Performance problems 002 Rack W/ Powerbook G4

[tomdiek]

Hello,

I am having major performance issues with my Powerbook G4 and the 002 Rack. I have a loaded session....25-32 tracks using lots of EQ's and Comps reverb etc. Also 8-10 midi Channels in Sampletank. Is this just too much for the Powerbook to handle, or are there standard optimization settings that someone can hip me to that will help? Any information is greatly appreciated.
Specs:
Powerbook G4 1.67 17" Display 1.5 G RAM 100G HD OSX Tiger
002 Rack 7.0

Tom

[Slim Shady]

That sounds like it would probably be a little more than that computer could realisitcally handle. One of the main culprits is probably Sampletank - where is the Sampletank library located? If you have 10 channels of Sampletank and they're all pulling their samples from the internal drive on the powerbook, you'll definitely take a performance hit there. Laptop drives aren't super fast (usually 4200 or 5600 rpm) and don't have big buffers, so you should unload any sample data onto an external drive (something seperate from what you're recording to) if you're going to be using that many channels on a consistent basis. Increasing your buffer size in PT can help with that a little bit, but it'll make it very hard to track any new MIDI channels if you're working at a 1024 buffer.

Reverbs are also a big CPU hog, if you've got more than one in a session, you're probably over 50% of your CPU right there.

You can open the ProTools "System Usage" window to get a better idea of where it is exactly that your system is taking the biggest hit, I'd imagine you're probably pushing both the disk performance and the CPU pretty hard with that big of a session.