Figured I'd post this in the audio area rather than Mac Apps.
So I've been having regular issues with my MacBook Pro and ProTools 10. I bought the top of the line store model 15" MBP in January 2011, it was shortly before they had a refresh with newer chips. It has a Quad Core i7 2.8 GHZ intel chip, 4 GB RAM, and a 500 GB hard drive, running the most recent version of Lion.
I used to work in Logic as I do a lot of composing in my basement studio with virtual instruments, but I recently made the switch to PT10 in January because I want to get familiar with the industry standard DAW as I get more into tracking at studios and mixing projects. At home I am usually using a couple tracks of Amplitube 3, a vocal track or 2, and one track of EZ drummer in my composing sessions (maybe one or two tracks of a built in PT synth)- I constantly get CPU overloads and glitchy noises during playback/ MIDI editing. Up until now I've attributed these overloads to PT not being able to handle virtual instruments efficiently.
However, I'm now getting these overloads all the time, even today where I was laying a simple 2 mic drum track down to an existing backing track on it's own channel (RME Babyface interface, typically recording at 48k). I am using minimal plugins here, some parallel compression and a bit of EQ on the drums, not more than 5 or so plugins simultaneously.
Is this normal given my CPU's supposed processing power? I have PT set to only use 3 cores of the CPU, with a max of 80% (I read in the latest protools update read me that you can overload your comp if you allow more). Buffer size of 512. Would more RAM help this? I can install up to 8 GB, 4 GB installed currently. I've also been getting drive errors, even though I'm running off of an external 7200 RPM drive formatted in MaxOSX Extended (Journaled). I also had a bouncing to disk error today and had to up the buffer size to be able to bounce a simple 3 track mix. Something doesn't seem right here, any suggestions?
So I've been having regular issues with my MacBook Pro and ProTools 10. I bought the top of the line store model 15" MBP in January 2011, it was shortly before they had a refresh with newer chips. It has a Quad Core i7 2.8 GHZ intel chip, 4 GB RAM, and a 500 GB hard drive, running the most recent version of Lion.
I used to work in Logic as I do a lot of composing in my basement studio with virtual instruments, but I recently made the switch to PT10 in January because I want to get familiar with the industry standard DAW as I get more into tracking at studios and mixing projects. At home I am usually using a couple tracks of Amplitube 3, a vocal track or 2, and one track of EZ drummer in my composing sessions (maybe one or two tracks of a built in PT synth)- I constantly get CPU overloads and glitchy noises during playback/ MIDI editing. Up until now I've attributed these overloads to PT not being able to handle virtual instruments efficiently.
However, I'm now getting these overloads all the time, even today where I was laying a simple 2 mic drum track down to an existing backing track on it's own channel (RME Babyface interface, typically recording at 48k). I am using minimal plugins here, some parallel compression and a bit of EQ on the drums, not more than 5 or so plugins simultaneously.
Is this normal given my CPU's supposed processing power? I have PT set to only use 3 cores of the CPU, with a max of 80% (I read in the latest protools update read me that you can overload your comp if you allow more). Buffer size of 512. Would more RAM help this? I can install up to 8 GB, 4 GB installed currently. I've also been getting drive errors, even though I'm running off of an external 7200 RPM drive formatted in MaxOSX Extended (Journaled). I also had a bouncing to disk error today and had to up the buffer size to be able to bounce a simple 3 track mix. Something doesn't seem right here, any suggestions?
