Current Powerbook 15inch + Garagebnad

[editerik]

Hello all,

I mm hoping for a speed bump in the PB 15 inch model and am wondering if any current PB 1.5 owners can let me know how many software insturment tracks I can expect to play back with out issue?

Also, does playing back from a firewire drive improve performance in the above scenario.

Please advise.

 

[frenetic]

Hello all,

I mm hoping for a speed bump in the PB 15 inch model and am wondering if any current PB 1.5 owners can let me know how many software insturment tracks I can expect to play back with out issue?

Also, does playing back from a firewire drive improve performance in the above scenario.

Please advise.

Ok I can't tell you exactly how it will perform - I have a 1,33 ghz PB with 768 mb of ram, 64 mb video card, but I might give you my experiences. I find garagband quite slow, it all depends on what software instruments you use (e.g instruments that use lots of reverb are quite cpu intensive). This being said, I can get roundabout of 6 or 7 tracks to run simultaneously. As your song gets longer GB will have more problems of keeping it up.

There are some tricks to improve performance, however:
1. Minimize the panel that contains the volume slider - one way or another this is very hefty on cpu usage.
2. Once you have a finished software instrument track, bounce it to an audio track (just drag your "midi" file to an audio track and GB will convert it to an audio track) - audio tracks are much easier on your cpu since GB doesn't have to calculate in real time reverb, chorus etc...

All in all I hope that the new Garageband will significantly improve cpu usage, because I find it barely usable if you want to finish an entire song - for rough sketching GB shines, but finishing a track is often difficult and requires "economic thinking".

Hope this helps.

 

[hesitaliandad]

i can't tell you exactly how many software instruments you can use without issue, but i have a 1ghz powerbook, and i have never had an issue with recording or playback even when i have a ton of stuff going on. so the 1.5 should be fine. just make sure you have plenty of RAM. don't know about the firewire drive. hope that helps, albeit somewhat vague.

 

[johnnyjibbs]

I don't have any problems with it on my 1GHz PowerBook, although I agree that performance could be better.

However, GarageBand 2 (what you'll be using) is supposed to be better at performance anyway (especially as they say you can have up to 8 simultaneous audio tracks recording, and I'm assuming that's not just available to dual 2.5GHz G5 users) and GarageBand 2 also introduces a 'freeze track' feature (locking each track) which, when turned on for a track, mixes it down to the hard drive, hence freeing up processor power (you can unlock it to make changes at any time). So you should be fine.

 

[dswoodley]

bleah! My PB starts seriously choking after about 10 tracks. My coworkers dual g5 runs it fine with several more tracks

 

[editerik]

Thanks everyone for the help. As soon as they speed bump the PB, I am in.

Take care!!!

Erik