Cherry Audio Forums

Perhaps this is a boring subject for many but please indulge me.

I'm trying to get a feel for what hardware your average VM enthusiast is using.

As a developer I'm hoping to launch an integrated suite of pretty "hungry" modules in a couple of month's time and am aware that the utility of these modules and how I should address tutorial material and marketing is very much dependent on how much computing power you the target audience have available.

I'm not wanting to start a my computer is faster than yours competition, I am genuinely interested in what kind of kit people are using in practice and also what you might upgrade to in the next year or so.

One of the key benefits of software over hardware modular is the price - with software being a lot cheaper and having the obvious advantage that multiple copies of modules are effectively free. But the downside is the cost of the computer - and there is huge difference between entry level and something that costs two or three month's pay. So it's difficult to know what kind of computing power is "typical".

I've spent most of the last 2 years in Voltage Modular just learning basic synthesis, which means it's not demanding at all because you're working on basic ideas with just a few modules. One great thing about VM is that everything I was doing, and at least half the preset patches, would work on a celeron chip, $179 laptop. Quite a huge variety of amazing things can be done with that dual core n2830. With my interest in FM synthesis, I outgrew it and am using a laptop with a 9th gen i5, 9300H. I'm not an apple guy that's willing to spend more than $800 bucks on a computer. There is a price point somewhere that virtual modular could cross where it wouldn't be a practical obsession any more, and would be closer to alternative obsessions. If upgrade costs and VM costs approach the cost of a new deepmind 12 plus my current computer, then I'll have to do a gut check.

Nice post.

VM runs fine here with sometimes complex patches, even the cpu hungry PSP modules, on a
Lenovo Thinkpad L540, i5 4300M CPU@ 2.60 GHz, 8GB memory, Windows 10 pro 64 bit.

Cherry Audio made a fantastic job since the release of V2. Upon release it started very cpu hungry and after a few updates
now runs incredibly smoothly.

Looking forward to your modules suite !

VM runs comfortably on this system

2x Asus i7 3610QM 2.3GHz both overclocked to 3.0GHz
8Gb ram in one 12Gb ram in the other.

They run most VM patches with no issues. I've even had 6 instances with different modules running in Reaper with no problems.

However some complex patches especially pads and many of AmperSonic's patches, like ambient glitch from volume 1, do not run well at all. Lots of pops, crackles and buzzes! Even in a single native instance.