Computer help -- working with VST's and CPU

Super great advice about effects on return tracks as opposed to main track. I will check this out. I really appreciate the help here.

Don’t use a laptop for music production anymore but when I did I had to go into the laptop performance settings and make sure it was running at 100% performance mode all the time (can’t remember if these settings are applicable for Mac as well, as it was a while back I used a Mac laptop for producing)
Laptops can sometimes throttle the CPU performance to increase battery life, this happened with mine and was unusable for music production till I enabled maximum performance mode.
Also turn off stuff like sleep mode, hard disc hibernation etc, which is great for extended battery life but terrible for music production where permanent uninterrupted power is paramount. Pretty basic stuff but critical for laptop work.

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Thanks. Out of curiousity what kind of computer are you using for music production these days?

I use a PC desktop (switched from Mac last year), a little more powerful than yours, but shouldn’t make much difference

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Oh and crappy anti virus software like norton is known to cripple audio performance

Perhaps as a last option (and my personally least favourite) you could try a fresh install of macOS and just your minimally required software. It can be difficult to hunt down resource hogs on systems which have been running for a long time, what with apps being installed/removed and re-installed. Sometimes software de-installation is not so clean. As mentioned, I personally hate having to do this, but it can be quite helpful to start with a clean system.

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Not a bad idea at all and I think I might end up doing that.

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