Optimize your music PC (Windows)
Jayden Lawrence
Whether you’re experiencing poor audio performance, or you just want to make sure your system is primed and ready for music production, this article’s here to help you out
So, you’ve moved all of your samples to Solid State Drives, you’ve decreased kontakt’s buffer size and OPUS’s disk cache, you’ve performed a ‘batch resave’ for all of your kontakt libraries, and yet your samples are still taking forever to load. What gives??
Well, if you’re a Windows user, you need to know about Windows Defender.
On a fresh install of Windows, there is an active anti-virus service running continuously in the background, called Windows Defender. It’s actually pretty great, and (for the majority of people) makes purchasing 3rd-party anti-virus software unnecessary. However, it will actively scan every file that moves, and that includes your samples when you try to load them, which can contribute to some serious load times!
So here’s how we stop it…
There’s a number of ways to get to the Windows Defender settings page, but the quickest is to simply open the start menu (or press your Windows key) and type “exclusions”. You should see an option for “Virus & Threat Protection” come up. Click it!
You should now see a page similar to what is shown in the image to the right.
Under “Virus & threat protection settings”, click “Manage settings”.
You’ll now see a list of headings and toggle switches. Scroll down to the bottom and find the Exclusions heading. Click “Add or remove exclusions”.
(we’re almost done!)
From here, you’ll probably know what to do, but just in case…
Click on the big plus button to add an exclusion. Choose “Folder” as the type of exclusion you want to add, and navigate to your sample location to add it to the list of locations that Windows Defender will exclude from future virus scans.
NOTE: You can select a whole drive as a location – you do not need to add every individual sample folder!
Now, Windows Defender will no longer scan all of those tiny sample files when you try to load them, giving them a clear pathway straight to your RAM
And there you have it. An often-overlooked but crucial step needed to tune a Windows system for efficient sample streaming.
Founder of synthestration.com, Jayden has spent the last ten years working as a film & TV composer, mockup producer, composer’s assistant, template builder, sample library developer, and is soon to commence studies in biography writing.
Whether you’re experiencing poor audio performance, or you just want to make sure your system is primed and ready for music production, this article’s here to help you out
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“As a scoring composer, I am always looking for a tight, hard hitting, mix-ready percussion library. Hammers is one such tool that has completely blown me away. “
One Response
Excellent tip, thanks!