The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

DiskCache. It will record everything to its left into a disk file. When it has finished recording, remove the
check from the Record box in the DiskCache parameters. From this point forward, that entire branch
will be read from the disk rather than computed in real time.
The advantage of using a DiskCache over simply recording to disk is that, with the DiskCache, you never
lose track of what you did to create that disk recording. Everything that you used to generate the recording
is still there, to the left of the DiskCache in the signal flow graph. This makes it easy to make changes
to the original Sound and re-cache the results. No more trying to remember exactly how you created a
particular track or where the disk recording of a particular Sound might be. The Sound and its recording
are linked together in the Sound structure.
In some cases, disk-caching is something like multi-tracking, where different “layers” of sound are recorded,
one at a time, in a hard disk recorder. In the case of Kyma Sounds, though, the “tracks” might
occur anywhere within the Sound structure; they are not necessarily all inputs to one Mixer.
There are several different strategies for choosing which part of the Sound to cache on the disk. You
might choose the most computationally expensive branch in order to free up the most time. Or you might
be forced to choose only those parts that do not rely on live input — the fixed or sequenced parts of your
Sound that do not change from playing to playing. It does not make sense to have nested DiskCaches,
because that is like storing the same thing on the disk twice.
Optimizing your Sounds
Sometimes you can optimize your Sounds in such a way that the sonic result is exactly the same but the
entire Sound requires less processing time.
Get a Baseline
Use Get info from the Info menu to get a measure of the complexity of your Sound in terms of a rough
estimate of the percentage of your Capybara that it requires in order to run in real time. Jot down this
percentage before you start simplifying so that you can see which things have an impact.
Look for Common Inputs
If you can identify two identical Sounds that are being processed in different ways, you can copy one of
them, select the other one, and choose Paste special… from the Edit menu. This will cause them to be
identical. That way, the Capybara can compute this Sound once and feed the result to two different places
(rather than recomputing it for each branch).
Check Polyphony
If you have any MIDIVoices, MIDIMappers and/or AnalogSequencers, check that you haven’t requested
more polyphony than you had intended. When you request 10 voices of polyphony, Kyma makes 10
copies of the Sound, so you should request exactly the polyphony that you need, not more.
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