OSX users, let's figure this thing out!

[esteso]

I thought I could be a little more proactive in helping track down these problems some of us are having in OSX. If everyone could give a short report on what you\'re using GPO with, (software and hardware) if it works for you or not. (sometimes or rock solid) If it crashes, what were you doing when it crashed? Is your library on the same drive as the app. etc....

I have seen this kind of thing help by letting patterns emerge and narrowing down the culprit (or culprits)

Really don\'t want it to turn into a crabfest or anything like that. And it\'s probably just as helpful to hear a report from someone who\'s got everything working solidly (Ned!) and what kind of usage they are putting it through.

It\'s also a GREAT idea to send crashlogs to Gary. He will send them right over to NI to Martin, who\'s the top guy for this kind of stuff.

My setup:

MDD 1.25, 2GB, OS 10.3.2
Motu midi express 128 (usb)
Motu 2408mk111
Logic 6.33
DP 4.12
Spectrasonics
Reason

New drivers for the Motu stuff
Brand new install of Panther
Rock solid until GPO added

I\'ve managed to crash Logic and DP three or four times in the last few hours.

Logic crash was a full kernel panic.

In Logic I was playing back a short piece with maybe 36 instruments loaded, but only 12 or so were actually triggering from the midi files. I can\'t remember what else caused the crashes but sometimes I can just hit a button that it doesn\'t like for some reason, and that\'s it. Automation appears to be problematic in Logic as well.


DP crashes and freezes.

DP crashes when I tried to edit CC1 data in the event list. It also crashed when I tried to set up a midi device group. It also lost it\'s way to the library, but that was easily fixed.

My library resides on a seperate drive from the app. I don\'t know if that\'s significant or not but you never know (until you do!)

Also I should add that if any of you programmer types out there can read a crashlog and are willing to do a cursory examination of them, maybe we can post them right here. (bet there\'s a lot that could be learned)

So that\'s about it for now. I hope we can hear from a lot of you guys. Maybe we can get to the bottom of it.

regards
esteso

[dnortana]

GJood idea, Esteso.

My setup is very close to yours, except on a Quicksilver Dual Gig. Same OS, same apps.

Logic 6.3.3

I have two major gripes - the stuck notes (rewind while a note is playing, and it plays forever), and the multi-instrument automation problem. Both are known, and appear to be \'features\' of Logic. :-( I simply do not use Logic with Kontakt or Kontakt Player, as a result.

DP 4.12

I have no problems at all with GPO in DP, though I do wish the multiple outputs would get implemented. As it is, only outputs 1-2 appear in DP. I don\'t know if this is a Motu or NI problem.

Trond

[Ned Bouhalassa]

OS X 10.3.2 + Logic 6.3.2 + MOTU 828 MKII + Dual G5 2Ghz + 2 gigs RAM = no problems for me.

[Ed Dzubak]

Originally posted by esteso:

In Logic I was playing back a short piece with maybe 36 instruments loaded, <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">I could never get close to 36 instruments. The most I got before upgrading to 008 was 16 over 4 instances. With that, I could playback but couldn\'t record the whole lot as audio. I couldn\'t even record the violins as audio (only four instruments) without the cpu overloading.

Yesterday (after upgrading), I could play back 16 instruments over two instances fairly cleanly; we\'ll see what happens from there.

[crr]

Panther, powerbook G4 1.33 Ghz, 512 MB of RAM, cubase SL 1. No big problems, but sometimes I have the problem of stuck notes.
I reached the limit with 17 instruments playing together (a string orchestra made up with ens. instruments) and the included reverber on.
Is there anybody who works with GPO on a laptop?
Michael

[dcornutt]

Just wanted to throw this in this thread:

Obviously, the first thing on anyone\'s mind who\'s planning an OSX machine to run a RAM based sampler is ...\"ram\".

To that end, I\'d like to just remind that OSX is \"very\" sensitive to ram incompatiblities. The issues from this can turn up in any number of ways..from subtle, to severe. And it will get worse the more load you put on it. There have been more than a \"few\" people who purchased Macs with OSX who put aftermarket ram in it from the start, who have had more than their fair share of issues (apps quiting, kernel panics, etc), who tried to solve the issue by adding more ram, only to find the situation get worse.
If you have any doubts, remove all the ram but what came with your mac. Start putting load on it (doesn\'t matter how you do it), and see if it crashes or you get unexpected quit ..poof. There are ram checkers and they sometimes work..sometimes not. The best way is to yank the aftermarket ram and see if the problem goes away. I\'ll mention here, if this is the case (or bad logic board) you\'ll have this same behavior in any app. Not just GPO or etc. It will be consitant crashing across the board. You may find your machine freezes just sitting there. These are all symptoms of bad ram or logic board.

To add to that, Apple has had more than their fair share of hardware failures (QC) lately. There are people who even after removing all the ram except for the apple branded ram that came with the machine, had the same sort of behavior, who ended up having their logic boards replaced.

More than a few. And I\'ve worked on a few of them. The frustration here is, when you have the same hardware, OS revision, software revision, etc, and \"you\" have problems that the other person does not have my be worth checking some of this out.

Here\'s some other things that can cause wierd behavior in OSX and apps: the \"blue box\" or \"classic\" compatiblity environment.
It\'s set to boot at startup by default (even if you are not using it).
And, after you run a \"classic app\" under OSX the bluebox remains running until you quit it. It doesn\'t quit with the app. You can got to the \"classic\" control panel in OSX and set it to not start automatically on boot AND you can also kill it if it\'s running actively.

I recommend NOT using classic ..ever, if you can help it...specifically if you are on a dual boot , single drive system (such as a powerbook).

Here\'s some other things/differences that could be out there, Panther uses a new updated file system addition to HFS+ called \"journaling\". Journaling, works something like Disk Warrior that runs all the time. It rearranges your file system based on priority and it will auto defrag any file over 20 megs that\'s fragmented.

It will also reduce your disk response and load capability by about 10%. When you install OSX, you have the option to \"not\" activate journaling. I recommend that if you are going to use audio apps on your Panther install. You can also turn it off. (active journaling). But, regardless of which option you choose, when you install panther on a drive you have erased with the drive setup that comes with Panther install, you will note your drive now reads xxxxx hfs+ (journaling).

Some more: fonts. Many mac users, might typically have a DTP collection of fonts in their system and may be using a font utility such as \"suticase\" from extensis, etc. This is one area that I think I\'ve seen \"more\" instability from than anything else. Some of these utilities \"auto activate\" fonts and over time, the font cache gets corrupted and will cause a crash in just about any app you open. To clean this up, there are instructions from most of these font util makers on how to delete all the font cache files (whcih might be strewn about your drive in numerous folders), and deleted the font database and prefs to they can be rebuilt fresh. DeepSix is a free utility that will search for such adobe and other font cache files across drives and wack them in one shot.

