Garageband Performance Issues With New Macbook?, Newbie needs some help optimizing garageband Options

[nebdrof]

Hey all! Got a new mac user here with some questions about the CPU hog that is 'Garageband'. Either I've selected some memory heavy track options, recorded something improperly, or have other unknown system issues that I could use some help sorting out.

Hardware: New Macbook with 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB Memory (1067 Mhz DDR3) with about half of the hard drive filled with pictures/music etc. 121G of 256G

Software: Gb that came installed on the machine and no other plugins/add ons.

Recording: 6 track/2:00 min song, 2 mic tracks (guitar,vocal), 3 Gb instrument tracks (bass and 2 keys), and 1 Drumbeat loop from the Gb loops (effected drumkit 08) all relatively light on effects

Issue: "Part of Project was not played" - Too many real instrument tracks to be played in real time. To optimize performance...blah blah blah. I've followed most of their optimizing tips to no avail. I've uploaded a screenprint of garageband, the warning and current CPU usage monitor which does not seem to be maxed...

Question: Anything else I should be doing to make this thing work? Is there another program that is not as resource intensive that has similar functionality. I do have Adobe Soundbooth as part of the Adobe Production Premium package but use that mainly for video/photo editing.

Thanks in advance for everyone's help!

Attached File(s)

 Screen_shot_2011_01_13_at_11.23.04_AM.png ( 347.79K ) Number of downloads: 11
 Screen_shot_2011_01_13_at_11.23.04_AM.png ( 347.79K ) Number of downloads: 5

 

[manchoa]

HI !

The problem in not YOu Mac, the problem is You Soundcard that has not enough power to render all the files. I think you try to use the internal "built in" soundcard of your Mac ? Don't. What You need is a good external soundcard. The internal one is good for playing games or listening to music only, not to render effects and multitrack audio.


Tommy

[houstonmusic]

that's certainly not too much for your machine to handle, i'd guess.
before you try a third party audio interface or external hard drive, however, please make sure you've set your buffer size higher. it's in the preferences.
it's possible that your midi tracks have extraneous data, like tons of continuous controller data, (pressure or pitch bend). that can clog things up. even a huge pile of notes can be a problem. an old midi trick is to slide each midi track a tick or two left or right of the beat grid. very small increments, of course.
i also wonder if you've got a bunch of effects on top of each track. more cpu stress there.
i can report that with GB 8 on an intel dual laptop i've easily run more virtual and audio tracks than you're having trouble with here.

This post has been edited by houstonmusic: Sat 15 Jan 2011, 17:44

[deaconblue]

All good suggestions.

One more thing to check before investing in more hardware is that your hard drive is in good repair (boot from the system DVD and run disk utility to repair the drive) and confirm that you have at least 10% of your hard drive space free (20% if possible) to ensure an adequate swap file for optimal memory availability.

best of luck!

peace.

[nebdrof]

All great suggestions, thanks.

Houstonmusic, I maxed my buffer but it still seems to randomly quit with that warning. Are there certain drum loops that require more processing power than others? I've removed nearly all of my effects from the tracks themselves.

Deaconblue (nice name, I'm from Alabama), stupid question: booting from system dvd... how do you do it? should it have come with my mac?

Thanks again!

[manchoa]

that's certainly not too much for your machine to handle, i'd guess.
before you try a third party audio interface or external hard drive, however, please make sure you've set your buffer size higher. it's in the preferences.
it's possible that your midi tracks have extraneous data, like tons of continuous controller data, (pressure or pitch bend). that can clog things up. even a huge pile of notes can be a problem. an old midi trick is to slide each midi track a tick or two left or right of the beat grid. very small increments, of course.
i also wonder if you've got a bunch of effects on top of each track. more cpu stress there.
i can report that with GB 8 on an intel dual laptop i've easily run more virtual and audio tracks than you're having trouble with here.

Actually - couple of audio tracks and one-two realtime effects is too much for the internal soundcard and will cause dropouts :-( You can run multiply audio tracks, but not realtime effects. They need realtime rendering processeor...

[manchoa]

All great suggestions, thanks.
Are there certain drum loops that require more processing power than others? I've removed nearly all of my effects from the tracks themselves.

