Hello everybody

My Setup
Powermac G5 1,6Ghz/1,25gb ram/OSX 10.4.11
Behringer FCA 202
GB v 2.0.2

The Situation:
A gb Project with

• 1 audio track; no instruments no plugins no nothing

• 1 instrument track rock drum kit 20 measures long

causing to stop playing back/record giving an error message that basically says "content of project too heavy for you computer to run" and the suggestion to check help file containing a list of things you can do to optimize GB's performance.
I only have this sporadically. Sometimes everything goes without a hitch and I can have

What I have done (to no avail) so far:
*Done all the things that's suggested in the help file to optimize GB's performance
*Checked activity monitor. The shown percentage CPU usage doesn't correlate with the periods where the issue occurs. for instance, when my G5's got "it" the issue would occur while CPU percentage would indicate no more than 35% and having no other apps running. At other times the issue would not occur while the activity monitor shows 65% CPU acitivity from GB alone and having other apps running.
*Tried running GB from external drive, tried opening the project file from external hard drive all to no avail.

it is being suggested to me that I try running GB and playing back while using the sound card built-in to the mac. at the moment GB is doing fine, but later today or tomorrow the issue will reoccur as it has been going on for more than a week now and then will be good time to test that. My guess is that it won't make a difference though.

So the issue doesn't appear to be CPU related hence what ive said about the activity monitor.
Tried logic express and shows identical behaviour to garageband apart from that Logic Express shows a core audio system overload error message (error code -10011)
And yes, I have checked the audio->system performance thing and the CPU gauge hardly shows any activity.

Allri

Cheers and thanks for reading!!

Hey Allri,

Since it doesn't appear to be a CPU issue, I'd look to your RAM (1.25 GB on a system pushing Mac OS X v10.4.x AND Garage Band is cutting it a bit close) or more likely your hard drive.

How much drive space do you have available on your disks? If it is less than 10% of formatted capacity then this will cause you performance issues with the virtual memory swap file being written too often.

Also, check your directory structure (Disk Utility, repair disk) to ensure that it is not damaged.

SInce it is occurring in both GarageBand and Logic Express it is pointing to the system not being able to handle the load of your project as opposed to a problem specific to GB. Luckily, Logic Express' error might give us a bit more insight into the issue.

For more info: Logic Core Audio System Overload article in Apple's K-Base.

Best of luck!

peace

I've had the same thing happen on an iMac with GB 2, 1 gig of ram, using a Motu 896, with 2 LaCie external firewire drives. I did all the troubleshooting you've tried. Usually doing a restart fixed it- but when that didn't work anymore I dug a little deeper...
What fixed it for me was to use Techtool Pro. I used another firewire drive with 10.4.11 system cloned on it to boot my iMac music slave from, and ran the directory and disk optimization tasks from there.
Holy Cow! it took about 30 hours to defrag my files and disks! Even though percentage wise there was enough "room" for my new files to fit, the fragment mayhem was screwing things up.
I haven't seen that error message since I defragged. I'll be more regular about disk housecleaning after that hellish weekend!