GarageBand struggles on 2018 Mac mini

[russell_314]

I'm no musician but I was playing around with GarageBand. I opened a MIDI file I downloaded and wow it took my 2018 Mac mini with i7 and 32 GB of RAM down to a crawl! After a minute or so of it giving me the beach ball it played it but at almost 29 GB out of my 32 GB of RAM and about 3 GB of swap file used. Is this something more for the Mac Pro or maybe I just need more RAM? No other programs were open and I even tried this right after restarting. I've ran three VM's at once and other crap open and it barley flinched but it seems GarageBand is it nemesis 😂

 

[aarond12]

32GB of RAM and it effectively used it all? That must be one hell of a Garage Band production. Even the ones that Trent Reznor posted didn't take up that much RAM. You're right -- in this case, more RAM is needed.

 

[jackerin]

How many tracks and what instruments were loaded? Keep in mind that it's not using MIDI instruments, but audio samples for many of the instruments, which will need to load into the RAM.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Unless there's something wrong with your Garageband and/or macOS installation... this is not normal or expected for Garageband. Garageband is an "every Mac, every user" app. 32 GB RAM is more than the vast majority of Garageband users possess. (Now, if you were talking about Logic Pro X, Garageband's professional "big sibling"... 32 GB might be considered inadequate.)

It's far more likely this has something to do with the MIDI file. It's certainly possible for someone to create a MIDI that demands far more resources than the average system possesses. Download some other MIDIs and see how they run.

 

[russell_314]

Thanks for the replies. As I said I'm not a musician so I don't have knowledge of how it works. I downloaded a 74 kb MIDI file of "I shot the sheriff" and it wanted to open with GarageBand by default so all I did was play it. I forgot it had a pop up saying "Disk is too slow. (Prepare)" and I had to click OK. I don't know where it would list how many tracks. It's an interesting program so perhaps I'll go on YouTube and figure out how to mess around with it.

I was just surprised because I've never done anything that seemed to strain my computer in any way close to that. I noticed the CPU usage wasn't high so I'm guessing the RAM was the issue. Perhaps it was just that particular file.

I attached some screenshots if that might show anything.

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Okay I tried another file and GarageBand is using less than 1 GB and running it with no issues. I'm guessing that file was just too much.