Drumloops can be both audio and "real instruments". Real instruments need more "power" because they are sampled in real time. I see You use lot of real instruments in Your track. Real instrument is a virtual instrument and You use your Mac as a sampler. This means (again) realtime rendering. As the internal soundcard is not ment for this job (its only for primary recording/playback), it does not have its own processor and/or memory. So everything that in normal condition soundcard would do, no you "give" to your computer. Basically it means, that soundcard uses Your computer memory, processeor and harddisc to process all the rendering. Normally this is all done with the soundcard memory and processor. If you dont want to spemt money to a normal soundcard (if you want to make music, youll have to, sorry), then one way is not to use real instruments ! Or use them one by one. Make a track with real instrument, record it to audio and then delete the real instrument track. THen add another ect. Finally mix your song only with audio files. Ofcourse, at one point you run out of power even this way. The more you use effects, that need realtime rendering, the faster you run out of power even with only audio files. Such effects are all reverbs (the large and more complex the reverb, the more power it needs) , flangers - choruses, ofcourse all mastering effects (compressors take a lot of power from Your computer) except equalizer.
So - to some point You can use internal soundcard, if you don't use real instruments or record them to audio, then mix your tracks and bounce to single stereo file and do the mastering with the stereo file.
But better - buy a firewire or USB soundcard. This must not be a expensive profi interface. You can make your things with interface such as Line 6POD studio, M-Audio Fast track, Steinberg CI2 (very good one !) or Edirol UA (also very good). They all cost around 170 - 200 EUR (220 - 260 USD) so I think they don't hurt Your wallet.

Tommy


[One more thing about real instruments You use. As I already told you - these are sampled instruments and you use Your Mac as a sampler. It means, that all the real instruments are made from a number of different audio files that are rendered back in real time if you play the instrument. Different isntruments have different number of audio files, depending, how complex the sound is. The fingered bass You use in Your song for example, takes 44MB of samplememory (in You case memory of Your Mac) and it's made of 116 audio files ! Simple way to understand it, is that by selecting this real instrument, you have loaded 116 audio files to the memory for instant realtime playback.
Pianos, organs and all other polyphonic instruments that have long decay for every note, takes a lot of more memory. The organ You use, takes about 200MB at least.

[deaconblue]

All great suggestions, thanks.

...

Deaconblue (nice name, I'm from Alabama), stupid question: booting from system dvd... how do you do it? should it have come with my mac?

Thanks again!

cheers, nebdrof!

Yeah, you should have gotten either a computer specific disc (grey with white lettering and, I believe, Software Install or Software Restore printed on the left side) with your iMac or a Mac OS X DVD (black with a purple nebula on the face of the disc for 10.5.x or white with a snow leopard on the disc for 10.6.x).

To boot from the system or OS disc, put it in your optical drive and choose one of the following:

1) Go to the Apple in the top left corner of the screen
2) Select "System Preferences"
3) Click on the "Start Up Disk" preference pane
4) Select the DVD icon in the list
5) Click on "Restart"
6) Click on "OK"
7) Once booted, you should see a "Utilities" menu at the top of the screen
8) Click on this and select "Disk Utility"
9) Once opened, click on your Hard Drive in the left window pane
10) Click on "First Aid"
11) Click on "Repair"
12) Also, click on "Repair Permissions" once the disk repairs have been completed
13) Quit Disk Utility
14) Quit the installer (you will be prompted to quit and restart)

or:
1) Restart your iMac
2) Hold down the "Option" key
3) The unit should boot to a grey screen with icons of your available hard drives and DVD
4) click on the DVD icon and the unit will boot to the DVD
5) follow the rest of instructions from the method above starting at #7

Post back with your results. Hopefully this will get you solved and creating more music.

peace.

Attached File(s)

 Screen_shot_2011_01_17_at_6.57.59_AM.png ( 159.28K ) Number of downloads: 1

 

[kayj_prod]

There seems to be a bit of confusion here over the soundcard and what it is doing. Adding an external interface (audio I/O) will not help. The interface is merely a front end for getting audio in and out of the computer. Regardless of the interface, the computer processor is doing all of the processing. Now, on a PC things could be different depending on the software and how it is set-up. The processor speed is the only thing that will dictate how many processes you can run. On my quad core MacPro, I expect to be able to run more tracks and processes than on any of my other machines.

