Pinwheel of death waiting for audio

[jtaubman]

Question from a novice: I am running 1 Presonus Inspire in to my iMac and 1 MIDI i/o to a giga machine. When I play/record MIDI I have no issues. As soon as I arm an audio track and try and play/record my sequence I get the pinwheel of death for a good 30 seconds before anything plays.

I have DP set to Internal Clock since there are no other options. The Inspire is setup as my default AU but doesn't appear to have any clock modes. Is this even a clocking thing?

I tested the inspire with Garage Band 2 and had no problems recording or playing back audio. I must have something set wierd in DP.

Thanks in advance for any help with this one!!

[crumps]

I'm having the same problem, and I had thought that maybe it was my hard drive being a 5400 rpm instead of 7200. Are you on an intel imac?

[Frodo]

Are either of you running virtual instruments?

[jtaubman]

I'm on a 7200 RPM.
Happens with and without VI's.

[Frodo]

External HD? Some problems can occur with streaming audio from the OS hard drive.

How much RAM? iMacs, to the best of my knowledge, max out at 2GB. You may want to check your Activity Monitor to see your page ins/outs. This is virtual memory-- where OSX calculates what to load and when. The less RAM you've got, the harder the CPU will work to page data and stream audio.

Try enabling or disabling these features to better optimize performance:

1. Automatically analyze beat and tempo (Preferences> Background processing)

2. Analyze audio files for DSP as soon as possible vs. wait until analysis is needed.

3. Lower your buffer settings

4. Check Configure Studio Settings-- activate "Prefill file buffers for Quick Start, and adjust your "delay before pre-fill" setting accordingly for better performance.

just some suggestions.

[jtaubman]

Thanks Frodo, good advice. I'll try these things tonight.
FYI: My iMac has 1.25 GB RAM and I am using an external USB HD.

[Frodo]

Thanks Frodo, good advice. I'll try these things tonight.
FYI: My iMac has 1.25 GB RAM and I am using an external USB HD.

It could be the USB... not sure, but if FW is not an option, you'll have to massage the settings until some combo works for you.

You really should consider maxing your iMac out with RAM. I would put money on RAM being the primary culprit. Almost half of what you have is being used for OSX and half of what remains is probably being used by DP and loaded audio + plugins.

[crumps]

I'm actually running with 2gb of RAM, and at the time of my problems, I got rid of all virtual instruments. I was doing some rewire work, and it worked perfectly for about 2 hours, then started lagging again.

[Frodo]

I'm actually running with 2gb of RAM, and at the time of my problems, I got rid of all virtual instruments. I was doing some rewire work, and it worked perfectly for about 2 hours, then started lagging again.

When you say you were doing some Rewire "work", what did you mean? I have Rewire in my Application Support folder, but I've never had to do any "work". I start a standalone VI and it "sees" DP. The VI becomes selectable inside DP, and that's it.

I would do an uninstall of Rewire-- and either reinstall it, or check for an updated version.

I would also watch how many instances of a VI were running at once. Do a test--- make a project and add one VI at a time. Check each time to see when playback lag begins.

Also, I wouldn't recommend running more than one or two FW hard drives on one buss. I wouldn't stream more than one VI from one hard drive at a time. If you have three VIs, run them from different hard drives.

If it's possible, run them on different busses-- FW400, FW800, SATA, or eSATA. Put your most demanding VI on your fastest buss.

Just to give you an idea, I'm running 6 instances of Miroslav Philharmonik with maybe 60 MIDI channels, plus two Altiverbs and one Ivory Piano. With a 1024 buffer, my CPU meter sits at 60% when it's not even playing. I have 8GB of RAM and I run VIs on SATA, FW800 and FW400-- different VI's on SATA and FW800. I record to FW400. I am using a 2.5 Dual G5, and it's very easy to overwhelm it.

I don't know if this helps...

[jtaubman]

Fixed!

My current project is using audio and MIDI tracks and the external USB has become a snail. Once I moved my current project to the desktop I had no more pinwheel of death. Of course this will tax my system. Time for a FW drive, Any reccomendations?