The other thing related to this, when you install Panther, it does not search your drives for fonts. But, it \"will\" pull in everything in your OS9 sys/fonts folder. So, if you\'ve been hording fonts from OS9 in your OS9 fonts folder, they are now in your OSX install.
Having multiple fonts of same type or name is also a cause of problem. A bad or corrupt font as well can cause issues. If you are using a font mangement system (even the built in one in Panther) make sure you have it set to DO NOT manage system fonts. If a font util removes one of the base system fonts or replaces it with a different version sub, OSX will buck like a mustang. There are only a few base system fonts that come with Panther, but one of them is \"helvetica\" a common font. If you are into DTP you might have 4 different versions of this font. Your font utilitiy might see these as duplicates and remove or deactivate all but one. What I\'m saying is, if it\'s managing your system fonts, it may \"remove\" that font and try to sub a different helvetical font..which would cause OSX and apps to crash.

So, that\'s another area to just be wary of. Most of my studio clients run very clean systems..just panther and their needed audio apps, etc. But, some of them, use their macs for \"everything\" including a DTP business with Quark, PS, etc and about 2000 fonts on their system along with a font management utility. So, I mention some of the things I\'ve come across.

As a last bit, \"any\" USB, firewire device could be the source of trouble. If you are troubleshooting, and having problems, remove all of them you can (save the apple keyboard/mouse). Use of FW HDs has become so previlant that many people no longer even consider it a 3rd party add on. More than once I\'ve been on phone with client instructing them to remove ALL connected devices save the keyboard/mouse and somewhere down the line they mention their files are on the FW hd. Removing the HD cleared up the issues. There have been some updates along the way (firmware, etc) that have fixed some of these issues. Some people never have any issues with them. And others..seem determined to chain as many FW devices together as they can, and just consider it part of their mac and never think to remove any of it when they have trouble.

That means, hubs, everything. HEre\'s a very interesting one, client had perfectly working system suddenly go south. I asked what had changed...nothing of course. Finally I asked him to remove all 3rd party devices. That fixed it. We traced it to the USB hub...but he swore it worked just fine for months..how could it just go bad. I asked him what he had changed in regards to what hardware he had plugged in. He had removed one of the USB devices a week before to take with him on a trip..but left the USB cable plugged into the hub..with no device attached to it.

To test this, we plugged the hub back in, but removed the dangling cable. Problem gone.

It was probably the strangest issue I\'ve run across, in that regard, but I post it here to show when you get to trying to isolate the issue, make sure you unplug \"everything\"...and don\'t leave any cables plugged in. Some people do this, becuase it makes it easier to reattach the device..ie..leave the USB/FW cable lieing out etc. Be aware that this \"could\' be a possible source of conflict.

Lastly, I\'ll mention the user mantainence that you should do on your OSX system.

Reparing permissions. EVerybody has heard this one. But, what you may not know is, that most \"installers\" from 3rd party companies frag your permissions to some degree. You should always rebuilt permissions after \"every\" install of any software to be safe. And you should religiously repair them about once a week or so. Once permissions start to go wacky, folders will dim out in the finder and not be accessible, you\'ll start getting file not found errors, any sort of wierdness, that eventually, could lead to file corruption, disk corruption. Most installs you wont\' find much corruption. But, I\'ll just mention, that I\'ve seen some 3rd party installers that fragged persmission \"royally\". Took about 20 mins to repair the damage the installer did to file permissions. So, \"always\" run this. And do it religiously, it won\'t hurt your machine to \"over\" do this. (think of this as the equivilent of rebuilding your desktop file on OS9...do it, and do it often to prevent catastrophic file loss or irreperable damage)
To repair permissions: applications/utilities/disk utility.
Select the volume your OSX is isntalled on. Select the \"repair persmissions\" button. If anything is wrong, it will list it.
You can, for an even more complete job, run the utility from the OSX CD after rebooting from the CD. If you can\'t get persmissions repaired just running the utility locally, you might try this method.

To that note: I\'l mention Norton. Do NOT use anything by symantec on your mac...specifically an OSX install. It\'s just asking for it. And I\'ve had plenty of experience repairing drives and otherwise that have had Nortons running on it. They usually do more harm than they fix things. You should \'only\" run such 3rd party apps, IF you have problems and have tried all OSX means to get things up and need the files on the drive. After you get the files (if you do) using such a utility, wipe the drive with OSX install disk and reinstall fresh. Same goes for DiskWarrior, techtool, etc. They are handy in emergencies, but I would not trust them for daily maintenance. (just my experience). They chances are likely that they will cause more harm than they will fix if used over time.

Next : Cron Jobs\". These are the maintenance scripts that run every night at 3:10am on your OSX machine that clear out unused cache, rotate logs, etc. The problem is, they ONLY run if your machine is on and awake at that time. If you are like most people your machine is asleep..and the jobs won\'t run. This means, you need to run this jobs \"yourself\". There are daily scripts, a weekly script and a monthly script. Out of those, the weekly is the most intense and takes the most time..a few mins.

You have a couple of options here. One is to get a free utility that makes this easy to run them at will. I tend to frown on using any 3rd party utility for such things, but people report they work ok. The issues are, if you upgrade your OS, they may have changed some of the things about how this works, and your utility that kept your machine fresh, might suddenly make things a mess without you knowing it.

You can run them simply /manually, thru the terminal app.
applications/utilities/terminal. You\'ll see your user name/login with a square next to it. This is the command prompt.
type \"sudo periodic daily\" with no quotes and hit return. It will ask for your password. (admin password you setup on OSX). It will run very quickly and return the prompt. Next type \"sudo periodic weekly\" again, no quotes and hit return. This one will take a few mins and you\'ll hear your drives cruching away. Eventually, it will return the command prompt. Type \"sudo periodic monthly\" and hit return. That\'s it. Done.

Doing these 2 things, (repair permissions and cron jobs) will keep your OSX install fresh. Anyway, that\'s it for now. Some of this will probably be redundant for many of you. I apologise for that. And I apoligise for the long post here. But, hopefully, this info might prove useful to some who are having problems. When you\'ve confirmed that you have the same revisions of DP, GPO, etc same mac, same OS, and having all sorts of issues no one else is having? Time to start looking at some of these areas to see if you have ram issues or if your permissions are fragged or etc.

Hope that helps.

[Karl Garrett]

Trond, Just curious, are you using the Kontakt player as an AU or within a VST wrapper?
I have no trouble at all with the AU version, but the VST with Audioease wrapper doesn’t work at all for me. The graphics get all messed up, and the pointer’s coordinates don’t match the buttons and menus on the player.

G4,1.25g processor, 2g. ram, DP 4.12, MOTU 1224 audio interface with PCI324 audio card.

