Plea for less cpu usage

[Gothboy]

     It's been a while since I've worked with Morgana as I've been busy with my studio upgrade...but I just got around to trying Morgana on my new system setup...and the results are a little dissappointing. This is with version 1.2.0 wrapped with the Fxspansion wrapper. The first thing is cpu power.  Have the system requirements changed since the early development stage or something because this thing uses Soo much cpu power that it's almost unusable for me and sending me running for my Zebra and Crystal synths.   I've got just one instrument track with one Morgana instance and playing not more than 4 notes at a time it's hittong the cpu red.  Ouch.  Real ouch.  I know the specs are:
 OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
G4 @ 1.25 GHz, Intel Core Solo @ 1.5 GHz
256 MB RAM

....does it need to be so system intensive?  Is it the GUI that does it?  There must be something we can do.

[dj!]

Well... there appears to be something funky going on with the PowerPC version.  On my underpowered little Mac Mini I can play 8 voices through the built-in audio with under 20% total CPU load, so what you're seeing is definitely not normal.  There's been a few other reports of excessive CPU usage, all of which on PPC.  I'll check into this.

For diagnosis purposes, does it make any difference whether the GUI is open or not?  And could you open a Terminal (from /Applications/Utilities/) and enter the following:

  defaults write com.112dB.Morgana.Preferences ShowCPUMeters true

Restart your host and the Morgana GUI shd now have 3 graphs at the lefthand side.  What do they indicate when you're playing?

Thanks!

-- dj!

[Gothboy]

     DJ,
     Hey sorry I wasn't able to get back to this issue until today.  Doesn't seen to make a difference with the GUI showing or not so I don't think it's that.  With short release times the PT cpu meter is at about 50% with 4 or 5 notes....with Longer release times it's way higher of course which is to be expected...but hitting the red on just a few notes is harsh.
     Can you give me more info on entering this stuff in the terminal?  I typed it in, closed out the terminal and no graphs on side.  Do I have to save this terminal file somewhere or do anything else to make these graphs come up?  I'm not a code writer so need to know more.  Thanks!

[dj!]

Weird... if there's one possible culprit I would have bet my money on the GUI.  50% for 5 notes is waaaaay too much, there's definitely smt fishy here.  Is the CPU equally excessive with a VST or AU host?  The Ableton Live demo does both and might be good to test with.

If you typed in the command and didn't get any error messages, that shd do the trick... you may have to restart your host for it to work--if that doesn't do it I'm not sure what's going on.  BTW you can verify whether the command worked by typing

  defaults read com.112dB.Morgana.Preferences ShowCPUMeters

If that prints "true" as output, the meters shd be there.  If it doesn't, try the write command again.  If they still don't show up... well... that'd be weird.   

-- dj!

[Gothboy]

This is what I get:

2008-04-18 18:03:39.009 defaults[201]
Rep argument is not a dictionary
Defaults have not been changed

....so no power graphs come up.  I'll try it in MuLab and Live Lite 6.  Does the full Morgana GUI show up in Live or is it the Live abridged version?

[Gothboy]

     Even though I can't get Morgana to load anything in Live Lite 6 the CPU usage is around 10% while the GUI up and I'm just hitting keys without a sample loaded.  Just so you can compare that to PT.