Question

Hello friends,

I'm running the most recent version of Studio One with OSX 11.2.3 on a 2017 MacBook Air with an i5 processor and 8GB of RAM. Running through a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4.

Last week I was working on mixes and was feeling really great about how well my machine was handling things. Buffer size at 1024. Running a fairly dense mix with lots of inserts and even a couple of instances of the CTC-1, which I know is power-hungry. Everything was going smoothly and I was excited to finish the mixes for a big project.

Then one day everything changed. Immediate CPU spikes upon opening the song file. Unplayable. Impossible to work with. Even with the buffer raised to 4096. It seems like something changed literally overnight.

I searched, and this issue seems similar, although it's from, like, a year ago:

https://answers.presonus.com/48053/same-session-but-cpu-usage-increased

Any advice? I've opened a support ticket, but the exchange has not been particularly helpful thus far. I may just go ahead and upgrade my machine, but it would be nice to avoid that for now. Thank you!

Answer 1

Usually when stuff like this happens, if all the settings in the DAW are the same, I’ve found it productive to check reasons why the OS may be throttling the processing power available to Studio One. Because the same amount of plug-ins will read as a higher % in Studio One’s CPU meter if that occurs.

The list of possibilities is long but I’ve seen a syncing cloud application cause this (think Dropbox, a backup system, etc), I’ve seen video call apps that stream your system audio cause this, streaming applications in general, as well as the usual things like power saving settings in the OS getting reset to defaults for whatever reason.

As always, your mileage may vary and good luck.

Answer 2

I recently fired up my spanking new M1 Macbook air and spent hours getting everything transferred only to suffer the same problem just opening Studio One 5.2! Can't work at all. Very sad.