Also when you say outputs, are you referring to audio outputs in DP? I’m sure you know this but if you want to increase your audio outputs, make sure that you have enough available when you set up your studio size. (Setup/Configure Audio System/Configure Studio Size). Then make sure the outputs you want to use are selected in the Audio Bundles menu. (Audio/Audio Bundles). Then they will show up in the output menu for GPO in the Tracks window. I’ve never been real comfortable with this audio bundles thing. However, this may not be at all what you’re referring to.


Also remember Mac Guys, In OSX virtual memory will kick in when you don’t realize it. It’s not like the good old days of OS9. At this point things will just creep along. That’s why we need to get as much ram as we possibly can.

Esteso, This is a great idea.

Thanks,

[esteso]

trond, can you see what happens in DP if you record a track with CC1 data and then edit it in the Event list? Just erase a few bars or re-record some mod wheel stuff on the same track (merge) or change the values on a few events manually.

That\'s how I got DP to crash yesterday.

Ned, does the 828 have midi or are you using another unit for midi? I think the midi input component is particularly critical and so it\'s nice to know which ones are smooth sailing.

Michael, if you can wait until fall you might be able to get into a G5 powerbook.

regards
esteso

[IGOR]

Originally posted by esteso:

My setup:

MDD 1.25, 2GB, OS 10.3.2
Motu midi express 128 (usb)
Motu 2408mk111
Logic 6.33
DP 4.12
Spectrasonics
Reason

New drivers for the Motu stuff
Brand new install of Panther
Rock solid until GPO added

I\'ve managed to crash Logic and DP three or four times in the last few hours.

Logic crash was a full kernel panic.


esteso <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Esteso,

I have exactly the same setup as you do! Do not look any further for the culprit, it is your MOTU stuff. I did change my MOTU souncard for an RME Multiface, and I never had a Kernel crash again (use to have several per day before changing the MOTU crashcard) .

But I do still have problems while using GPO on MAC OS X, but not this one.

[IGOR]

dcornut

Thanks for thos very intersting contribution.

I did try this \"cron jobs\" procedure. here is the copy of the terminal and it does not accept any typing after this????

Last login: Tue Mar 2 21:07:21 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Iwan-Roths-Computer:~ iwanroth$ sudo periodic daily

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these two things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.

Password:


I did repair the disk privileges just before doing this

Someone does know what this means??

[esteso]

Yes it does accept typing, but it doesn\'t show up on the screen. Just type your password and continue.

Igor, I don\'t think I\'m ready to ditch the Motu stuff. It\'s too expensive for me to replace and I was getting the same crashes with the built in controller in 10.2.6. Plus most reported problems with Motu cards have to do with the PCI 324, not the PCI 424. I have the 424.

When I get a minute I\'ll switch over to built in audio and see if I can reproduce the crash in 10.3.2.

So to reiterate, in Jaguar these crashes happen with no external hardware, except one of two midi interfaces; a Motu usb unit or Griffin gPort serial adaptor. Not conclusive, but suggesting the problem lies elsewhere.

Haven\'t tested this in Panther yet. When I get a minute I\'ll switch over to built in audio and see if I can reproduce the crash in 10.3.2.

cheers

[dcornutt]

Yes, Igor,
The first time your run anything in the terminal app, it warns you to be careful what you type. The password it is asking for is your admin password you made up when you first installed OSX (the password your created for that username). and it does not display your password as you type. It doesn\'t show x\'s or dots or anything. Just type your password and hit return.

After you input the password, it will run the job. It will not ask for the password again for the subsequent commands you input for that sesssion.

The next time you open terminal, it will not display that warning again. Only ask for the password before beginning the first script.

The warning here is, that any thing you do here, it\'s done. If you choose to remove a directory, etc..as super user (sudo), it will do it from this window no questions asked. It does not \"warn\" you about anything. So, you have to be careful. That said, while the terminal window deserves healthy respect for what it can do and the power you have over your machine with it, these cron scripts are safe to run. I\'ve actually mispelled them before, and it just says, no such command. So, you are ok there.

Type your admin password and hit return. The job should start. Like I said, the first one goes very quickly. When you see your login name (btw..should not post that around), type the next cron job (the weekly) and hit return. It will no longer ask for password and you\'ll hear this one run for a few mins.

Like I said, you only get this warning you mention if it\'s the first time you\'ve used terminal window and run a \"sudo\" command (super user). It doesn\'t display this after that. But, it will ask for your password for the first entry of each session (when you open the terminal app).

Hope that helps

[esteso]

dcornutt,

that\'s amazing that there\'s a 10% difference in performance between jounalling being enabled or disabled!

I disabled it. We\'ll see what happens.

Also, can you tell me where to find the font management system built into Panther? Does it pull fonts from all OS9 systems residing locally, or just the same drive? (or even the same partition only?)

thanks

[dnortana]

Originally posted by Karl Garrett:
Trond, Just curious, are you using the Kontakt player as an AU or within a VST wrapper?

Also when you say outputs, are you referring to audio outputs in DP? ... <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Hi Karl,
I\'m using GPO as an AU in DP 4.12, not via the wrapper. But the VST version works in Cubase SX for me.
No, the outputs I\'m referring to are the multiple (in theory) audio outputs available from each instance of the Kontakt player itself - in Logic and Cubase I can route each instrument\'s audio to its own aux track for treatment. So far, in DP, I only have a single audio output from the player for all instruments hosted in that player.

Trond

[dnortana]

Originally posted by esteso:
trond, can you see what happens in DP if you record a track with CC1 data and then edit it in the Event list? Just erase a few bars or re-record some mod wheel stuff on the same track (merge) or change the values on a few events manually.
esteso <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Esteso,

It worked just perfectly normally for me.

Trond

[crr]

thanks a lot dcornut, very interesting post I just copied it!
thanks
Michael

[crr]

karl, I noticed you are working on a G4 1.25, how many instruments can you use before reaching your system limit?
This could be very important for me to know what I can do using a \"similar\" laptop.
thaks
Michael

[Garritan]

esteso,

Thanks for starting this thread. It will help in identifying some issues so they can be resolved. I sent your crash logs to NI and took the liberty to post them on the NI bug report list.

Trond, crr, the suck notes issue should be resolved with the Lobic 6.4 update and the new player (hopefully we\'ll have it next week).

Ned, with a Dual G5 - how could anything go wrong? Thanks for the report.

Ed, Glad you\'re geting better resilts with the 008 upgrade. Hopefully we can get you even better performance.

dcornutt, Wow! You wrote a book! I am going to name you our resident Mac Guru. I never considered hardware problems, bad ram or logic board as a cause of problems for some. Appreciate the input on Journaling, Reparing permissions, cron jobs, fonts and the USB/firewire devices (glad GPO doesn\'t have a USB dongle images/icons/smile.gif )Thanks so much for this exhaustive troubleshooting guide for Mac users. This helps immeasurably!

