iMac Optimization

I

I-AM

New member
Hello All,

Question: I recently made the switch from PC to the new intel based iMac and tried my best to load it up in preparation for doing some fairly intense audio processing and recording.
Specs of my Imac are 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo, 4GB RAM, and 320 HD. I was wondering if anyone had any links or sugestions that could help with optimizing my iMac for audio recording? Maybe things like disabling the internet capability and or losing all the internal sounds and etc.
When I am running Logic and Reason together I hear a skip when the loop comes back around and it is all off beat. My DAW audio interface is a Tascam FW1884 and is fairly decent when it comes to latency. I may need to adjust the latency parameters a bit though. Any information and insight would be helpful.

Thanks
 
Hope some of this helps...

I record to an empty external HDD. If this is not possible then do your best to de-fragment the internal disk. This will reduce the amount of work your disk has to do during tracking, up your available bit depth, sample rate and track count before maxing your system out.

Also set everything up (all the mics and everything) the night before and test it as completely as you can.

Make sure all mobile phones (cell phones) in the immediate area are turned off !

Cheers
 
I-AM said:
I was wondering if anyone had any links or sugestions that could help with optimizing my iMac for audio recording? Maybe things like disabling the internet capability and or losing all the internal sounds and etc.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't do anything to it. Mac OS X doesn't have the same sort of problems with IRQs that Windows does; the Mac OS X driver model pretty much forbids doing large amounts of work at interrupt time, so IRQ sharing just doesn't matter.


I-AM said:
When I am running Logic and Reason together I hear a skip when the loop comes back around and it is all off beat.
Click to expand...

Sounds like something wrong with the loop length to me.
 
Dr_simon said:
I record to an empty external HDD. If this is not possible then do your best to de-fragment the internal disk. This will reduce the amount of work your disk has to do during tracking, up your available bit depth, sample rate and track count before maxing your system out.
Click to expand...

Please don't. Mac OS X does automatic background defragmenting and hot file adaptive clustering on the fly. The use of defragmenting tools will make performance anywhere from slightly to dramatically worse. I strongly recommend against defragmenting a Mac OS X system unless you're running 10.2 or earlier.

Also, I don't recommend using an external hard drive. Recording is much more likely to glitch due to high latency than anything else. Your best bet for low disk latency is to use a drive on the internal bus. The only way you would ever have a possibility of getting better performance from an external drive is if you just plain don't have enough RAM and are paging constantly. If you are paging constantly, you should buy more RAM, thus fixing the actual problem instead of working around it.


Dr_simon said:
Also set everything up (all the mics and everything) the night before and test it as completely as you can.

Make sure all mobile phones (cell phones) in the immediate area are turned off !
Click to expand...

Both good points.
 
You might turn off all networking except firewire. I do that when playing live gigs off my Mac laptop. This prevents the Mac from spending any cpu cycles looking for internet signal, blue tooth, etc.

The other thing is to boot your mac and then launch only the audio applications you'll be needing for your session. In other words, if you've been net surfing, playing games, editing video, etc., reboot your Mac and launch only your audio apps.

These two things are simple but keep things pretty clean for audio recording.

Also, make sure you have plenty of spare space on your hard drives. And as much RAM as possible is also a good thing.

I personally often record to an external HD.
 
Thanks for all of the excellent replies. They have been noted and will put them into practice this weekend as I fire up Logic and Reason again. Thanks again.
 
timthetortoise said:
I'm 99% sure that there is no defragmenting in the Mac OS at all, mostly because it runs on a journaling filesystem.
Click to expand...

You would be 100% wrong. That link I posted is an Apple web page that describes it (albeit briefly and in rather limited detail). My friend Louis did a good writeup about it a few years ago that goes into a lot more detail, but I can't seem to find a link to it.

Amit Singh also did a writeup on the subject here that also goes into more detail about the optimizations that defragmenting wrecks (and it diminishes the effectiveness of almost all of the optimizations described on that page).

The most relevant part is Amit Singh's conclusion at the bottom of this page:

"Defragmentation on HFS+ volumes should not be necessary at all, or worthwhile, in most cases, because the system seems to do a very good job of avoiding/countering fragmentation."

"It is risky to defragment anyway: What if there's a power glitch? What if the system crashes? What if the defragmenting tool has a bug? What if you inadvertently reboot? In some cases, you could make the situation worse by defragmenting."
 
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