I've been doing the first full-scale recording project in Logic Pro 7.1 on my ibook over the last few days and, expectedly, have been running into some performance problems. I knew that the ibook was not a "pro" machine and that I would be limited in what I could do with it, but I was hoping to squeeze a little more performance out of it for cheap as I really can't afford a better laptop. It's the last rev 12" ibook G4 and the RAM is maxed to 1.5GB. I use firewire audio interfaces (Firepod, MOTU 828mkII) and daisy-chain an external firewire Lacie d2 drive to them to record audio to. The biggest problem I have is that after recording a take and hitting stop, it sometimes takes a few minutes for Logic to become responsive again (during which time I can hear things being written to the Lacie drive) BEFORE it even starts to draw in the wave files, which then takes another few minutes. When you have musicians in another room waiting for you to hit record again before they do another take, this can become embarassing.
If I make some decent money over the next few months doing recording, then I may spring for a Macbook or even MBP, but in case that doesn't happen, I wanted to make what I have better.
Would plugging the Lacie drive into the USB port help even though firewire is generally better for this purpose? I'm thinking that by the time you're trying to run 16 channels of audio and a hard drive through one firewire bus, you may be negating the benefits of firewire for writing large files.
What about putting the application Logic itself on the Lacie drive? Would having it run off of something other than the system drive improve performance? As a last ditch effort, will getting a certified Apple tech i.e. CompUSA to put a faster hard drive into the ibook itself void the warranty, and if not, might that help this problem? If the bottleneck is the processor itself, then I surrender my efforts, but from what I've seen in Logic's CPU meter and Activity Monitor, that doesn't really seem to be the problem. Thanks.
P.S. I should mention that I was using my 2 audio interfaces as 1 aggregate device, so maybe I just really can't expect better performance when running them that way.
If I make some decent money over the next few months doing recording, then I may spring for a Macbook or even MBP, but in case that doesn't happen, I wanted to make what I have better.
Would plugging the Lacie drive into the USB port help even though firewire is generally better for this purpose? I'm thinking that by the time you're trying to run 16 channels of audio and a hard drive through one firewire bus, you may be negating the benefits of firewire for writing large files.
What about putting the application Logic itself on the Lacie drive? Would having it run off of something other than the system drive improve performance? As a last ditch effort, will getting a certified Apple tech i.e. CompUSA to put a faster hard drive into the ibook itself void the warranty, and if not, might that help this problem? If the bottleneck is the processor itself, then I surrender my efforts, but from what I've seen in Logic's CPU meter and Activity Monitor, that doesn't really seem to be the problem. Thanks.
P.S. I should mention that I was using my 2 audio interfaces as 1 aggregate device, so maybe I just really can't expect better performance when running them that way.