And thanks all for you help and please continue this thread.

Gary Garritan

[esteso]

Originally posted by dnortana:
</font><blockquote><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><hr /><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Originally posted by esteso:
trond, can you see what happens in DP if you record a track with CC1 data and then edit it in the Event list? Just erase a few bars or re-record some mod wheel stuff on the same track (merge) or change the values on a few events manually.
esteso <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Esteso,

It worked just perfectly normally for me.

Trond </font><hr /></blockquote><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Ok, thanks for checking it out! I\'ll go back into DP and see if I can reproduce it on my system.

You know, now that I think about it \"Kensington Mouseworks\" showed up a time or two in the crashlogs. I can\'t decipher those dang things so I\'m not sure if it means anything or not. I\'ve got the latest drivers for it but I seem to recall a conflict or two with the Kensington stuff in OS9 so it\'s worth a look>

Is anyone that\'s having a problem using a Kensington trackball or turboball or anything like that?

And conversely, is anyone running Kensington stuff and not having any problems?

OK, I\'m going to do more troubleshooting in DP and Logic with the optical mouse and see if I can avoid crashing.

BTW I\'ve had Logic up and running for a couple of hours now with no problems. The only thing that\'s changed is I installed Kontakt 1.51, plus the DFD extension (the new one, can\'t remember the number)
Oddly enough, when I installed Kontakt the infamous \"autoload not loading\" bug showed up. But I just opened a file from the \"recent\" menu and all is well. No display bug.

Weird stuff, lucky I don\'t have a real job or I wouldn\'t have time to mess around all day like this images/icons/wink.gif

cheers
esteso

[Karl Garrett]

dcomutt, excellent post. Thenks

[esteso]

Whew! There\'s a lot to digest here already. Thanks dcornutt for that fairly exhaustive report on maintenence and troubleshooting.

Later on I\'ll have a more extensive report but for now here\'s a couple of things....

I think the idea of diconnecting ALL your peripherals is a very good one. I have done it several times during this whole thing and I\'ve found that it hasn\'t made a difference for me personally. But that\'s definitely not to say that it won\'t make a difference in your case. I have been alternating between the Motu midi express 128 (8x8 usb) and a g4Port (Griffin serial-usb adaptor) and the crashes continue. However most of my extensive testing was done on 10.2.6. It may be different on 10.3.2. My gut feeling is that this won\'t make a difference. Just make sure you have the latest drivers, especially if you use the Motu stuff, which is known to have been flaky with Logic the last couple of revs before the latest version.

crr, I\'m not using GPO on a laptop (yet) but I can tell you that you need more RAM. Max it out. Also be aware that NI/DP is a aprticularly slow combination on a G4 laptop. Don\'t ask me why, but it\'s all over the Motu-Mac site. People are pissed that their brand new laptop runs about as well as a G3/500. Also the missing of outputs 3-4 etc. is a known issue. \"NI and Motu are working closely together to solve this problem\"

Ned, you are living a charmed life! Must be all that squash and fine Montreal air! I notice that you are using Logic 6.32 instead of 6.33 so that\'s a difference, although not as much a difference as your shiny new G5. Ive been bouncing back and forth between 6.31, 6.32 and 6.33 with no discernable difference.

Ok, thanks all. Keep it coming. I\'ll report back after I run a few cron jobs etc. (thanks again dcornutt___good stuff) In my case I don\'t believe it\'ll make a difference because my install of Panther is only 3 days old and installed on a fresh disk with permissions repaired after each install. Also don\'t forget you can disable permissions for any drive or partition. It seems like a good idea to me to disable this option on audio drives.

regards
esteso

[crr]

thanks, I know that I need more ram, but I\'m working on my brother powerbbok, I\'m waiting to change my ibook G3 (complitely insufficient) to see if apple updates the powerbooks to have the most powerfull model and then I will add RAM.
I\'m also working with cubase SL 1 not DP and I dont\' have problems with it.
thanks
Michael

[Karl Garrett]

Esteso, for what it’s worth, I use the Griffin gPort serial adaptor with no apparent problems. Not saying you shouldn’t check it out.

Trond, thanks. With all the DAWS out there, sometimes the language becomes a little confusing for me with each one having its own proprietary terms and only being really familiar with DP. For what it’s worth, I usually don’t do any processing on midi tracks any way. I’ll freeze each, and process the audio. Now for me that’s where the headaches start since it takes so long to freeze each track. I sure can see though how the lack of separate outputs for each GPO instrument would be a problem in live performance.


Originally posted by esteso:
trond, can you see what happens in DP if you record a track with CC1 data and then edit it in the Event list? Just erase a few bars or re-record some mod wheel stuff on the same track (merge) or change the values on a few events manually.
esteso <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">I also have no problems doing this.

[Karl Garrett]

crr wrote:

karl, I noticed you are working on a G4 1.25, how many instruments can you use before reaching your system limit?
This could be very important for me to know what I can do using a \"similar\" laptop.
thaks
Michael
<font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Michael, In my piece “The Humbling Of Job”, somewhere around the bottom of page 3 or top of page 4 on this forum, I was able to get, as I recall, 8 instances of the Kontakt player with an average of 5 GPO instruments in each. Now things got rough when they all tried to play at the same time in the climax of the piece. It never crashed, but it sure stalled, hiccupped, and became unusable at that point. Freezing and disabling some of the tracks let me finish the piece and still keep my midi data in tact. After freezing about 6 tracks, it became impossible to continue, so I copied the whole folder full of files to keep the midi stuff for reference or future use, and then deleted the midi tracks and Kontakt instances that were not deeded after freezing. Hope that makes sense since its after 5 in the morning and I haven’t been to bed yet.

As someone said above, there seem to be issues with some PowerBooks and DP. Version 4.12 did help some of these I think, but I’m not sure if you could do as well as I did in Job. As I recall, a lot of the problems had to do with the use of certain external firewire drives. I could be mistaken though. Do some reading on the Unicorn Nation forum and see what you come up with.

I wonder what Apple can do with PowerBooks in the future. Some of them already seem to get so hot. They abandoned the titanium and went back to plastic in order to dissipate heat. The G5’s, with their 64 bit processing would be even worse. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Good night all. Must ggggettt sommme sleeeep….zzzzzzzzzzz

[Karl Garrett]

It’s a beautiful new day. Wanta get into my garden and plant some peas. But first I’d like to relate my only GPO/DP problem.

