Size of .wav files vs performances

[LeSedna]

Hello,

I consolidated all my .wav files, and since my project is around 29mn long, a lot of them are around 500mo. 6 tracks of guitar DIs, 1 of bass, and a lot of other onces between 50 to 500 mo. With 30 instances of omnisphere, and a few things layering up, my session is starting to show signs of latency (computer not responding for a few seconds some time to time) and I still haven't even started any mixing on this.

The question it raised and I never asked to myself, is : how much do the size of audio files count performance wise ? Which parameters are important to monitor ?

When it gets sluggish, CPU is still around 15%. So, is that simply down to a harddisk read performance ? Is that a RAM problem (implicit question : are those .wav preloaded by the DAW) ?

And is consolidating files a bad idea before you actually want to send those files to someone else, and should I just keep .wav files as short as possible (for example with a 10s solo in the end of the project, should I keep it as a 10s wav instead of creating a 500mo file just for 10s worth of actual sound) ?

Or am I misleading myself and it's only because of my 20/30 instances of omnisphere ? It seems each of them only uses a fraction of a % of CPU. I have already printed some of them, but still.

I'm using Reaper.

 

[AudioGeekZine]

This one song is 30min long?

 

[azistenostora]

Can't really answer your question however I think that it's always a good idea to cut a 10 sec part so it's not a 500 Mb wav if it could be brought down to something like 5 Mb. I do that anyway to save space.

 

[oroinvictus]

7 DIs and 'lots of other ones'? How many is lots? Half an hour of lots of tracks will eat your memory pretty hard. Size, bit rate and sample rate all make a huge difference, i.e. I record my WAVs at 44.1khz 16-bit, cause 24-bit is pretty huge, and I always keep them as short as possible to save space. RAM, CPU clock, hard disk speed etc. will also make a difference. Printing tracks and consolidation help save space too.

 

[LeSedna]

It's not a one song, it's more that all songs follow each other with no pause and my mbp is powerful enough to deal with the whole thing so i gave it a try. It's like a supersong made of 4 songs if you will.

I found myself the reason of the sluggish behaviour, it's just a freebie plugin that I have deleted and now it's smooth again.

Still I'd like to understand how this is dealt with ? I have noticed with the performance window that the RAM is not dependent on how many wav are being read. But, of course, the disk usage increases. It's around 150 or 200kB/s per wav IIRC. When there are more, it increases proportionally.

So if I'm right it's only down to the hard disk performance and not to memory because it always reads on the fly the files ?

@orvinctus for example the song no3 has the main DIs/guitar/bass wavs,
Plus 7 or 8 other DIs for repetitive secondary guitars that make the ambiance of that track, that come and disappear in the background at different notes etc. that + an already printed choir, and there will be synths in the future, and layered vocals.

I've already cut and re-glued the files when I was searching how to fix that sluggish behaviour before I discovered it was actually a plug, and the project is now 1.9Gb instead of 5. I can't say if the project is smoother because of that.