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Posted: Mon Nov 08, 2004 11:40 pm
by Music Manic
Does anyone know how things work as soon as you pres play on a native sequencer.This is with regards to native plugins SFP plugins,synths etc.How does CPU deal with this and in what way?What is sent to memory,how much work does hard disk do.All these typ of things.How do platforms work with eachother,and do things like Native programs interfere with SFP?
We are told about multi-tasking but there really isnt such a thing right!
Posted: Mon Nov 08, 2004 11:58 pm
by garyb
right.
the cpu is NOT "real time".
Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 1:53 am
by Vasfed
CPU performs only one task in a bit of time, some can perform 1.5 (preload and start performing the next comand etc - like P4)
Multitasking, in fact, is a slowdown for cpu because much processing power is spent for switching tasks, sometimes even more than for main job.
At low level, when you press a key - there's an so called "hardware interrupt" - CPU suspends current job and starts processing data came from device. In most soundcards MIDI events are interrupts too. I dont know about Scope in config like "Midi A source -> Midi A dest", but in "MidiA->Seq dest" there must be an interrupt.
Second mechanism - is DMA aka Direct Memory Access - when a device can write to RAM without IRQ, Scope uses this method when recording audio.
Harddisk is not involved in such relations between other devices, but if you have little RAM windows will cache memory of programms on HD resulting in veeery slow speed