project already has plenty of VSTs on the existing tracks because then you can't take the buffer size down as much as you could without any VSTs active.
For example if you want to use eDrums, then track them first or just on top of a simple rough recording of your guitar playthrough without any VSTs.There's plenty of ways to get rid of latency issues. Swapping the audio interface has the least effect of all.
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Thanks for all the information. Much much appreciated
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That's why some people get a Universal Audio interface, so the DSP can run the plugins w/o affecting the CPU.
Problem is, it takes a lot of "cores". For a typical home project, you'd need at least 4 cores. I had 6 available and didn't run out.
But you CAN get away with 2 cores (ie Apollo Twin DUO instead of the QUAD) and just "print" the effect, or "freeze" it and then turn the UA fx's off to take them out of the DSP % count.This is also an expensive route.
Some folks who can afford it go the Pro Tools route with external effect processing. I don't know anything about that, but Pro Tools has to be your DAW and plugins for such a platform aren't cheap either (external plugins like Waves. Pro Tools has it's own plugins which are very good)
The best route of course is to up the GB count of your RAM first, then up the power of your CPU as a last resort. I run minimum 16GB and I do fine on a 2011 iMac (now a 2012 iMac)
I would learn first how to "print" and "freeze" tracks to handle CPU usage. It teaches you how to make MIX decisions up front that makes mixing easier later on.