To enable/disable plug-in load balancing, go to Edit > Preferences > Audio - Playback and Recording and select Plug-In Load Balancing. This option is only available if Use Multiprocessing Engine is enabled.Enabling Plug-In Load Balancing does not introduce any latency.To determine if a project will benefit from plug-in load balancing, first check the Control Bar’s Performance module to see if any cores are spiking. The Performance module lets you monitor the activity of each CPU core. For details, see Performance module.
Note: The Control Bar’s Performance module can display several different CPU meter modes. To display a meter for each core, right-click the Performance module, point to CPU Meter Display Options, then select Audio Processing Load.Enable Plug-In Load Balancing if:There will likely not be any benefit from enabling Plug-In Load Balancing in the following cases:
The project uses a low Mixing Latency Buffer Size setting (<256 samples) in Edit > Preferences > Audio - Driver Settings.In this example, FX2 becomes the bottleneck in the processing, since the downstream plug-ins have to wait for its processing to finish. When Plug-in Load Balancing is enabled, SONAR optimizes this chain, by subdividing the workload and scheduling processing the plug-ins in parallel to distribute the load across multiple cores when possible:By default, if the Mixing Latency Buffer Size setting in Edit > Preferences > Audio - Driver Settings is < 256 samples, it is too low for load balancing because the buffers cannot be subdivided further. This is equivalent to Plug-in Load Balancing being disabled for all FX Racks. This threshold can be tweaked by changing the MinPluginLoadBalancingBufferSamples variable in Aud.ini, which controls the size of the smallest internal buffer subdivision that may be used for plug-in load balancing. The minimum value is 32 samples and the max is 256. The default value is 128 samples. Lowering the value will make load balancing more aggressive and consume more CPU for processing, but normally there should be no need to adjust this value.The MinPluginLoadBalancingBufferSamples setting should not be confused with the Mixing Latency Buffer Size setting. Load balancing subdivides the audio buffer into multiple smaller buffers depending on the number of plug-ins in the FX Rack. If the Mixing Latency Buffer Size value is smaller than MinPluginLoadBalancingBufferSamples × 2 samples, then load balancing has no effect.
1. Go to Edit > Preferences > Audio - Configuration File.
2. The Aud.ini file opens in the default Windows text editor.
3. In Aud.ini, add a new entry called MinPluginLoadBalancingBufferSamples in the [Wave] section, and set its value to the minimum desired buffer sample value. For example:
4. Save Aud.ini and close the Windows text editor.
5.
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