Welcome back, turning stuff off. First something for beginners if you're not currently using bus and sends something you need to do now. So catch up to speed as is going to save you a tremendous amount of space and CPU. So you see how I have a reverb, PC and delay? Well these are tracks that I can now use inside of any other track. So this first one corresponds with a, the second one corresponds with B.
And the last one here See, you can see the sense knobs. So if I want to add some reverb, all I would have to do is lift this up that down. Same thing with C, that corresponds with delay if I wanted to add delay to this track, I will do that. Okay, let's move on the one setting you're going to have To change the most while you're producing is your buffer size. And that has to do with latency. So if we look at the latency section in the preferences in Ableton, you can see that my buffer size is currently set to 512 samples.
Low. If you look at the output latency, that means it's going to take 14.7 milliseconds to sound itself in your speakers or headphones. Now, if we decrease the buffer size, let's say to 32 samples, you can see now that turnaround time is a lot faster. It's now five point 35 milliseconds, which is indistinguishable. So a rule of thumb is to keep your buffer size low when recording and high wind mixing. Why is that?
Well, if it's high when I'm mixing latency, isn't it really something that I have to consider as I'm not playing a MIDI instrument or singing into a microphone, follow that rule of thumb, and it will come in handy, trust me. The next thing that we need to address is turning stuff off Wi Fi, Bluetooth, other apps, you want to turn them off. It's proven that it sucks energy from your computer, and it cripples your CPU. So right away, turn off Wi Fi, if you're not using it for any reason, like loading on Dropbox or downloading an update or something. If you're not using Bluetooth, get rid of it, again, an energy sucker. Let me show you how to turn off other apps that you may not be using.
On a Mac, Hold OPTION command escape. And there you'll see the programs that I'm currently running and you can click one of them Hit force quit. And that's that. So please turn off anything that you're not using if you need to bring something up a secondary program, do what you have to do. Gather your resources, samples MIDI, and then turn it off. Onto the next, turn off your inputs.
If we go to the audio tab here, and we go to audio input, if you're not recording anything, if you're not using your interface to record a guitar, or vocals, then turn this off. On top of that, if you go to channel configuration, if you have any extra outputs that are not currently being used, turn those off as well. Okay, the next concept if I go to my hard drive, I click it and I hit command. I You want to keep at least 20% of your resources open. So for example, I have a terabyte on this computer, it's an SSD. Of that 800 gigabytes or so are being used.
I want to have 200 gigabytes open. Now that's my rule. I've also read that 10% is enough as well. So in my case, 100 gigabytes would be okay, so keep 10 to 20% of your computer space free, and you'll notice a great shift in your computer's performance. Okay, let's go into spotlight. In your Mac's System Preferences, go to spotlight.
And here we want to turn off features that you know for sure you're not going to use for example If I do a search, if I'm looking for a song or a sample, I don't need to access my calculator, nor my contacts. Let's see here definitions, right. And you can kind of understand, what I'm trying to show you is, if you don't need to search for a font, turn that off. In my case, I don't use this feature. So I'll turn this off as well not looking for movies, this computer is strictly for music production, etc, etc. So I highly recommend you turn off features that you're not using in your spotlight.
I also recommend you turn off login items. Now that you find here in users and groups. Go to the current user and right here where it says login items. Turn off anything that you don't want to log in when you first open up the computer. I like the functionality here. But if you want something more in depth, I highly recommend clean my Mac.
Okay, let's go back to accessibility. And something else that's going to help you with your CPU is turning off these functions right here, reduce motion, and reduce transparency. If you haven't already, turn off your dashboard by going into Mission Control and turn off your dashboard here. One final note to those of you who have secondary screens via HDMI or Thunderbolt ports, if you don't absolutely need them if they're not really helping you turn those off as well as that is a major energy vampire for your computer and CPU resources. Okay, I'll see you guys on the next one. Thank you.
You