PC Tips for improving your Lmms Music making experience

[brandystarbrite]

Hi guy's. Wanted to make this tips tut for ages.
Now I'm finally gonna do it.

Here are some tips from me, Brandy Starbrite, on how to improve performance of Lmms and 3rd party Vst's being used in Lmms on your PC or Laptop etc.
Lets begin shall we......................

1) If you have an Antivirus running on your PC or Laptop. Make sure your Antivirus's Guard option thingy is switched off.
That way you can use the extra CPU power for LMMS. And certain 3rd party VST's being used in Lmms. Especially the CPU consuming Vst's.
Most Antivirus software has a Guard off, Guard on, option button "thingy" that enables you, to manually switch on your Antivirus guard, and put it back on when you're ready.
Avast Antivirus, Trend Antivirus and numerous other antiviruses, has this option too.

2) Make sure your internet wireless option thingy is off too. In other words, turn it off.
Having your wireless internet thingy running uses and consumes a alot of CPU power.
As many applications/Win OS are trying to search for the latest updates, for the PC/Laptops software you're using.
You may not always want this running, when say,....you're using a Vst like DSK Choir.

A good way to see this happening in action, on WIndows, is to turn on the Task Manager while having your internet service on.
And you'll see the spikes in CPU usage.
Turn off the internet service/wireless service and you'll see the CPU spikes simmer down after a while.
Meaning that you now have more CPU processing power to play with.

On my Asus note book, to switch your WIreless on or off, you press keys.....Fn blue Key and F2.
Asus has the picture icons on it's buttons, so no worries for me.
To turn it back on, you press the exact, same two buttons.

3) Close any running software applications.........eg. 3D or 2D programs, Media players eg. VLC, Win media player, Miro etc. or other, when using LMMS or any other DAW.
LMMS should be the only program running at the moment of music making or when using certain CPU consuming Vst's.
Having these media players or 3D or other software will Sap alot of power from LMMS.
Leaving Lmms with less CPU/ RAM memory power and cause LMMS to glitch, slowdown crash, freeze or even worse.
The more CPU processing power and RAM power available, the better LMMS will perform, especially when using certain 3rd party Vst's within it.

4) Vst Plugins: tsk......tsk.........a touchy subject.
Vst's and Vsti's use up alot of CPU processing power, and RAM memory, when opened in Lmms or any other DAW.
So as a note, make sure that your Anti Virus and Wireless internet or internet is turned off, before opening or loading Lmms.
Or before loading any Vst's or Vsti's into Lmms.

You don't really need these things running when using Lmms or certain Vst's etc.
Why you ask?
Because In the case of Vst's, they use up alot of power!
Some use, ridiculous amounts of power!!
Having these things running, when using Vst's can cause Lmms to Crash, Freeze, or worse.......... Prevent you from reopening Lmms for a long time.
Trust me when i say, that this has happened to me quite a number or times. Lol!

Another reason for closing these things software applications or other etc, is because if your PC/ Laptop freezes or crashes when using a Vst, it'll have enough Cpu Juice and Memory power to close Lmms in a jiffy! Yay!!

5) In some cases, Disconnecting any usb devices or harddrives from your system, will help also.
These things also use up quite a bit of of memory, memory cache and Cpu power.
Or, if even you have an average or powerful PC/laptop rig, don't have to many USB devices or wireless devices connected. It'll save you in the longrun.
These things sap alot of power from Lmms. So disconnect those bad boy's!

6) If you're a Windows user, moreso a Win 7 user. Turn off WIn Aero theme mode. And switch to performance mode.
Normally "Aero,"is enabled on default, when you first use or install WIn 7.
To turn this mode off, go to the Performance Tab, in the action center and check or click Performance.
Or uncheck all of the effects options.
Make sure none of the special visual effects eg. Shadows etc, are enabled.
Then after doing this, restart your PC/laptop.
Believe it or not, Win Aero uses alot of GPU or graphics card power, CPU power and RAM memory resources and more than you would expect.
You'll be surprised how much faster and quicker your PC responds, and CPU etc. power is available, when you turn this Aero baby off.

Well. that's a wrap guys. I hope you enjoyed reading these helpful tips to improve your music making and Lmms' performance.

To summarise what I wrote.
Turn off your Antivirus, your Wireless service, Skype chat, OS and software updates.
And WIn 7 aero theme mode, to increase your PC/ Laptops performance and Lmms' music making performance.
Trust me, you'll thank me in the long run if you follow these tips.

