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Given that it’s challenging to reliably measure the number of simultaneously-playing voices (look at the Audio Track Playback Performance section of a previous blog article to see how low the usage is), our tests comprised the following actions in Logic Pro X 10.5.1, running under macOS 10.15.5 Catalina:
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So, armed with a stopwatch and an exceedingly large cup of coffee, we looked to demistify the landscape and gather some useful data. Solid state drives - SSDs - are much better suited to this task: as data is all stored electronically across a matrix of memory cells, no physical mechanisms hamper access to disparate areas of the disk, so the SSD can achieve much higher random access data rates, required for audio applications. So where video files could largely be written in a long contiguous block on a disk - and thus require sequential data access, audio projects will typically require random access for a multitrack workflow. To be honest, it’s a wonder it ever worked at all: And each time you’re switching from one file to the next, there’s no guarantee that the files are sitting next to each other on the disk platters - so the drive has to reposition the heads over the spinning disk, wait for the right bit of data to fly under the head, and then move on to the next file. With spinning hard drives, this was really hard work for the drive: it would need to read a small segment from each individual sample file in turn - before it then starts and reads the next small segment from each sample file… and so on. Multiply these together to get 400 simultaneous files that need to be read from disk. 1700Mbps for a 4K ProRes video - only a typical maximum of three or four such files will be played simultaneously.Īudio files are much much smaller - 2.3Mbps for a 48kHz 24-bit stereo file - but they are played simultaneously on a massive scale: with a sample-heavy playback environment, it could easily be: Whilst these files can have fabulously high bit rates - e.g.
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The answer is due to the pattern of data access performed on the drive: video projects typically access only a small number of files at any time - often just a single file, but more where a crossfade or insertion take place, requiring layering of different files of footage simultaneously. But why are these so different? Why wouldn’t a video-focussed test be equally applicable to audio usage?