I've been looking into Readyboost on W7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost
It is a component of W7 and Vista that allows you to use a flash drive, SD card etc as an extra memory 'cache'.
It seems to work well to speed up my system generally - I was wondering if it has any particular benefits for AM? Clearly a generally speeded-up system seems beneficial, but I'm not too sure what the extra 'memory cache' that Readyboost provides actually is. Is it similar to increased RAM? Is it used in processing, or does it mean more sample could be loaded?
It made me realise that I'd always assumed that processing in AM was handled by the CPU and samples, vst's etc were loaded into RAM - but I have no idea if this is the case. (I'm no computer expert, as you can tell.)
I'd love to know a little more about how AM works in this regard, if anyone can enlighten me? And also, in what areas Readyboost might boost AM performance? MS site says that Readyboost can add up to 256Gb of additional memory (!) Does this mean near-unlimited plugings and samples? (!!)
I've heard of ReadyBoost but I have not much idea how it would accelerate AM. That wikipedia article suggests that it is a disk caching technology -- which means it may speed up operations that depend on your disk speed. It seems likely to be more useful if you have a traditional spinning disk hard drive rather than the newer solid state disks (SSD).
My impression is that it may accelerate loading samples into AM *if* Windows happens to cache your sample data.
>> It made me realise that I'd always assumed that processing in AM was handled by the CPU and samples, vst's etc were loaded into RAM <<
Processing is performed by the CPU.
Sound files are loaded from disk. In AM there are two possibilities: samples loaded into RAM when you select them, or when the AM document is opened (Drums, LoopPlayer, BubbleBlower) sound files streamed from disk as they are played: FilePlayers and FileRecorders. To hypothesise: In the former case ReadyBoost might speed up loading of samples if you have a lot of them, in the latter case ReadyBoost might allow you to stream more sound files from disk simultaneously. In theory it could help with loading plugins as well.
The behaviour of plugins varies from plugin to plugin so it's not possible to generalise.
Thank you for the reply!
Nice to know a bit about how AM works with regard to samples etc... I was curious to know if Readyboost might help boost performance, but I'm certainly very happy with how AM performs already, both as a compositional tool and in live situations. Cheers!