Well, that's it for now guy's. I'll be back with more tips as soon as I can remember any.
So for now...........
Bye.

[diiz]

6) A flat panel monitor,.....AKA Plasma Screen or Lcd screen saps less power. Compared to a CRT old school PC monitor.
Believe it or not, Those old school CRT PC monitors, consume alot of power.
And alot of VGA graphics card and RAM memory power! Ouch! Lol!
Not to mention your poor CPU.

Hm? CRT monitors consumer more electrical power, but the type of your monitor has no effect on the CPU power used. And CPU power is the one that needs to be conserved here, LMMS doesn't care how much electrical power your computer consumes...

Anyway, you're suggesting doing so many things here to get LMMS running smoothly in a windows box, that frankly I think it'd almost be easier to just install a lightweight Linux distro as a second OS and run LMMS in that... Something that runs XFCE, like maybe Xubuntu or Linux Mint Xfce, which are very easy to install and use for Linux-newbies.

[brandystarbrite]

Oh crap. Sorry about that that error.
I was trying to fix mistakes in the tut, but Source forge is giving me "Beans," to log in.
I realised I put the wrong "sentence line/info," in the wrong portion of the tut.
Sorry for the mistake guy's.

Re edit it is!

Anyway, you're suggesting doing so many things here to get LMMS running smoothly in a windows box, that frankly I think it'd almost be easier to just install a lightweight Linux distro as a second OS and run LMMS in that... Something that runs XFCE, like maybe Xubuntu or Linux Mint Xfce, which are very easy to install and use for Linux-newbies.

True. And you have a point there diiz.
But the other point of this tut tip, was to help users, not familar with those lightweight Linux distros
and other cool stuff that you mentioned etc.

And also for those users, this info comes in handy because, when you're using "certain Vst's," especially
certain DSK Vst's, these tips come in the most handy. Especially if the Vst you're using is unstable, or consumes alot of CPU processing power.
And some Multi platform Vst's, don't care about what OS you're using either. They'll still crash. Lol!
It helps in cases of Vst+Lmms, freeze system hijacks. When you can't close Lmms.
The extra power does come in handy in situations like these.

This tut is a rewritten/updated version, of a previous one, that I wrote on this forum last year.
Which helped quite a bit of Lmms users.
I can't find the original one. Darn it!!
Guess I should have put it in the tuts section in the first place lol.

[roy38]

To turn this mode off, go to the Performance Tab, in the action center and check or click Performance.

Where is this performance tab in the action center? Its a shame you cannot do screen shots

[musikbear]

Your provided tips to improve lmms on laptop are really very useful. I am facing low speed issue on my laptop although not able to rectify which software make causes.

You do not say what OS but in windows you can use taskmanager to inspect all running processes.
Press alt+ctrl+del at the same time, and task-man will pop up. If you are uncertain of which processes you can stop, you can ask us
Remember to sort so all your own processes are shown together

Besides that since you are new here, Welcome to the forum reusetek! Here are all our important links:
http://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4740
-And a few rules for Avatars, signatures, posting and using the right sub-forum :)

[brandystarbrite]

Your provided tips to improve lmms on laptop are really very useful. I am facing low speed issue on my laptop although not able to rectify which software make causes.

Oh my gosh!! I almost forgot about this first tut of mine.
I'm glad it was useful.
Also, welcome to the Lmms Forums.

This tut was made after testing, on an Cobalt black encased ASUS K50AF laptop
running Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit.
With the following cool specs.

AMD Turion II 2.3 Ghz cpu's
ATI 5945 GPU with 512 mb of memory
RAM 4GB of DDR 2 RAM
Hard Drive running at 5400 RPM

It helped run Blaze Blu Calamity Trigger and it even helped run Super Street Fighter 4
on that same ASUS laptop too.
It even helped Blender run nicely, with a 3d sculpted object I made, that had over 4 million quads polygons
on that single object.

I'll update this tut again, with more info.

I am facing low speed issue on my laptop although not able to rectify which software make causes.

Check musikbears post above. He gave some nice tips.

PS: To anyone who got confused, when I said, "OS and software updates."
What I meant there, are Windows updates and 3rd party software updates.
In the case of Windows updates, running in the background, that thing does use a good bit of power.
Which is why back then, when I had that Asus laptop, I would always switch it off.
It helped alot, especially when doing 3D sculpting in Blender and Maya.