In sending audio from one place to the next digitally, you will always have to add everything in the chain up to that point.

Mathematically, one single reverb on a send for five tracks should be more efficient than five individual reverbs, one for each track, right? Wrong. I’m talking about bus and send processing. The second misconception disguises as a perfectly economic way to produce, but it really isn’t. This is what is commonly referred to as an under-run. So if the CPU needs more time to fill the buffer than the actual buffer length, playback stops for a split second until the buffer is done rendering.

That’s why, when the CPU meter hits 100%, there is just enough time to fill the buffer in the time of the buffer that is already playing. It measures how much time the computer needs to fill an audio buffer divided by the time span of a buffer.

The answer is easy: Fl Studio does not actually measure regular CPU load. The first one is often accompanied by the question ‘Why is FL’s CPU meter in the red, but my task manager only shows FL using 40% of my CPU?’. First, let’s examine two common misconceptions around CPU usage in digital audio.