After loading several instances of Kontakt into DP, and tracking a lot of midi, if I want to change my buffer settings for mixing say from 128 to 512 so that I can play all that midi back, each instance has to reload before the change is complete. Not knowing the inner workings of Kontakt or DP for that matter, I don’t know why it would have to do this. But for some reason after the reload I lose my midi channel setups in the input column of the tracks window. I’m not sure whether this is a Kontakt problem or a MOTU problem. I kind of think it’s a MOTU problem,

I’ve found a workaround by writing the setting within the track name, e.g. vn.1.Gar.4,2. Then it’s easy to reselect the info in the inputs column. Also I have closed my piece, opened a dummy file, changed the buffer settings, closed that file and opened my piece again with the midi input settings intact.

If this is the only problem I have, I’m happy and can deal with it. Of course, like everyone else, I’d like to be able to load the whole GPO orchestra into ram with 20 instances of contact, each one with eq, reverb, etc., and play them all live while simultaneously recording a 70 voice choir… the stuff that dreams are made of. images/icons/smile.gif

[dcornutt]

Originally posted by esteso:
dcornutt,

that\'s amazing that there\'s a 10% difference in performance between jounalling being enabled or disabled!

I disabled it. We\'ll see what happens.

Also, can you tell me where to find the font management system built into Panther? Does it pull fonts from all OS9 systems residing locally, or just the same drive? (or even the same partition only?)

thanks <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">When you install OSX Panther, if you have an install of OS9 anywhere, even on a sep drive or partition, it will read the fonts that are in the OS9 sys/fonts folder. The application in Panther is called \"font book\". It allows you to make \"sets\" etc. It will work ok with a modest amount of fonts. But, can frag your sys stability by dumping a whole lot of fonts into it. (just not made for that).

The performance hit for journaling mostly happens with sustained write operations. The hit for \"reading\" is less. But, it\'s still something that can impact performance. The other part of it is, because it actively manages your drive, it can impact seek time. (just depending).

One other thing I should mention, just in case, if any of you have a G5 dual, the energy saver control panel needs to be set to \"highest\"...not auto. YOu\'ll gain about 30% performance improvement just by doing that alone. The auto setting, and others, throttles down the G5 to make it quieter. On auto, it\'s supposed to increase freq as needed based on load, but it doesn\'t work. Set it to highest to make the G5 run full tilt. You \"will\" notice a difference.

[dcornutt]

This is a repost of a thread over at OSX audio.com from mfritz who is a programmer from emagic who now works at apple.
It\'s a great explanation of how audio apps work with OSX and why you see 100% on your cpu monitor sometimes..etc.

Mac OS X has two sorts of threads (a thread is sort of a sub-process inside an app): normal threads and real-time threads.

All normal threads share the CPU cycles in a simple way: everybody gets the CPU for some time (a few ms) and then the next thread can use the CPU for a while. This works great for the UI, etc. I would guess that almost all apps are doing their graphic and UI inside a single main thread. If they don\'t do anything they don\'t need the CPU (= in an ideal world 0% CPU load). With audio apps it is a bit different. Because they have to listen to audio-inputs all the time - e.g. to update the level meters - they always need some amount of CPU load for the graphics. If the graphics is hidden, Mac OS X knows that a redraw is not necessary and the overall CPU load goes down. It is an optimization to lower the CPU load, when possible. This happens when you hide the windows of an audio app with level-meters. This is the reason why the CPU load goes down when you hide/minimize the window in GarageBand. I have to do the same when searching/replacing in a specific text editor: because the text editor always scrolls to the line where it just replaced some text, it is extremely slow when I do search/replace in a big file with thousands of replaces. If I hide the window, it doesn\'t update the window anymore and it is _much_ faster. The text editor surely can be optimized for this case, but level-meters have to be updated as quick as possible, so there is no way to optimize it.

Because the UI threads can cost some CPU load, the normal threads are not appropriate for real-time processing. Think about it: a window has to be redrawn and playback stops while the redraw is happening... Not good... But Mac OS X offers an elegant solution for this problem: real-time threads! These threads have a much higher priority than the normal threads (they will be - I simplify a bit - never be interrupted by another thread, even if they take a bit longer to process). AFAIK all audio applications running under Mac OS X are using these threads for their audio and MIDI processing.

So what is happening when an audio app is running? If there are no plugins/instruments the real-time threads only need very few CPU cycles, but they still need some to allow input monitoring (with effects!). This leaves a lot of CPU cycles for the normal threads (in our case the UI and graphics). If the user adds more DSP load, the real-time threads will use more and more CPU cycles and - when the CPU load reaches 100% - the UI will become slower and slower (because the UI has no real-time constraints, Mac OS X will simply give less CPU cycles to the normal threads). You can try this in any audio app under Mac OS X: add plugins and plugins and at some point the UI will become slower and slower, but audio should still work.

The Activity Monitor or \"top\" in 10.3 only shows the _sum_ of all threads, no matter if they are real-time or normal threads. This can lead to the assumption that the CPU can\'t handle more DSP load when it already shows 100%. But in reality there is still more headroom, because Mac OS X still has the option to slow down the UI to get more CPU cycles for the real-time threads.

Here\'s something you can try. First, there are a few options that you can turn off in OSX to maximize available cpu. In dock options (apple menu/dock/prefs) turn off the animate applications opening. Select the hide and show the dock. This will make it go off screen until you need it. Holding the mouse near lower edge of screen brings the dock up. This keeps your system from having to constantly display the tranparancy, etc of the dock, AND it gets it out of your way giving more screen space.

Turn off font smoothing. This eats some resources. Your screen fonts will look jaggy, but it will use less resources. It\'s easy enough to toggle these things off and on.

Here\'s something else you can try, according to mfritze\'s explanation, if you have a full load in your DAW and you are just trying to get it to play back or record, and you are running out of resources, leave only the transport up, close the other windows, and use the transport only to hit play or record. It should give you back quite a bit of cpu (according to Mfritze\'s notes here).

That might get you through, when you need those few extra tracks, etc. Load up GPO, get it all set to go, then close all the windows and just use the transport to hit play. See if it doesn\'t give you capability to run a few more instruments.

According to fritze, the level meters, etc on audio/midi apps have to listen constantly to the audio/midi i/o to draw or redraw the screen. This takes up cpu time that could be better put to use elsewhere (ie..loading more instruments). Some apps have lots of windows open...many of them redundant, and more than a few with some sort of active metering or redrawing going on.

Effective management of your window sets can help maximize your resources for your audio/playback/recording tasks.

For those who need to use many open apps/windows, I might mention a very productive new feature in Panther (expose). If you haven\'t tried it, it\'s usually mapped to the f8, f9,f10 keys I believe (you can change the key assignment in sys prefs for expose). It will take however many open windows you have up, and arrange them in a grid..with labels so you can select the window you\'d like on top. Just double click the window you want and everything comes back up just as it was..with the app/window you selected being on top. Another expose feature is, that, when you have your entire screen covered with windows and say..need to get to the desktop quickly, one of the expose keys will make every app /window on your screen exit off screen exposing the desktop. When you are done with what you need to do, toggle the function key again, and everything goes..swoosh, right back where you left off.

