I'm sitting here with Cubase SX on my drive, and now confronted with the reality of making music on this "new" Mac OS I'm wondering what can be done to improve audio recording and playback performance. On OS9 I would create a new extension set with the bare minimum of extensions and control panels, turn off virtual memory, and turn off appletalk (for starters). What can you do with OSX?

Some adjustments just seem common sense: set your monitor to thousands of colors, quit unnecessary apps...but what about something like quitting the dock? Would that help? Or how about shutting off networking, file sharing, or speech?

Does anyone here have any tips, or know of any websites that feature advice about the relatively new science of optimizing Jaguar for music production?

Here is a first tip: launch "/Utilities/Directory Access" and uncheck every daemon you do not need (Appletalk/LDAP2/3/SMB/etc.) -> more free RAM & less CPU usage.
Next?

Bye.

but what am i turning off by doing this? with the extensions manager of 9 it had (mostly) an explanation of what the extension did.

ah the learning curve of a new os that is comletely different to the one ive spent 3 years dimly understanding.

You're only turning off network services you probazbly do not use, untill you don't even know them ;-)
If your machine is alone (ie not in a Local Area Network), you can disable everything. I personaly only use SMB for file sharing with linux/windows.

There are probably other tips to optimize memory/cpu usage, anyone?

Bye.

While any type of CPU usage is a concern, its my understanding that OS X's memory manager allows open apps to draw very little (how little?) of the computers resources when not "active." However, I'm new to this OS as well and don't really understand what's going on "behing the scenes."

Can anyone else address CPU usage in OS X?

Yes, an application can use 0 CPU and even 0 RAM (this is also what swap is made for). But network services are generally listening to something (untill there is ONE super-daemon (inetd/xinetd) that handles them all, so better desactivate them in the sys prefs.
I would also advice to use the fewest active dock apps as possible, deactivate the "genie" effect & other bells & wistles.

Please complete ;-)

Bye.