Here’s more valuable information from Sweetwater’s stellar Tech Support department. The issue at hand is BFD, and the topic is reducing the amount of CPU power the plug-in demands:
Generally, the less data throughput, the less CPU power BFD will use – so if you follow the memory reduction tips found in the BFD manual, you will find this reduces BFD’s CPU load as well, as most of the CPU load comes from operations related to disk streaming, or from the operating system being forced to use virtual memory (which requires swapping slabs of RAM memory to disk).
- Set ambient microphone Width to normal, and distance to 0 – these DSP operations take extra processing.
- In the Options Panel, disable any graphics animations you can live without.
- BFD’s samples are 44.1kHz – if you can run your host at 44.1kHz as well, then no real time resampling is required. Like wise, detuning the kit pieces can use more CPU.
- Close the editor window if you don’t need it.
- Make your host processing buffers as big as your requirements can allow. If you don’t need super-small latency because you are composing in a looping or offline manner, BFD will appreciate the extra time to process the hundreds of audio channels it is synthesizing.
- (Mac) Make sure your hard drive with the BFD Data doesn’t have File Journaling turned on.