Brand new MacBook Pro and still getting CPU overloads???

[kassonica]

RenaissanceMan wrote:

converters: using an m-audio firewire 410 with latest drivers

There have been known problems with M-audio drivers and M-audio is not known for writing good ones for the mac at least.

Try setting DP's work priority to Med or low and see if that helps.

Also make sure beat detection is off and turn off warn when system overloads.

Also don't run other apps at the same time if you can help it.

[kgdrum]

to me it looks like the shared fw bus for I/O and fw/drive is the problem.
FW has very limited bandwidth.
I have my FF800 on it's own bus and my 2 FW drives off a pci/fw card.
as it is I only use fw drives for archival storage,I really dont trust fw too much, my sample and tracking drives are all sata and esata.

[Eleventh Hour Sound]

You've got a lot of good suggestions here. The two cheapest would be; switch to 44.1k, and see if you have the latest driver for your interface. Then try kicking it up to 4 Gigs ram. You can add an eSata card bus card for some eSata drives. A RAID could help too. If your internal is 4200 rpm, then a 5400 or 7200 rpm replacement could be nice

[burn em]

A very cheep option would be to try running a project using only built in audio. If your problem goes away, its quite likely an m-audio problem.

[Elektroakoustika]

i also have a macbook pro but i have the 2.5 ghz version with 4 gigs of ram. This model, compared to the 2.4, also has 6mb of L2 cache instead of 3mb of L2 cache on the 2.4. I don't think that is a big deal, but it might affect your performance ever so slightly. I think the extra ram would definitely help. i have yet to hit the 4gb limit. I run a motu 828mk3 and so far haven't had any issues with that unit. But I probably haven't run as many audio tracks as you have, since my work is more with sequencing with a few audio tracks.

Now I would also definitely get a seperate esata or firewire800 expresscard 34. esata would be preferable. The macbook pro's firewire interface is only one bus so any units on either port will share the firewire bandwith. Then once you've got that go for a fast external drive. (there are a bunch of threads on drives so you can look that up).

Good luck!

[RenaissanceMan]

Hey everyone-

Just wanted to give an update... I ended up connecting the external Rocstor drive by itself to my Firewire 800 port and connecting the M-Audio interface by itself to the Firewire 400 port...

HUGE, HUGE difference in performance! So far, running my sessions fine without crashes or interruptions today for the last 4 hours.

By the way, I have taken note of all the fantastic suggestions and in the immediate future will be going ahead and maxing out my RAM to 4 Gigs as well as will look more into the eSata option. My Rocstor drive does have an eSata port on it, so it is compatible.

Just wanted to report the good news. Thanks again for the help. This forum is great!

Adam in TN

[Eleventh Hour Sound]

Thanks for the follow up report Adam! There are several eSata cards available, possibly under $70, that would be nice since your drive has eSata capability.

[stephentayler]

I have quite a nice system running as follows, it really seems to share the ports for all this stuff!!

MacBook Pro 2.33 Core 2 Duo

Traveler on Firewire

Mbox2 on USB (I have to use ProTools for some work - connected by spdif to Traveler so I can monitor both through Cuemix)

Sonnet ESATA Expresscard connected to Lacie Quad drives

Euphonix MCMix on Ethernet

running DP 5.13 (6 not arrived here in UK yet) and PTLE 7.4.2

All works very comfortably

kind regards

Stephen

[kgdrum]

Hey everyone-

Just wanted to give an update... I ended up connecting the external Rocstor drive by itself to my Firewire 800 port and connecting the M-Audio interface by itself to the Firewire 400 port...

HUGE, HUGE difference in performance! So far, running my sessions fine without crashes or interruptions today for the last 4 hours.

By the way, I have taken note of all the fantastic suggestions and in the immediate future will be going ahead and maxing out my RAM to 4 Gigs as well as will look more into the eSata option. My Rocstor drive does have an eSata port on it, so it is compatible.

Just wanted to report the good news. Thanks again for the help. This forum is great!

Adam in TN

i am glad you are getting better results but the fw 400 and 800 ,if i remember correctly share the same fw bus.
if you can add a 2nd dedicated fw bus you will get better results.

[Dwetmaster]

Hey everyone-

Just wanted to give an update... I ended up connecting the external Rocstor drive by itself to my Firewire 800 port and connecting the M-Audio interface by itself to the Firewire 400 port...

HUGE, HUGE difference in performance! So far, running my sessions fine without crashes or interruptions today for the last 4 hours.

By the way, I have taken note of all the fantastic suggestions and in the immediate future will be going ahead and maxing out my RAM to 4 Gigs as well as will look more into the eSata option. My Rocstor drive does have an eSata port on it, so it is compatible.

Just wanted to report the good news. Thanks again for the help. This forum is great!