It can be a real timesaver for those of you who have to work with multiple windows/apps open..and it cuts down on the mousing and scrolling (which can be slow in OSX).

The finder in panther has 3 different view options (they are buttons on the top left of any open finder window). The option are icon view, list view and mult-pane view. I use the multi-pane view to drill thru folders and subdirs. It\'s much quicker. It will also auto scroll as you drill many layers deep. The \"search\" option in upper right hand corner of finder window is amazingly fast. After you type a word in..a small gray \"x\" will appear to the right of it. The contents of your search appearing in the preview panes below. Clicking the x will close the search and return you right back to where you left off. Very handy. So, I recommend using this view for finder if you don\'t already. It makes quick work of finding or locating anything and cuts down on the mousing/scrolling.

That\'s it for now.

[crr]

thanks Karl,
anyone who is working on a G4?
thanks
Michael

[IGOR]

Originally posted by dcornutt:
open the terminal app).

Hope that helps <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">It did actually help, thank you very much for the generous help!

Esteso,

You are rigth, I do have the MOTU 324 and this is the one with the problems. I hope you will be able to fix your stuff. Nothing worst than fiddle around with computers instead of making music...

[dcornutt]

Understanding OSx, is the key to learning how to trouble shoot it. There are some books that can help you as well, but you might want to take some time exploring your OSX install to have a look around. There are prefs and certain things stored in your \"user\" folder. There are also prefs, etc stored in the system folder. Users can get corrupted.
If you run into trouble with your install, create a new user account. This will eliminate all the prefs, etc associated with the old user. If this elminates your problem, then it\'s probably something stored in your old user account folder (prefs, etc) that\'s causing it. Sometimes, just creating a new user account can clear up issues..and it\'s worth a shot. You can always delete the user account later.

Sometime down the road, we mac users will be just as familiar with OSX and it\'s foibles, and troubleshooting methods as we have been for the old Mac OS and it\'s \"shift\" key startup to disable extensions, and knowing where to look for trouble when it comes. Part of the growing pains here are in the learning curve of getting caught up with this new OS. It\'s a HUGE understatement to say that OSX is an upgrade from OS9. It\'s a \"completely\" different OS in every way. It works differently on all levels.

OSX Panther Tip for the day:

Did you know that \"Quartz\" the screen redraw system that replaces the old Quickdraw in OSX..is PDF based? Did you know that you can PDF \"anything\" to PDF in any app?

Try it: if you are reading this in OSX, go to file print in your web browser. When the print menu comes up on the lower left you will see a \"make PDF button\". What ever app your in, this is available. PDF your music scores. PDF webpages for archive. It works anywhere.

For you DTP prepress guys...did you know that hidden away under the colorsync options are prepress options for the make PDF? Just like distiller? Take a look at the \"filters\" tab under color sync. Then take a look at \"domain\" tab. If you select some options here, they will show up in the print menu under the make PDF option. Just like distiller. Take a look around. You might be surprised what you find sometimes images/icons/smile.gif

[Karl Garrett]

dcmutt, Fascinating post.

Thanks

[dcornutt]

My pleasure.

For the DP users out there:

http://www.motu.com/english/download/index.html (\"http://www.motu.com/english/download/index.html\")

Did you, when upgrading to 4.1.2 remember to install the plugins update if you upgraded from 4.0 or 4.1? Only 4.1.1 users already had these updates. But, if you upgraded from 4 or 4.1 to 4.1.2...it\'s missing some of the plugin updates. There is a seperate installer to run for those.

Also, check to make sure you have the latest MIDI driver.

I\'ll mention, the 3 series PCI card drivers have been very problematic under OSX. (for those using the PCI based systems).
The 4 series users seem to be having a lot better luck with things. Motu had an exchange program for a while. I\'d highly recommend anyone still using a 3 series motu PCI system to get the series 4 card.

[deceptivesound]

My setup:

Dual 1Ghz G4 with 1.5G RAM
Jaguar, OSX version
Pro Tools LE 6.1.2
Digi 001

Two problems.

First, GPO Studio crashes everytime I switch to the Digidesign Core Audio Driver.

Second, I can only get about four sounds running on Pro Tools before it fizzles out.

Jasper

[deceptivesound]

Heard from a friend of mine from California this morning via email. He has the same setup as mine: OSX 10.2.6, Mac Dual G4 1Ghz, 1.5 gig of RAM, Digi 001.

One exception: He also runs Digital Performer. He told me he got as many as 16 sounds from two instances of Personal Orchestra, and thought he could get more. All of this from running Digital Performer instead of Pro Tools LE, but using the Digidesign hardware via the Core Audio driver.

So it would appear that, as some people have been saying, that the problem is Pro Tools DAE-based software. But at least it doesn\'t seem to be a problem with the Digi 001 hardware.

That said, he also reports that GPO Studio crashes when he tries to run it from the Digi Core Audio driver.

Jasper

[deceptivesound]

dcornutt --

You wrote this in an earlier post:

\"Here\'s some other things/differences that could be out there, Panther uses a new updated file system addition to HFS+ called \"journaling\". Journaling, works something like Disk Warrior that runs all the time. It rearranges your file system based on priority and it will auto defrag any file over 20 megs that\'s fragmented.\"

You also wrote that you won\'t use Norton\'s, TechTool Pro or Disk Warrior.

If you don\'t use those apps or journaling, how do you defrag your hard drive?

Jasper

[UNIX_GURU]

I use:
Dual 800MHz G4
1.5 Gig RAM
OSX Server 10.2.8 (journaling and web/file services turned off)
Logic 6.3
M-Audio Delta44

Today when playing with the GPO I was able to get 23 sounds spread over 7 instances of GPO, it pooped out while recording #24.
I have not yet reached a limit of sounds I can use when I freeze tracks images/icons/smile.gif

What bugs me is GPO will pop and crackle with just a few sounds going, and sometimes it will just go silent. The midi cross-talk bug gives me trouble while recording using the mod wheel other instances of GPO will sometimes pop or do other odd stuff.

My OSX speed tip of the day, on the terminal type:

sudo update_prebinding -root /

This will help some applications startup faster.


Aaron

[dcornutt]

Originally posted by deceptivesound:
dcornutt --

You wrote this in an earlier post:

\"Here\'s some other things/differences that could be out there, Panther uses a new updated file system addition to HFS+ called \"journaling\". Journaling, works something like Disk Warrior that runs all the time. It rearranges your file system based on priority and it will auto defrag any file over 20 megs that\'s fragmented.\"

You also wrote that you won\'t use Norton\'s, TechTool Pro or Disk Warrior.

If you don\'t use those apps or journaling, how do you defrag your hard drive?

