Performance and Limitations

Performance and Our Benchmarking

We recommend that you first install the program in trial mode on your target machine to see how it performs. There are many things that will affect performance: CPU speed and number of cores, hard disk seek/read speed, system bus speed, RAM memory speed, amount of RAM, operating system in use, OS services running, other programs running, and more. Installing the latest versions of .Net Framework 3.5 and DirectX 9.0c may have performance improvements as well.

Our benchmarking was done on a machine with Windows XP Professional SP2, Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.2 Ghz, 3GB DDR2 RAM (memory) with bus speed of 533Mhz. Your performance will vary based on your system hardware and the software processes running. Sound Mill will take advantage of multi-core CPUs via threading. We have tested the program on a low end tower machine with Intel Pentium 4 CPU 1.6 Ghz, 768MB DDR RAM (memory) with bus speed of 266Mhz. There was no discernable degradation to sound quality on this slower machine and audio play was instantaneous when clicking the Play button.

Netbooks are not recommended although they will run the program. A performance laptop will provide better program response than a Netbook. Most Netbooks have processors designed to optimize and conserve power rather than provide performance. And if the Netbook comes with Windows 7 Starter edition (which is not supported by our products), you would need to upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium edition. Home Premium is a 'heavy' operating system for a Netbook. Some Netbook owners are optimizing Windows 7 performance by shutting off unnecessary services, Areo graphics, etc. Here is a sample of Windows 7 performance tweaking. (Note: This link is provided for your information only. We have not tested these tweaks and this should not be viewed as our endorsement. Proceed at your own risk.)

Limitations and Exceptions

The following are limits and exceptions to normal operating behavior as described in the Help document.

Sound List Size limit - We have stress tested with sound lists of about 21,000 sound items and 1,500 automation scripts with no noticable performance degradation. A list this size took about 30 seconds to open -- so be patient with large lists. Importing large sound lists can also take a bit of time, again be patient. The theoretical limit for number of sound items is far higher than 20,000 but depending on your system you will eventually hit a practical limit. Each simple sound item (no descriptions, no Fx effects, no 3D effects defined) will take up about 1K (K=1,000) to 1.5K bytes of space on the hard disk. For example, our test sound list of 21,000 sound items takes up 29 MB (Megabytes) on harddisk. The 29 MB sound list when loaded into system memory consumed 72 MB of RAM. Very few users will ever need lists this large.
MIDI cannot play concurrently - Midi audio files will not play concurrently (multiple Midi audio at one time). The WMP driver Midi engine is apparently single threaded for Midi play. If you start two midi files playing at the same time on the same output device, you will only hear the first Midi file. The second Midi will advance its play position but is inaudible. When the first Midi finishes playing, the second Midi will become audible. Other audio formats will play concurrent with a Midi file.
Some advanced features only availabe for Wav audio - The following DirectX features are only available for Wav audio format: FX Effects, 3D Effects, Output groups. The Play Modifiers -- Use DirectX checkbox must be checked to use these features. If you need these features for a given sound, you need to convert the audio file to Wav. There are many audio conversion programs available on the Web. Some are free.
Video formats will play audio only - You can play video formats such as WMV and MPEG, but only the audio portion of the file will play. The video is currently ignored.
Audio file size limit - In our testing, we successfully loaded Wav files of about 100 Megabytes. Files larger than this failed to load by DirectX but were able to be loaded by the WMP driver. File sizes will depend on your computer configuration, mostly a factor of total available RAM (system memory). If a file fails to load, try shutting down unused computer services that are occupying memory. Or convert the audio to a lossy, compressed format like MP3.