Someone posted a question on my video “Music Production Quick Tips: MacBook Pro 16 – Is Fan Noise An Issue When Using External Monitors?” regarding how the laptop would perform with a large session in Studio One when the Endurance App’s low power mode was enabled. I don’t normally work in large sessions, but I wanted to get a video posted showing load in Studio One.

In this video I created 20 tracks, all running separate instances of Serum. Serum is pretty power hungry, so I think this is a good load test for Studio One.

What I found interesting is that it seems that the CPU monitor inside of Studio One is spiking once I enable around 18 instances of Serum, but the cumulative CPU monitor in the MacBook’s activity monitor stays really low. It’s almost as if Studio One (or Serum) is throttling via some CPU threshold it sets before the MacBook even comes close to consuming it’s full amount of CPU. This occurred regardless of the Endurance App being in low power mode or not. I don’t really understand what’s going on that would cause this. I’m actively trying to learn why the CPU seems to be spiking in Studio One, but the cumulative CPU in the MacBook remains low. If anybody knows why this is the case, please let me know in the comments. It seems that there must be a way to get Studio One and/or Serum to make more use of the power in the MacBook than it currently is.