Thanks, Steven and Art, for the input.  I kind of felt that it wouldn't make much difference, so maybe I'll try both and see.  Luckily it's not for an OLPC so I'm not too constrained on memory or processor power.   Thanks again.  

                  Mark 



----- Original Message ----
From: Art Hunkins 
To: csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 9:54:33 AM
Subject: [Csnd] Re: Instrument Efficiency

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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