FWIW, having tried both, I find it makes no difference.

(In my works, the overhead of unique instruments seems to be balanced by the 
branching code required to make the individual instances from a "template." 
Of course my "unique instruments" are similar but not identical.)

Art Hunkins

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "mark jamerson" 
To: "Csound" 
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 3:16 PM
Subject: [Csnd] Instrument Efficiency


>
>   Just a quick efficiency/optimization question.  Is it better/faster to 
> have multiple instances of an instrument, or multiple instruments that do 
> the same thing?  For instance, if I have a loscil based instrument that I 
> want to use to play different files with overlapping instances.  Would it 
> be better to have an instrument for each file or just use an i-rate 
> variable to choose the file.
>
>                                                     Mark
>
>
>
>
>
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