Jasper <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Here\'s some basic info for you (apple)
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668 (\"http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668\")

The OSX sys on a very large drive, would rarely (if ever) need to be degragmented whether you have journaling turned on or not, because of the way it works.

I have 2 internal drives. One of them has my OSX system on it (journaled), the other drive I use for recording/playback of audio/video/samples. It\'s a straight HFS+ drive and is not journaled. The only drive journaling might be effective on would be your sys drive which you shoudl not be recording or using for playback anyway (if you can help it). Powerbook owners of course have limited options here...but a good FW HD would be the order of the day for such cases.

The main thing to glean from this apple info is, that OSX \"needs\" a lot of space to operate in. Older systems with small HDs \"or\" if you made the mistake of making a very small partition for OSX to run in, you might see some fragementation (and poor performance I might add). In both cases, I\'d recommend a larger HD (or partition) for OSX...not to run Nortons to make up for that deficiency.

Mainly, we are talking here about a 2nd drive, used only for data/samples/ or audio/video recording/playback. Such a drive will get fragmented over time from constant recording/writing to the drive.

But, there is a simple and easy way to defrag such a volume. (ie..a non-system volume). Copy the files to your other drive.
Use disk utility from OSX to erase the drive (basically a reinitialization or high level format), then copy the files back. This will force the files to copy in sequential blocks and will completely defragment the files. It\'s much faster than using a 3rd party defrag which can take a LONG time on large HDs.
*important* do NOT drag copy yoru OSX system to another drive, it will frag it. YOu have to use a utility such as \"carbon cloner\" to move your system. Use the above drag copy method \"only\" for 2ndary non system drives that contain data such as video/audio, etc..for playback.

That said, the point I\'m trying to make is..do not run any defrag utility on your \"system drive\"..which is simply not necessary and can frag things royally. Its much less objectionable to me to use them on a 2nd non sys drive that\'s mainly used for recording/playback. However, I find the above method, faster and safer to use. (if you have the HD space to do it). The other point is not to use your sys drive for audio recording, video, etc. Get a 2nd drive.

As far as GPO goes, I doubt any of this will play much of a role in so far as impact. It\'s completely ram based, not streaming off drives, so even if you have journaling on, I would suspect the only thing it might impact would be the load times for loading up instruments into ram.

Diskwarrior is not a defrag app. It\'s a file retrieval, drive repair utility. Their defrag utilities (plus optimizer, etc) are not yet OSX compatible. Diskwarrior is handy to have around, just in case you ever have an emergency/drive failure, etc. But, you must keep it updated as well. Techtool and Nortons both contain defrag apps I believe..and the same goes for them as far as compatiblity/updtaes. ANY OSX update can render them dangerous to use. And, like I said, the copy/reinit/copy back proceedure for a 2nd drive is faster method and does not depend on compatiblity for it\'s safety.

[jon2u]

Hi,

Great thread, esteso. dcornutt you\'re a wealth of information, as well as all of you.

OT - hard drive performance/streaming on the Mac

I hope to get GPO soon and will be running it on a 1Ghz Powerbook G4, and I just ordered 512MB ram (3rd party, Crucial) today to get to 1Gb. I was going to install the GPO samples on an external Firewire drive, with the program running on the internal system. I know this will be fine for GPO.

I\'m hoping to buy a G5 sometime in the future. I am also purchasing other libraries as well.

While hard drive streaming doesn\'t affect GPO currently, I am wondering about other streaming libraries on the Mac, or let\'s say a streaming version of future Garritan libraries (Mac, not Giga).

So, the question - are external Firewire drives (on G5s) adequate to stream large quantities of samples? It was said that Firewire is too slow They are recommending SATA drives at 10,000 rpms. Certainly, this is to meet the demands of \"full orchestration\" and live real-time streaming. It must be hell on the cpu and hard drives when streaming thousands of samples — thus the current need for multiple computers with these larger libraries.

(2) if DFD on the Mac ever gets fixed, is it possible that GPO could be updated to take advantage of it? Streaming plus RAM would give us more polyphony. Or a new product?

I\'m curious as to how you guys would setup internal and external hard drives for both GPO and future streaming libraries to get maximum performance. For laptops and say G5s?

If this is OT - someone say \"IGNORE\". Thanks.

John

[esteso]

I haven\'t been able to crash Logic/GPO for the last little while. In fact it hasn\'t crashed ever since I installed Kontakt 1.51 yesterday! I wonder if this is a coincidence or not.

Also, does anyone know what this language means in the crashlog?

GPO crashlog....

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE

Logic and DP crashlog...

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS
Codes:KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS


(I\'m not shouting, this is exactly how it appears)

No takers on my Kensington mouse theory? No other crash victims that use these? No none-crashers?

Hey John, sorry, but that\'s a serious hijacking of this thread. Please post it as a separate topic.

Thanks again dcornutt, I\'m going to have to name my next computer after you!

regards
esteso

[Garritan]

Originally posted by jon2u:
if DFD on the Mac ever gets fixed, is it possible that GPO could be updated to take advantage of it? Streaming plus RAM would give us more polyphony. Or a new product?

<font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">John,

I justed posted about streaming on this thread:

http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=18;t=001427 (\"http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=18;t=001427\")

Gary Garritan

[dcornutt]

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2063.html (\"http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2063.html\")

this is a document about understanding kernel panics in OSX.
It has some basic info about exception handling, and crash log contents.

The apple developer site is FREE. Tons of info, sample code, etc.
Lots of detailed info about inner workings of OSX and the hardware. A tedious read sometimes, but might prove to be useful.

[jon2u]

Gary,

Thanks for the information on the hard-drive streaming thread. That was helpful. My max is 1 Gb of RAM but it looks like I will be able to get satisfactory performance out of it. The samples of loaded articulations was helpful. Thank you.

John

[esteso]

Originally posted by dcornutt:
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2063.html (\"http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2063.html\")

this is a document about understanding kernel panics in OSX.
It has some basic info about exception handling, and crash log contents.
<font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">OUCH!!

[Beel]

dcornutt, thanks so much for posting all these useful information. You are definitely know your Mac !
You metioned the Cron Jobs and that you try to avoid 3rd party tools. But I´d like to recommend the app \"Maintain\" to some users not willing or not feeling comfortable in using the terminal... well, you´ll need to type your password in the terminal anyway. It worked really well for me. Just make sure you use the latest version and you´ll be fine. The advantage you will have is a GUI for lots of tasks like prebinding, empty caches etc.

Best
Holger

[peter269]

FOR DCORNUTT:

I\'ve been asked to prepare a brief article on Mac compatibility issues for Film Music Magazine which goes out to composers in the industry. This is for the May Issue and I have a deadline of March 25th. I\'d like to get your input on this article and give you credit for it in print. Could you e-mail me at peter@alexanderpublishing.com ? Thanks in advance.

