Please Please Please Help! New Mac User... Options

[briziofa]

hello everyone,

i'm a new forum member, i'm sorry for my bad english but i'm italian... :-)

a week ago i decided to buy a new computer, and i choose a new macbook 13" with intel core duo processor.
I had been using pc for 10 years and it's my first mac now.
I used pc for producing and djing with programs like ableton live and fruity loops, and i own a two-months old TASCAM us-122L external sound card. It worked good with pc.

Here's my HUGE problems:
I couldn't make anything work!!!

1- I installed live 5.0 for mac os and it has got two problems:
-i couldn't play my live file, the CPU usage goes up till 90-100% and the sound gets weird and distorted. never happened with my previous pc, AMD athlon 1200 mhz with 256 Ram
-my soundcard can't be selected as sound device in the preferences, only built-in audio shows up as option, although i installed all newest drivers and firmware from tascam site. The card works good with i-tunes and garageband.

I updated all the mac software and firmware, i got osx tiger latest version.

2- There's no fl studio for mac, so i installed boot camp, latest version and win xp. it runs ok and i installed my version of fruity loops. another problem.
if i choose us-122 as audio device, sound gets soon distorted, it slowdown and the buffer underruns counter grows up till 400 (!!). There's no buffer or latency setting that makes it better. If i choose built-in audio device, it starts to be clipping only after 40 seconds, and then every 15-30 secs. the cpu usage is always 1-2%.

When i close fruity, strange clipping noises come from the speakers.

I tried to install all newest drivers for everything, and i also installed from windows update download center the dual core speed patch. nothing's better. I also tried ASIO drivers.
Both in Mac OS and Win XP i turned off all energy saving programs and set all performance settings to the top.

I'm getting crazy. I will destroy this mac if the things won't be better.

[lepetitmartien]

How much ram have you?
Are you on an Admin account on OS X?
Where are located you audio files? If on the system drive, you are running in the wall, have an external drive if you plan more than a few audio tracks simultaneously. (see here for more)

On the XP issue, please post in the PC sub forum, this is not a MAC OS X issue (I like things clean and tidy)

[BoStar]

the US-122L is a input device for midi and audio, not a sound card. Your mac has it own sound with out the use of inferior sound cards (that PC rely on). The use of the US-122L for output of sound through usb is doing injustice to the sound that is going throught the mac.
anything running on a second OS will have lag and may not work right.
Use the audio out on the mac and not the tascam you will have better Sound the you had on you PC.
and dump the fruit loops and get Logic pro.
if you can not get it to work better do not destroy it send it to me and I'll make it work

[gdoubleyou]

Live 5.0 is not compatible for the Intel machines. If my memory is correct 5.2.2 brought Intel support.
I suggest an upgrade to Live 6, it adds support for dual core processors.

In Lives audio preferences you have to select Core Audio, first before you can view the available drivers.

Check to see if the TASCAM shows up in the Audio/Midi setup utility found in the Utilities folder.



This post has been edited by gdoubleyou: Sun 4 Feb 2007, 21:00

[minim_c]

bonjourno briziofa!

i too am a recent mac-convert and while i haven't experienced the troubles setting up that you have, i did run into a few hiccups.

mac-side, music things definitely seem to be more reliable when using proper universal binaries developed for the intel chip. while i've got a few legacy programmes running under rosetta, it seems that these quite often have problems where a universal binary doesn't. unfortunately this does generally mean spending more money :-(

windows-side, i've had some audio issues with boot camp - running finale 2006 under boot camp, i experienced glitches in playback which i just couldn't work around. i asked about this on the finale forums and the general response seemed to be that apple probaby hasn't quite sorted out all their audio drivers yet - remember that boot camp is still in beta - and that this was probably what was causing the problem. which doesn't exactly help, i know.

however, parallels desktop for mac might be of some use to you. i haven't tried a straight install of windows xp into parallels - i dived straight in to the release candidate so i could access my boot camp partition directly from within OS X - but as it's a commercial release (and they're supposed to release a new version in the next few weeks) it should be more reliable than boot camp for the moment. hopefully someone here might have played around with this and be able to advise on the practicality of a parallels-based solution for audio. for me, i just shifted finale mac-side because i'd planned to do this when i upgrade anyway.

hope this helped a little...