Adam in TN

If this can comfort you, I have a 1st gen MBP coreduo (see my sig) which is slower than yours with only 2GB of RAM. I have a 7200RPM internal HD, a 7200RPM connected via esata and another 5400RPM HD connected via esata. the FW bus is dedicated to my 2 896HDs and my MIDI is connected USB.

With a slower computer than yours, DP6 runs a 54 tracks session with a lot of MW EQs and MW leveler, about 8-10 Altiverbs instances and a few other plugs. My video is streaming from the slower esata HD and my faster HD is for the Audio streaming. At 1024 buffer it runs at about 50% CPU.

That's not for braggin but that's to tell you, you should be able to achieve way better results than me...

[RenaissanceMan]

Hey everyone-

Just wanted to give an update... I ended up connecting the external Rocstor drive by itself to my Firewire 800 port and connecting the M-Audio interface by itself to the Firewire 400 port...

HUGE, HUGE difference in performance! So far, running my sessions fine without crashes or interruptions today for the last 4 hours.

By the way, I have taken note of all the fantastic suggestions and in the immediate future will be going ahead and maxing out my RAM to 4 Gigs as well as will look more into the eSata option. My Rocstor drive does have an eSata port on it, so it is compatible.

Just wanted to report the good news. Thanks again for the help. This forum is great!

Adam in TN

If this can comfort you, I have a 1st gen MBP coreduo (see my sig) which is slower than yours with only 2GB of RAM. I have a 7200RPM internal HD, a 7200RPM connected via esata and another 5400RPM HD connected via esata. the FW bus is dedicated to my 2 896HDs and my MIDI is connected USB.

With a slower computer than yours, DP6 runs a 54 tracks session with a lot of MW EQs and MW leveler, about 8-10 Altiverbs instances and a few other plugs. My video is streaming from the slower esata HD and my faster HD is for the Audio streaming. At 1024 buffer it runs at about 50% CPU.

That's not for braggin but that's to tell you, you should be able to achieve way better results than me...

Wow, that's pretty encouraging!!!

[Frodo]

i am glad ypu are getting better results but the fw 400 and 800 ,if i remember correctly share the same fw bus.
if you can add a 2nd dedicated fw bus you will get better results.

You are correct, kg. If both the 400 and 800 ports are connected at the same time, they fold into the same single 33Mhz bus which effectively renders the bus no faster than 400.

[bezzy]

Hey everyone-

Just wanted to give an update... I ended up connecting the external Rocstor drive by itself to my Firewire 800 port and connecting the M-Audio interface by itself to the Firewire 400 port...

HUGE, HUGE difference in performance! So far, running my sessions fine without crashes or interruptions today for the last 4 hours.

By the way, I have taken note of all the fantastic suggestions and in the immediate future will be going ahead and maxing out my RAM to 4 Gigs as well as will look more into the eSata option. My Rocstor drive does have an eSata port on it, so it is compatible.

Just wanted to report the good news. Thanks again for the help. This forum is great!

Adam in TN

If this can comfort you, I have a 1st gen MBP coreduo (see my sig) which is slower than yours with only 2GB of RAM. I have a 7200RPM internal HD, a 7200RPM connected via esata and another 5400RPM HD connected via esata. the FW bus is dedicated to my 2 896HDs and my MIDI is connected USB.

With a slower computer than yours, DP6 runs a 54 tracks session with a lot of MW EQs and MW leveler, about 8-10 Altiverbs instances and a few other plugs. My video is streaming from the slower esata HD and my faster HD is for the Audio streaming. At 1024 buffer it runs at about 50% CPU.

That's not for braggin but that's to tell you, you should be able to achieve way better results than me...

Wow, I guess it depends on the plugins you use but I could not run any where near what you are able to run. I was running Massive and IR1 etc.

[Radiogal]

i'm going 88.2 because a couple of 'audiophilic engineers' told me that sound quality would be marginally better if i started from there instead of 44.1. i realize it's going to be down-converted anyways for the cd, but these folks insist that what you end up with will still benefit from the higher resolution. at this point, if all it takes to eliminate my frustration is switch to 44.1, then i'm willing to do it. i was just taking some advice from some folks i trusted...

thanks again-

My experience: 48 KHz/24 bit is pro standard........ and even still less CPU hungry for your laptop..

[Tomcat]

There is another consideration.

For about 4 or 5 months (roughly Nov. 2007 to Feb or Mar 2008) MacBook Pro's did not have a TI firewire chipset in them; instead they had (I think) a Ricoh chipset. This caused a LOT of problems with pops, clicks and general bad behaviour with audio. The workaround that worked for some people was to connect the Hard Drive directly to the MacBook Pro and then the audio interface chained off the HD.

You might try connecting things that way. BTW, if you want to know what chipset is in your laptop simply install WinXP through Bootcamp, get on the web and get a copy of SIW (Systems Information for Windows, which is free) and it will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about your laptop hardware.

HTH,
Tom