[dcornutt]

Peter,
I sent you a private email.

[Beel]

Esteso asked me to post this link:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/FindingProblems/Tasks/UsingTop.html (\"http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/FindingProblems/Tasks/UsingTop.html\")

It provides information about memory usage and gives short explanations about what you see when using the Top command.

Best
Holger

[deceptivesound]

dcornutt writes:

\"The main thing to glean from this apple info is, that OSX \"needs\" a lot of space to operate in.\"

How much space? And by that, do you mean free space? Is there a number or a ratio?

I run my system from two hard drives, as you suggested. But I may not have left enough room for the OSX partition. (I have two partitions on two hard drives, therefore four hard drive images show on my desktop.)

One more question. I\'ve heard a lot of Mac techs down on Symantec lately. What about its virus protection software? Surely they do that right. If not, what do you use? Maybe nothing, huh? Virus protection isn\'t all that big a deal on Macs.

Jasper

[Beel]

Jasper,

there is indeed a kind of a ratio. If you have only 10% left of your disk space, Mac OS X will get less and less happy. What happened to me (with 10.1 though), I ran out of space while mail.app compressed the mailbox. System crashed, never came back again. I had to reinstall the OS.
I am totally with dcornutt on Norton. For Virus protection I´d recommend Virus Barrier. It´s from Intego if I remember correctly.
Hope this helps.

Holger

[dcornutt]

When you are running a ram based sampler, you are most probably filling your physical ram towards capacity. At some point, your system will start paging to disk. When it does, having free space for this (along with any other varied disk operations that need to be going on), becomes \"crucial\".

Leave as much free space on your OSX drive as practically/reasonably possible. OSX can reserve and hold large amounts of space on your HD for VM,caching or other operations. If it has to do paging operations on a drive or partition without enough free space to do so, it will start fragmenting those files. You\'ll start to hear your drive clanking away as the heads slap to and fro, your machine will slow to a crawl.

It would be hard to give you some \"ratio\" as that would change depending on the size of the HD. If you have a smaller HD (like 30 gigs or less), I\'d leave as much space as possible. Just put your OSX and apps on it..that\'s it. Put your archives, files, etc on another drive. If you have a 60-80 gig HD, Id say, I would keep about 35% or higher clear. If you have a 120 or 180 gig HD, I\'d probably make 2 partitions out of it. I\'ve got 2 internal drives. My OSX drive is 80 gigs. Out of that, 40 gigs are free. I offload files and archive them if it drops down to 40% or so. Like I said, this also dpends on how much paging you are doing as well.
If you\'ve got boatloads of ram and don\'t page much, you could probably get a way with a little less free HD space. But, considering what we are talking about here, ram based sampling, I\'d guess that\'s not going to be the case for most users.

As far as Nortons, like I said, I don\'t use it. I don\'t use any symantec products. That\'s just from my own experience. (both using it and fixing macs for others who have used it).

[deceptivesound]

Okay. Let me be specific so you guys can give me good advice.

I have two hard drives. One is 80GB, the other 160 GB. Both split into two partitions. The 80GB is split into 40GB and 40GB. I run my system on one, use the other for my samples. Then I\'ve got the big hard drive. One partition is 130GB, where I run my main audio. The other is 30gb where I run a backup OSX system.

I\'m guessing free space really only matters wherever you have OSX installed. In the main OSX -- the 40 gb one -- I have 5GB free. In the backup OSX -- the 30gb one -- I have 11 GB free. Where my samples are stored has 8 GB free, and the audio partition has 32GB free.

Advice?

Also, when I use disk utility\'s First Aid, I see the following message: •If a disk has other problems, you may need to use other programs to repair it completely.

What programs do they mean?

Sorry about asking so many questions, but I rarely meet anyone who knows more about Macs than I.

Jasper
PS -- Thanks for the info on Virus Barrier. I\'ll check that out, although virus protection is not a high priority. You know why.

[esteso]

That\'s not enough free space on your main OSX drive. Most people like to leave between 33% and 50% free for swap files. Less than that and performance suffers.

People are liking Disk Warrior, tech tool or maybe drive 10 for more extensive repair work.

cheers
esteso

[dcornutt]

Originally posted by deceptivesound:
Okay. Let me be specific so you guys can give me good advice.

I have two hard drives. One is 80GB, the other 160 GB. Both split into two partitions. The 80GB is split into 40GB and 40GB. I run my system on one, use the other for my samples. Then I\'ve got the big hard drive. One partition is 130GB, where I run my main audio. The other is 30gb where I run a backup OSX system.

I\'m guessing free space really only matters wherever you have OSX installed. In the main OSX -- the 40 gb one -- I have 5GB free. In the backup OSX -- the 30gb one -- I have 11 GB free. Where my samples are stored has 8 GB free, and the audio partition has 32GB free.

Advice?

Also, when I use disk utility\'s First Aid, I see the following message: •If a disk has other problems, you may need to use other programs to repair it completely.

What programs do they mean?

<font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">First, you do not have enough free space on your OSX partition.
On a 40 gig partition, I\'d suggest you try to keep somewhere around 1/2 of that free (or 20 gigs). That should mean, the only thing you have on that partition would be OSX, plus apps, plus ie would leave some room for non audio files. I have quite a few apps and just OSX and apps takes up about 10 gigs. It should be entirely possible for you to have all your apps and OSX on a 40 gig partition and still have some room left over..and keep all that within 20 gigs leaving 20 gigs free. That would be my target. If you end up with 18 gigs free or so...good enough.

The other thing is, I would not install OS9 with this on the same partition. Just keep OSX, only\" installed on it. If you need OS9 around, then install \"that\" on the 2nd partition.

YOur DAW should be installed into your OSX applications folder. Run your apps from your OSX partition. Record to and keep your session files on the 2nd big HD. It\'s also better to keep your samples for playback on a sep drive if at all possible...esp if you are using very large samples and using DFD. In your case, using RAM based sampler, it\'s not as much of an issue since you are just loading the samples into ram (disk wise) and from there, not using the disk to stream them out.

Disk utility is good for general maintenance of your OSX drive. But, it\'s not a deep featured product like Disk Warrior or Nortons. Normally, you should not have any problems. But, should your HD unmount or you get some file corruption that causes drive issues that are beyond disk utilities ability to repair, these tools are handy to have around, just to get the drive back up and whatever files you can retrieve. From there, reinit the drive with apples drive utility and reinstall or restore anything you have to.

I just wouldn\'t use them for your general ongoing maintenance. Only use them when the apple stuff fails to fix things.

[deceptivesound]

Thanks, guys. This is very helpful info. I\'m sure I can clear out space in my OSX drive and I\'ll get to that soon. I really haven\'t had any problems with OSX so far, but I sure don\'t want any either.

Jasper