colophon's Recent Posts
Thanks to Randy for responding to my earlier post over on the Sumu preview page. I'm also encountering the "opening too large" problem (on Windows 11), and have no ability to access the bottom right corner of the relevant window -- it remains off screen.
That's really a minor point, though, and I'm sure that it will swiftly be fixed in an update.
A much bigger worry has to do with CPU hit, and here I just want to echo what some others have already noted. I have been looking forward to working with this synth for a very long time, and the videos from early beta testers posted back in December got me even more intrigued. This is clearly an amazing piece of software, and I know that Randy has put a lot of love into it. But the people involved in those beta tests must be running systems whose capabilities leave mine in the dust, because opening Sumu inside Ableton Live 12 -- which I could do (no crashes, thankfully) immediately brought my CPU to its knees. I've got only 16GB RAM installed, so it's not like I expected perfectly smooth sailing (though it is a multicore system, but that doesn't seem to matter much). But I had at least hoped that I would be able to tinker a bit. Nope. That's not happening. The initialize patch hovers around 100% before any connections are made. Flipping through the presets spikes my CPU numbers to places I've never seen before (300%+), and while reducing the number of voices helps a bit, it helps only a bit -- it's not enough to actually make the synth usable given my current configuration.
I would really like to take advantage of the early access pricing, but I can't buy a synth that I am unable to get up and running. Maybe down the road, after future optimizations, I'll be able to take advantage of one of your intermittent sales (which are appreciated).
I raise this point not to complain -- Randy, I know you've got enough on your plate without having to deal with people whining, and I want you to know how much we all appreciate your work on this -- but just to bring back to your attention something that is too easily lost: I suspect that the specs on Madrona Labs' testing systems don't reflect the specs under which a lot of us are operating (16GBs of RAM, maybe 32GBs at the outside), and I really wish more had been done to make the amazingness of this synth available at a lower CPU hit.
I realize that this may be asking for the impossible, as one of the things that makes this so amazing has to do with the computational load it's made to bear. But as paul_vervoort noted above, having to buy a new computer to run this is a bridge too far -- and I'm bummed at not having the horsepower to participate in this particular sonic adventure.
The tl;dr: CHECK THE PERFORMANCE OF SUMU ON YOUR SYSTEM. This is far and away the most demanding software synth I've ever run across. (It might also be the most impressive, but -- alas -- I can't tell. Maybe someday!)
Really interested in this, but some of the patches on the Early Access version for Windows are absolutely crippling to my CPU. I've never seen a "349%" (!) reading show up without ever playing a note, and nothing comes in under 60% at present!
I don't know whether further optimization remains to be done --I dearly hope so--but on a 16GB RAM Windows multicore system, this currently looks to be a non-starter. (Yes, I know, I need to upgrade --but it's never been this bad--this makes even Generate look like a walk in the park! Any plans to integrate multi-core swapping on the finished version?)