Garage Band Help needed! Please!!!

OK I'm having trouble w/ GB. Every time I play back my song it will stop and say:

"This song has too many tracks, effects, or notes to be played in real-time.To optimize performance, see the 'Optimizing GarageBand performance' page in GarageBand Help."

Now I've gone under 'Optimizing GarageBand performance' and I've done the following things:

•Open System Preferences, click the Energy Saver tab, click the Options button, then choose "Highest" from the Processor Performance pop-up menu. Click the Sleep button, then turn off "Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible.
(I don't have this "highest" setting on my G4 Power Mac!!! So I can't do that!!! Any ides here?)

•Quit other open applications.
(I've done that. Didn't help)

•Mute some tracks in the song.
(Not an option. I need to here them all.)

•Turn off some effects, especially more complex effects such as Amp Simulation.
(Also not an option. I need to here them all.)

•If the song uses many Software Instrument tracks, convert some Software Instrument regions to Real Instrument regions. To learn how, see the "Tips" page.
(Don't use 'em.)

•Choose GarageBand > Preferences, click the Audio/MIDI tab, then click the "Maximum number of simultaneous tracks" button in the "Optimize for" section.
(Did it.)

•Choose GarageBand > Preferences, then click the Advanced tab. Choose lower settings from the "Real Instrument Tracks", "Software Instrument Tracks"or "Voices per instrument" pop-up menus in the Advanced pane.
(Doesn't apply.)

•FileVault can cause reading data from your Home directory to be significantly slower. To improve performance, open System Preferences, click the Security tab, and turn off FileVault, or move and keep your songs outside of your Home directory.
(Done.)

•Your computer can read data more quickly from its hard disk than from removable media, such as a CD or DVD. Copy songs to your computer's hard disk before playing them.
(Doesn't apply.)

•Some external hard disks may read data more quickly than your internal hard disk. If you have a high-speed external hard disk, try copying songs to it before playing.
(don't have one. Should I get one?!?!)

Also, I've cleared out Pics, MP3, and other big files to try and make more room, but I'm still getting this message! What should I do? Buy more RAM? Buy a external HD? Help!!! Thanks in advance!!!!!

Ibanez Strummer said:

I didn't see locking the tracks there, have you tried it? Thats meant to help performance quite a bit...

Click to expand...

How do I do that?

digitalnicotine said:

I'm not sure on this, because you're using a G4. I think your best options are going to cost you some money, and a nice little chunk of it. I'm assuming you don't have firewire 800, so you can either install a firewire 800 card, or an eSATA card, and then purchase an external hard drive for one of these options. Either of them *should* be fast enough to resolve this, but I'm not 100 percent sure they will pull it off.

Your other option would be to sell the G4 and upgrade to a G5 system. I wish I knew of a free way to resolve this, but short of going to an Apple store with your GB files burned to a DVD, that's all I can think of. Good luck.

Click to expand...

So what is a exactly is a firewire 800 card and a eSATA card and how will this help?

sorryiwasdreami said:

In my experiences with Garageband files containing over 100 tracks, the best things to do are:

1. Make sure you have a lot of ram (minimum of 2GB)
2. Keep the GB file on the local disk, not an external disk
3. Lock all the tracks by clicking the lock icon
4. Go to GB preferences->advanced->set real instruments to 64 or 255, set software instruments to 64

Click to expand...

Thanks for the info! I have an old version of GB. Not sure if I can even lock the tracks. Where is the lock icon? I have version 1.1.0