Does anyone successfully compose or produce with 16gb ram?

[u/Certain-Highway-1618]

I need a new MacBook and what with apples recent crazy hikes, that 16gb M5 at Costco Is looking pretty appealing

[u/r3art]

I never load up anything other than all the full sections in my template. That's at least 16 instruments already (4 strings, 4 woodwinds, 4 brass). In most cases I add various percussion, differents synths and more exotic stuff).

You know that you can see this in BBCSO for example (but also Kontakt), right?

The Violins I will *ALL TWENTY* articulations loaded take 730 mb for me. That's far less than 1 GB and that's probably the most complex instrument. Tuba is 350 mb, Xylophone 113 mb, both again with all articulations. I f you load only the articulations you actually need for a piece, you get down by a LOT even from that.

That's what I mean by "you overestimate it by a far". Not a single instrument in there is anywhere near 1 gb of usage.

Even if the average would be around 500 mb per instrument (it is much less if you don't load all articulations for everything), you would still get around 30 instruments which is more than enough.

My best guess it that you have Chrome with 400 tabs and several other complex applications running at the same time as composing. That might cause trouble if half of your memory is already gone, yes.

/edit: I just checked r/orchestraltools SINE player for other numbers. OTs instruments are even much lower than the ones in Spitfires player. A very good legato articulation Violin from one of their best products is 300 mb max. And again, that's usally the most intense instrument.

[u/Firake → u/r3art]

To be honest, I haven’t worked with my samples for years, now. So I can’t be sure. 1g seemed reasonable given my struggles with RAM, though. And yes, I’m aware you can see it.

I remember being careful with it and actually needing to bake audio a few times to keep it smooth. And when I upgraded to 32g, I remember feeling like I still wasn’t able to be as lax as I had hoped with it. What I wanted was to ignore it entirely and not have to spend energy worried about if my computer could do the thing.

I will say that I micromanaged my mic setups a lot because the brass never sounded the way I wanted. It wouldnt be uncommon for me to have 3 or 4 different mic patches loaded at once for the brass. Maybe that’s what caused it?

Anyway, the effort of managing the memory usage is what stopped me from continuing to use it. The extra sound quality over regular note performer was not worth the extra fuss of bouncing and unbouncing audio all the time, for me. Loading and unloading patches. And of course, it messes up your key switches everytime you do that so you have to find a new key switch each time you load an expression you’d previously unloaded. It was just a pain in the ass. I wasn’t composing, I was fussing with software.

The reality is that you only have access to about 50-75% of the RAM on your system at 16g. Thats why it’s recommended, after all. It allows you enough room to multitask beyond what your OS requires. With 32g you have about 26g memory available, which is a lot more than the 10 ish from 16g.

Maybe it was doable with 16g. But it was not a pleasant experience in the slightest. It wasn’t that I was running out of memory, but that I was having to put so much effort in to keep it that way. To me, that puts it solidly in the “needs more than 16g” territory. But different strokes, I guess.

[u/r3art → u/Firake]

I totally get that. But RAM is expensive as hell nowadays (thanks to fucking AI slop everywhere).

And if you just keep an eye on it and don't load up 50 instruments with everything all the time, you CAN get very far with 16 gb, that's all I wanted to say here.

If money was no issue, I'd of course buy 512 gigs of RAM, too.

[u/Firake → u/r3art]

Lol yea I get it. Especially on macbooks. I got myself a 64g kit right before they exploded again about a year ago and I’m glad I did. Had intended to use it for more production but haven’t thus far.

But yes you’re right. Good conversation to keep around for the thread, I’m guessing. Cheers.