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 track 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 (I've also read a lot of posts here supporting that).
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 you can fry your processor 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?
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 track 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 (I've also read a lot of posts here supporting that).
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 you can fry your processor 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?