Memory needed for kits in BFD 3

If I load say, the Purple Gretch 2 kit using the latest version of Cakewalk the performance meter says BFD is using 42 Gig of memory!
I do have it set up to load the whole kit, but Superior Drummer 3 loads up a kit with about 4Gig. I have my own keymap loaded but still…Is there something wrong with my setup?
Thanks.

Oh, well, there’s no way it’s 42GB. I don’t even have that on my laptop.

Go to Setup Preferences and look at your engine. First stop is to see if you have “Load All to RAM” checked. You’d probably have to in order to hit 42GB.

After that, there are some other settings there about buffers. They’re kind of a leftover relic from back in the day when we had 4GB RAM limitations and slow hard drives. These days, the defaults tend to be fine.

Hi, as I stated, I do load the whole kit into ram. Still …40Gig?
I am going to run the stand alone and check. If that is “normal” then I guess I need to try another DAW.
I was hoping that someone could chime in with a yay or nay with their DAW.

Yeah, in standalone, that kit occupies 31GB, as compared to under 7GB on disk.

BFD3 has a proprietary compression format, called BFDLAC, which is highly efficient, both on disk and in the engine. So, they can fit much more detail into an installation on disk than would be possible with .wav.

When you load the samples into RAM, they occupy the fully expanded space, for the time that they’re there. BFD3 itself is only 256MB of RAM. So, in the case of this kit, that’s around 31GB. That particular kit has 3 stereo and 5 mono ambient channels. With tails, which is where the BFDLAC format is most efficient, that’s a lot of detail.

If you want to occupy less RAM, your options are all on the Engine page. You can either change detail, uncheck Load All to RAM, use 16-bit mode, or tweak the buffers. There are various profiles at the bottom that you can select from to see how the settings work together.

What are you trying to accomplish by loading every single sample? The engine is very efficient. Do you have a particularly slow hard drive?

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Hi:
Thanks for the response. I just now loaded the Big kit using the stand alone program and it took up around 45Gig!
I play edrums and want to have zero problems with latency. I have a pretty new 10850K 64 gig system that i thought I could load all sorts of stuff into memory in order to reduce the overall latency.Often i will have 3-4 full kits loaded to try out during composition.
Anyway, I have all SSD drives(2 SATA, 2 NVME, BFD3 resides on a SATA SSD). so I can probably stream the kits. I just can’t wrap my head around the amount of memory needed. I mean, Superior Drummer 3 needs about 4-5Gig with 11 mics and sounds great.
I’ll leave this post up up with the hope that Drew or someone can shed some light on the massive memory consumption.
Again, thanks for the response!

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@Scottfa “Load All To RAM” has no impact on latency. Latency is dictated by buffers: the buffers setting on your audio interface, any additional buffering done by your DAW (if any), as well as any FX that may introduce latency entered into the signal path. Loading all to RAM is a nice option to use if you have a lot of RAM and a slow hard disk that can’t handle streaming all the simultaneous voices in BFD3.

I’d suggest trying to just run BFD3 at the default buffer settings settings with Load All to RAM off. I assure you, the latency will be the same. If anything, the kit load times will improve. If your PC can stream BFD3 without issues, which I expect it would based on the specs, then don’t worry about it.

Hi thanks, I have indeed set up BFD3 to stream. Seems fine. Knocks down the size of one kit from 36G to 9.5G.
Still wonder why these kit sizes are so large…

If you really want to load all to ram, go 16-bit. It will knock the kit size down substantially, and you won’t hear a difference when playing live. I’d go back up to 24-bit for mixdown of a recording. But 16-bit is no worse than what you hear on a CD.

However, with an SSD and most any CPU made in the past decade, you can generally get away with really low latency while streaming. I routinely run 32 sample buffers, which is a .7ms latency, or, the amount of time it takes sound to travel less than 10 inches. Can it get any lower than that? I know my timing isn’t better.

That said, RAM size is more about CPU than it is latency. The less RAM yo use, the more CPU it takes to stream, and more with smaller buffers. Honestly, not that much more. But prove it to yourself, and find out what works best for you. It’s only if you’re choking your CPU that you might want to load all to ram. If you’re not choking it, then loading all won’t buy you anything.

The size is the amount of detail in the samples. What you’re seeing in RAM is what that kit would be in uncompressed WAV format. Don’t know what else to say about it. It’s just … more.

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