High CPU Usage when commencing recording

[bayswater]

That would be nice. I feel like OS X used to be a lot leaner, and was optimised for audio and video work. Their push to being a cloud services provider has meant some of this leanness has been lost.

I'm just tired of the constant upgrade merry-go-round. Either don't upgrade and risk security vulnerabilities, or upgrade and risk breaking compatibility and introducing new bugs!

Amen.

[mikehalloran]

That would be nice. I feel like OS X used to be a lot leaner, and was optimised for audio and video work....

That has never been true but if you want to go memory lane (did you ever or is this something you read on the internet?) no one is stopping you from picking up a G4 for free—I’ll give you one. Load it up DP 5.13 over OS 10.4.11 and there’s plenty of music to be made. No one says you have to modernize and no one cares if you don’t. Ahhh, the joys of swapping RAM to disk (early G4’s had 2G RAM; later dropped to 1.5G).

The Commodore Amiga 2000 was optimized for video thanks to Brad Carvey‘s Video Toaster hardware which kept the platform alive a lot longer that it would have otherwise.

I’m guessing you don’t understand how jettisoning 32 bit code makes the Mac OS leaner, meaner etc. similar to the PPC purge 7 years ago.

...Their push to being a cloud services... bla, bla, bla,,,

What’s next, telling the youngsters to get off the lawn?

[HCMarkus]

My approach: Pretend your studio computer is a hardware DAW... assemble a solid combination of hardware and software and don't change it. Don't surf the web or open emails from unknowns on the studio computer. Only upgrade every few years or when something great comes along.

The challenge is deciding what "great" means.

A couple of years ago, for me, it was a 4k display and Modo Bass.

[seedylee]

That would be nice. I feel like OS X used to be a lot leaner, and was optimised for audio and video work....

That has never been true but if you want to go memory lane (did you ever or is this something you read on the internet?) no one is stopping you from picking up a G4 for free—I’ll give you one. Load it up DP 5.13 over OS 10.4.11 and there’s plenty of music to be made. No one says you have to modernize and no one cares if you don’t. Ahhh, the joys of swapping RAM to disk (early G4’s had 2G RAM; later dropped to 1.5G).

The Commodore Amiga 2000 was optimized for video thanks to Brad Carvey‘s Video Toaster hardware which kept the platform alive a lot longer that it would have otherwise.

I’m guessing you don’t understand how jettisoning 32 bit code makes the Mac OS leaner, meaner etc. similar to the PPC purge 7 years ago.

...Their push to being a cloud services... bla, bla, bla,,,

What’s next, telling the youngsters to get off the lawn?

Damn straight they should get off my lawn!

It's funny, because things like Amigas and Atari STs are making a comeback for MIDI sequencing due to their rock-solid timing. This isn't because of superior software, but more that the operating systems were so comparatively simple that it was possible for DAWs to have finer control over timing.

Hardware sequencers and working "out of the box" is also making a comeback, and I guess one has to ask why are people going back to tiny LCD screens and fiddly knobs out of choice?

The latency for MIDI going in and out of DP using a MIDI Express XT over USB on an i5 iMac can be more than 6ms, which is absurd. Meanwhile, there's a process running on my Mac chewing up system resources called "videosubscriptiond", which I have no idea what it does and can't be easily disabled. Why?

I'm all for removing 32-bit binaries from application packages, and can certainly see the benfit in doing so. However I see no reason to remove 32-bit application compatibility from 64-bit versions of OSX - what performance improvements will be achieved there from removing the thunking translation layer? It's not at all like the transition from PowerPC to Intel and Rosetta - modern Intel CPUs natively support both x32 and amd64 instruction sets, there is no software emulation required, just API thunking. Will MOTU's own CueMixFX and Clockworks even run on the next version of OSX considering they are 32-bit only at this stage?

[mikehalloran]

We’ll know the answers to all of that seen enough.

[magicd]

I told the doctor that if I tried to record 128 simultaneous tracks at 96 kHz with ProVerbs running live on each track, DP sometimes crashed.

The doctor told me to stop trying to do that.

Either something is broken or you have reached the limit of what your configuration can do.

You can test to find out.

Be thankful I can't find my Yoda haiku translator...

Dave

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Doctor, please tell me
Tell me what is ailing me,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

[seedylee]

I told the doctor that if I tried to record 128 simultaneous tracks at 96 kHz with ProVerbs running live on each track, DP sometimes crashed.

The doctor told me to stop trying to do that.

Either something is broken or you have reached the limit of what your configuration can do.

You can test to find out.

Be thankful I can't find my Yoda haiku translator...

Dave

I'm attempting to record five stereo tracks at 48khz with no plugins on a 24GB i5, using MOTU's own hardware with MOTU's own software - I'm not sure how much less I can do!

It still looks like there's a big CPU spike when commencing recording which doesn't occur with Cubae, but disabling Apple Photos has helped a lot.

Just wondering if there are any other common optimisations for DP I might have missed? As I say, it's just at the start of recording, after a few seconds it settles down.

I had even wondered if it might be related to APFS, but using a HFS formatted RAM risk didn't help either.

[bayswater]

Just wondering if there are any other common optimisations for DP I might have missed? As I say, it's just at the start of recording, after a few seconds it settles down.

There are a couple of settings mentioned in the Getting Started manual that are in one or more parts of the Setup menu . These sometimes seem to make a difference -- I don't know why, but there's nothing lost in trying them out.

[seedylee]

After a fair amount of stuffing around and deleting my Digital Performer preferences, I'm pleased to say it's running pretty well now! I'm able to achieve usable results with a buffer size of 64 samples, which is great. Hopefully I can maintain this level of performance.

The direct hardware monitoring feature works great too.

Thanks everyone for your input.

Still a few things left to fix: my MIDI Express XT seems to keep losing the connection with the computer and needs to be restarted; the same MIDI Express XT is also corrupting some SysEx messages; my Mackie-compatible controller's jogwheel doesn't work on DP 10 (but does on 9.5); and Korg Audio Units aren't showing up.

It's certainly a process!