The only exceptions to this would be a ProTools MIX or HD system where the processing is done on PCI/e cards installed with the ProTools system. Of course, with ProTools LE or M-Powered, again, regardless of the interface, the hard work is being done by the computer processor. The other exceptions are the rare firewire/USB systems which offload some effects processing to the external device. (I forget the names now.)

One of my machines is an iMac 2GHz Core2 duo. It currently shows the kind of symptoms the OP mentions. Yet I have a MBP with similar specs which has no such problems running considerably more processes. I might have some bad RAM in there which I just need to find a moment to check, failing that, I will do a complete clean re-install. A major pain, but I just need to find the time to do it.

Hope this clears a few things up.

[manchoa]

There seems to be a bit of confusion here over the soundcard and what it is doing. Adding an external interface (audio I/O) will not help. The interface is merely a front end for getting audio in and out of the computer. Regardless of the interface, the computer processor is doing all of the processing. Now, on a PC things could be different depending on the software and how it is set-up. The processor speed is the only thing that will dictate how many processes you can run. On my quad core MacPro, I expect to be able to run more tracks and processes than on any of my other machines.

The only exceptions to this would be a ProTools MIX or HD system where the processing is done on PCI/e cards installed with the ProTools system. Of course, with ProTools LE or M-Powered, again, regardless of the interface, the hard work is being done by the computer processor. The other exceptions are the rare firewire/USB systems which offload some effects processing to the external device. (I forget the names now.)

One of my machines is an iMac 2GHz Core2 duo. It currently shows the kind of symptoms the OP mentions. Yet I have a MBP with similar specs which has no such problems running considerably more processes. I might have some bad RAM in there which I just need to find a moment to check, failing that, I will do a complete clean re-install. A major pain, but I just need to find the time to do it.

Hope this clears a few things up.

okay - so take a rig of, lets say 10-15 "real instruments" an try to play them back via internal soundcard of Your mac. YOu cant, can You ! Now connect a USB or Firewire interface (from one i mentioned before), and now you are running smoothly and with zero latnecy.
I think You are talkong about "soundblasters" not interfaces. Give a try and then come and say again. Sorry - I have been in computer music for almost 20 years...

There seems to be a bit of confusion here over the soundcard and what it is doing. Adding an external interface (audio I/O) will not help. The interface is merely a front end for getting audio in and out of the computer. Regardless of the interface, the computer processor is doing all of the processing. Now, on a PC things could be different depending on the software and how it is set-up. The processor speed is the only thing that will dictate how many processes you can run. On my quad core MacPro, I expect to be able to run more tracks and processes than on any of my other machines.

The only exceptions to this would be a ProTools MIX or HD system where the processing is done on PCI/e cards installed with the ProTools system. Of course, with ProTools LE or M-Powered, again, regardless of the interface, the hard work is being done by the computer processor. The other exceptions are the rare firewire/USB systems which offload some effects processing to the external device. (I forget the names now.)

One of my machines is an iMac 2GHz Core2 duo. It currently shows the kind of symptoms the OP mentions. Yet I have a MBP with similar specs which has no such problems running considerably more processes. I might have some bad RAM in there which I just need to find a moment to check, failing that, I will do a complete clean re-install. A major pain, but I just need to find the time to do it.

Hope this clears a few things up.

okay - so take a rig of, lets say 10-15 "real instruments" an try to play them back via internal soundcard of Your mac. YOu cant, can You ! Now connect a USB or Firewire interface (from one i mentioned before), and now you are running smoothly and with zero latnecy.
I think You are talkong about "soundblasters" not interfaces. Give a try and then come and say again. Sorry - I have been in computer music for almost 20 years...

I use Edirol M-16 DX USB 2.0 interface, I 'm running eleven 24bit 48KHz stereo audio tracks plus 10 real instrument tracks in real time plus FX plugins with no problem (with only 2 gig of memory on my 2.66Ghz Mac). Can I do with the built in soundcard ? NO !!! WHY - go and read my previous postings. I run Edirol FA-66 on my other mac as an audio interface and have no problems. This is the difference between a soundcard (that is, what You have described) and an audio interface.

Audio interface is a professional or semi-prefessional soundcard, that is optimized for real-time (or at least low latency) multichannel sound recording and playback. It takes the "hard work" from your Mac or PC processor to its own processor, so You are able to run more complex setups in realtime.

Go and give a try to Edirol UA-25ex for example

http://www.roland.com/products/en/UA-25EX/index.html

and you will have no problems such as You describe.