Gawd I hate being a OS X newb.........

I need performance help with my powerbook
and am a bit lost at the moment.

Gear Stats:

Big room:
Dual G5 1.8 W/ 4GB RAM
80 GD SATA Main Drive
200 GB SATA 2nd Drive
Motu 896 HD

Plenty of Auralex Studio Foam and gear yadda yadda yadda

Powerbook
1.67 17" 1.5GB RAM PC 2700
100 GB 5400 HDD
Firebox

I have a degree in IS but OS X was not around when I was in school,
if it had been I would not be posting this =) I am a reborn Apple IIe
convert.. W00t! (9 months of OS X in personal life and loving it).

I need answers to all this based on using Logic 7.1 pro as the primary
use of my Powerbook. The G5 seems to laugh at anything a feed it but
the powerbook is bliss when inspired.

Does the new DDR2 powerbook have huge performance increase over the
1.67 (17") that I bought with SD pc2700 60 days ago? I cant seem to
locate any motherboard front side bus speeds anywhere.

Is there a Hard drive enclosure that runs Firewire 800 (IE:1394b)
and SATA drives? Does it have a fan?

How can I tune my G4 Powerbook 1.67 1.5 GB RAM, 100 GB 5400 rpm
HDD to perform better specifically using Logic 7.1 Pro?

Can I do more then drop resolution and omit shadows such as shut off
services with tools (Tinker Tools / Shadow Killer) or via the command line
to improve performance?

I am currently running a Firebox on the powerbook but own an 896 HD
for the main room. I have read the 896 has less latency and would be
much more powerful on the notebook. Is this true? Is it worth the hassle
of making the 896 HD portable? (I only use the powerbook for composition
but can get carried away when inspired quickly).

Is it worth pulling my rack out of my main room and making it mobile
with my Powerbook?

I ask all of this because I believe my Powerbook is underperforming.
I have 8 tracks of recorded input via apple loops and live instruments
via the Presonus firebox on a secondary IE1394A firewire drive (400) and am
running Logic 7.1 (OS X4.2) on a 100GB 5400 RPM Drive. I only have
native plugins running on the 2 guitar tracks (EVH 5150 direct into
the firrebox) everything else is dry. I try to add a 9th track and the machine
chokes. I have run latency settings as low as 128 and as high as 256.

Please help if you can.

Thanks

-=DF=-

It is good to keep your buffer settings low while tracking but if you are mixing you can increase your buffers settings more than 256. Have you tried freezing tracks in Logic? Basically when you freeze a track it's like consolidating the tracks with plugins into audio files freeing up CPU.

Have you tried recording to the internal HD instead of the firewire one? There may be a bandwidth issue with the firebox and HD on the same bus.

You can definitely play back more than 8 tracks in Logic on a powerbook. I manage it fine on my 1GHz Powerbook!

Also try substituting internal audio and the MOTU for the firebox to make sure the firebox isn't eating CPU cycles. Run it with internal HD and internal audio to check if it works, then add the HD and firebox back one at a time to see where it chokes.

As for tweaking the system, you shouldn't really need to fine tune OSX too much, just make sure there are no processes running that swamp the processor using activity monitor. You will notice the firebox spikes the CPU (via the process kernel_task which can be seen if you choose "all processes" in activity monitors CPU monitor page)

It sounds to me that you have a HD bandwidth issue, not CPU if you're only using plugs on 2 audio tracks.

i had a simillar issue - drove me absolutely nuts. i would play 8 tracks with nothing on them and logic 7 would choke.

upgrading to logic 7.1 helped. i also upgraded my MBox drivers - that made the biggest difference.

basically a powerbook only has a 167 mhz fsb, although if you have ddr2 ram, that might double it. either way, its not a lot of bandwidth to work with.

the logic instruments i also find can get pretty cpu intensive. i plan on getting a tc powercore firewire to offload the work from the cpu.

but its also about working as efficiently as possible - use multi outs on drum machines, send to common busses for things like reverb, etc. and freeze your most cpu intensive tracks.

What a bunch of questions… please, next time could you separate the unrelated to keep things easer for answers…

About the FW 800 enclosure for SATA hard drive, there's one as far as I know like Here (you can find it for less around if you search a bit) Or this (it seems to be coming at last). Now a regular FW 400 or 800 enclosure will do the trick for most use already and be less expensive. Note that FW 800 is not as effective as it seems unfortunately but it works ok.

Real fastness can be achieved thru a SATA card and eSATA drives.

DDR2 memory is not faster (only marginally) but it runs at lower power levels thus less tiring for the batteries and less heat EEC or non EEC memory just means Enable Error Correction, which is a high end server requirement and not of much use for us. We run on non EEC RAM for years and are still here and well off. It's just a show off thing which costs $$$.

HONESTLY. TO BE BLUNT. Powerbook G4 are way inferior in Logic 7. I just sold mine after 5 months of frustration. Latency issues, Core Audio Overload. No Matter what they say, No matter how they glorify it for Logic Use. It will a point where youd be dealing more with technical issues than making music. Obviously when you ask advices, they would either ask you to limit buffer size or freeze tracks or limit your instruments. Limit is such a negative word as far as your vast creative space is concerned. Ok so say logic works but its obvious you are limiting your resources just so your Powerbook works. It has to be the other way around... Never compromise with your creativity and productivity, a G5 workstation will always be your best bet.

I mostly agree with you on this except I don't think limit's are always bad for creativity. Sometimes if you have no limits you may over-do something or add way too much stuff that is either covering up for what isn't there as far as a direction/quality or that isn't helpful to the song. Back before DAW's and huge track counts people were limited to 24 tracks for their music and even before that 16, 8, and 4 tracks and even before that it all had to go down at once. Personally I think that some of the best music of all time was made during these periods. It really makes you evaluate a song and come up with better parts in my experience. I don't want to sound like a hippie but to me even solving technical issues involves creative thinking and is good practice or can give you ideas in other facets of creativity. That being said, I love being able to keep vocals that would have gone to analog heaven if it weren't for the power of high track counts, playlists and virtual tracks and being able to easily edit or rearrange a song completely after it has been recorded, virtual instruments that emulate classic instruments and plug in settings that are saved and come back the same every time. I guess it's all about balance though and that's a different threshold for everyone. Sorry about the rant.

On that aspect i commend you. That perspective on limitation is very enlightening. Cheers!

Trouble is it's not the first time I see persons complain to the fact 2005 powerbooks can't cope with logic 7. Which is in some way RIDICULOUS.

Limitations and quirkiness can be creative, but a software which can't properly run on one of its supposed to be platform of choice… It's different. And the shortcut Apple answers to bounce is just a way of not answering to the main issue, powerbooks are not up to the job.

Thanks for all the replies, I have done the following:

1. realized that posting frantically and stressed message with no rhyme or reason was really poor judgment on my part. I did ask several questions that should have been presented one at a time, sorry my bad

2. Moved the specific track i was working on from the powerbook from the fire wire drive used with my powerbook (IE1394a) to my secondary SATA HDD on my Dual G5 using the 896 HD. Same issue, I get a 200 MS delay in the guitar input direct just the same.

3. Executed Freeze Tracks on the two tracks running plugin's on both machines.

4. Changed buffer settings all the way down to 128 both machines.

5. Always ran the sample rate @ 44 from the start of the track.

Now the Dual G5 is with the 896 HD is showing the same behavior, no way this machine can't handle the farm with the second SATA Drive and all the RAM I have . This has to be an operator error but I have looked high and low for the reason. Any other ideas? Thanks so much for your help =)