Am I Missing Something?! Mbox Mini, Mac Mini, Shockingly Bad
Hi,
I hope someone can help as this is driving me crazy. I have a 3 month old Mac Mini 1.83ghz Core Duo with 80gb and 1gb RAM. Coupled with this I have an Mbox Mini with PT 7.3.1. Now, when I run PT I get so little performance out of it before it chokes it's unreal! For instance, my current project has:
8 Stereo Tracks 24 bit
2 Instrument Tracks (Click and Xpand)
2 Aux Groups
and the following plugs: 2x BF76, 1x Sonalksis TBK, 1x Amplitube, 1x Sonalksis TBK2, 1x Dverb, !x Sonalksis SSV315 Comp, 2x T-racks EQ, 1x Medium Delay and 1x Expand/Gate
Not a whole lot really, and many of the tracks are just dry.
Now I've considered this may be a disk issue, especially with the laptop drive in the Mini, but there is little audio here (each track is currently a 30sec loop bounced from another program) and I have a friend who used a g4 tiBook to make audio intensive glitch jungle without issue. Furthermore the disk meter in PT shows no problem and doesn't go into the red. I also run the audio from an external USB2 drive anyway.
So it seems to boil down to a processor or memory issue. The CPU should be about the equivalent of a 3ghz PC, give or take, and with multithreading, more capable. But my previous machine (Athlon 64 2ghz, 1gb Ram, etc..) could take triple that including convolution reverbs and still not fall over. The iMac G5's I have also used have taken more punishment than this Mini. As for memory, I know 1gb can nowadays be regarded as minimum but it's not like I'm using multi gigabyte ROMplers (something incidentally I could do with the Athlon)!
Much as I like my Mac and want to learn to like Pro Tools, I'm at a shocked loss as to just what is going on here.
FYI, I've got a good install of OSX, up to date and with no rubbish preloading on boot. I use onyx regularly and run no other programs whilst using PT. My drive has at least 50% space and are formatted with extended. I've also followed the guides to switch services and bits off to help it run better.
The error code is -9128 and the buffer is set to 2048, CPU to 90% and DAE Playback Buffer to Level 4. Can anyone offer any advice? Is it me, my Mac or anything else?
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