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Gary Benny

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Hi,

Earlier this year my trusty XP DAW finally died - running SONAR. I decided to try the Mac route. Until now I was trying to take advantage of GarageBand - great price - but finally bit the bullet and downloaded Logic Pro X.

The recording process/performance on the iMac has been kind of skittish. Things seem to be going fine - fast, smooth, solid - but then I get the spinning lollipop for extended periods which will sometimes lead to the system locking up completely.

Based on my current configuration, I'm hoping to get some suggestions on changes I can make to get past my current issues.

This is my iMac configuration:
27" iMac
Late 2012
3.4 GHz i7 Quad Core processor
8 GB RAM
2 GB video
1 TB Fusion drive

I have been using the interface I used on XP system, but I fear it may not be best for use with Mac. It's an M-Audio ProFire 610, and requires several conversions to connect to the iMac: thunderbolt>FireWire 800>FireWire400. I'm wondering how much this could be negatively impacting performance.

On my old XP systems, I used separate internal 7200 RPM hard drives to write audio to. So far, I have been just recording to the Fusion drive in the iMac. I'm wondering if I should get an external 7200 RPM USB 3.0 drive? Or maybe a drive I can attach directly to the Thunderbolt port. If I did that, I'd probably need to get a different interface, probably USB 3.0? How much better would a SSD be than a 7200 RPM drive?

I will probably upgrade soon to 16 GB RAM, but don't really know how much better performance I can expect. The most RAM I ever had on the XP systems was 2 GB, and it was pretty solid.

Guess that's enough for now. Looking forward to your input.

Thanks a lot,
Gary
 
Gary Benny said:
I have been using the interface I used on XP system, but I fear it may not be best for use with Mac. It's an M-Audio ProFire 610, and requires several conversions to connect to the iMac: thunderbolt>FireWire 800>FireWire400. I'm wondering how much this could be negatively impacting performance.
Click to expand...

Hi,
I doubt this will impact performance at all. There's no conversion process - Just physical connector changes.

Gary Benny said:
On my old XP systems, I used separate internal 7200 RPM hard drives to write audio to. So far, I have been just recording to the Fusion drive in the iMac. I'm wondering if I should get an external 7200 RPM USB 3.0 drive? Or maybe a drive I can attach directly to the Thunderbolt port. If I did that, I'd probably need to get a different interface, probably USB 3.0? How much better would a SSD be than a 7200 RPM drive?
Click to expand...


Are you having any problems recording to the built in drive? You shouldn't be.
It's not a bad idea to have external storage for safety, but what you have should be fine performance wise.

Gary Benny said:
I will probably upgrade soon to 16 GB RAM, but don't really know how much better performance I can expect. The most RAM I ever had on the XP systems was 2 GB, and it was pretty solid.
Click to expand...

It's hard to gauge how much better performance will be without knowing what performance is currently like.

Any modern imac should kill and old XP box w/ 2gb ram. Unless you've got specific issues, I'd guess there's no problem here. :)
 
Thanks for the quick reply Steenamaroo. Yes, I am having some specific problems, as in the original post, "The recording process/performance on the iMac has been kind of skittish. Things seem to be going fine - fast, smooth, solid - but then I get the spinning lollipop for extended periods which will sometimes lead to the system locking up completely."

This doesn't happen all the time, but it's a real PITA when it does! Any ideas?

I am happy to hear that I should be able to record to the Fusion drive. It seems fast and smooth. It's such a different mind-set than what I have been used to!

I do have external backup. I use Time Machine to backup to a 3 GB Seagate drive attached to an Airport Extreme, and use BackBlaze for offsite backup.

Also, I am currently using Mavericks 10.9.5.
 
Sorry - I read your post a bit too quickly!

Is there any particular pattern to the lock-ups? Any specific thing that causes it?
Since performance is good apart from that, I very much doubt you need to upgrade or add anything.

It might be worth keeping activity monitor open and keeping an eye on the cpu/hdd/memory usage during a lock up just incase, but only to rule it out.

Are all your drivers up to date? Version 2.4.4 was released a few days ago, apparently.
 
I haven't noticed any specific causes. Checking Activity Monitor is a good idea, I will do that. Also, it just occurred to me - again a way different setup than I'm used to - that I should probably turn off Time Machine and BackBlaze while I'm recording. If I do a large chunk of work i could turn them on and off as needed to capture new changes.

I don't have the latest ProFire driver but I will install that right away.

Thanks!!
 
Gary Benny said:
I haven't noticed any specific causes. Checking Activity Monitor is a good idea, I will do that. Also, it just occurred to me - again a way different setup than I'm used to - that I should probably turn off Time Machine and BackBlaze while I'm recording. If I do a large chunk of work i could turn them on and off as needed to capture new changes.

I don't have the latest ProFire driver but I will install that right away.

Thanks!!
Click to expand...

Oh, you could be on to something.
Time machine, as I'm sure you know, will be constantly reading and writing to the hard drive.
Recording and time machine is a very bad combo!

Update the drivers, turn off time machine, then let us know how you get on, yeah?
Hopefully it's as simple as that. :)
 
More ram = always better. Get 16gb and be done with it.

Fusion drives have had a bad rep for recording. If yours is working, fine, but look up some of the comments on them.

You ALWAYS want multiple drives on any daw.
OS, apps and plugs on boot drive,
Sample libraries on second separate drive,
Audio tracks and projects on third drive.
(Mine is set up this way with zero problems)

Keep time machine off and kick backups manually.
 
Are your audio and sample drives external? On my old systems my drives were all internal.

What about mechanical vs. SSD?

I hope my issues aren't related to the Fusion drive! That would be really dissapointmenting!
 
My 2nd & 3rd drives are external... Glyph quad-interface on FireWire 800, more than enough bandwidth.

Ssd are nice but not mandatory, fw800 can stream many hundreds of simultaneous channels.
I prefer having much larger drives.
 
Turn time machine off for now and see how she goes.

Beyond that, read activity monitor. It will tell you where you're lacking better than Tim or I can.
 
We'll, so far so good. I updated the ProFire driver - now on the final version - turned off Time Machine, turned off BackBlaze, and opened activity monitor. I have recorded 4 audio tracks and running a couple of softsynths with no problems so far.

The activity monitor shows that I'm using a fairly small amount of CPU, but the memory seems to be around 6 GB. Looks like I'll be upgrading to 16 GB soon.

It's kind of surprising that so much memory is being used on so few tracks. On my old WIN XP system I had projects with many more tracks, SoftSynths, plugins, etc., and the PC only had 2 GB RAM.

Thanks a lot for the input!
Gary
 
Nice one Gary.
It's surprising what modern OSs use.
I was working at my Father's mac mini recently and discovered that it uses 3.3GB ram from boot!
XP really is an antique now. Wasn't the minimum requirement something like 64mb? Remember mb? lol

Any computer will eventually use up all your RAM over time. While it's available every program you open will take advantage.
If you're one of these who reboots every few months, it's be worth rebooting and checking ram usage again.

On the other hand, upgrades aren't that expensive these days and it's always good to have spare ram! :)
Just don't expect an immediate performance increase unless you've actually saturated what's available.
At that point the computer starts to use the hard drive as ram and, damn, you'll know about it! ;)
 
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