Macbook and BFD...any luck?

[buzzyb]

Just wanted to see if there are people that are successfully using the full version of BFD with pt 7.1.1 at a 128 buffer setting (or 64) on a new intel macbook (not pro). I've had little luck getting it working well enough to actually use , even on a fairly simple session. Now some history/specs...

Macbook 2.0 ghz white model with 1 GB ram (Digi 002 RACK)
Tried Both PTLE 7.1.1 and 7.1.1 cs1
Tried Both BFD 1.5.45.h and 1.5.45.j
Tried Both OSx 10.4.6 and 10.4.7
I have two Nexstar 3 enclosures, one with SATA and a 10,000 rpm raptor drive (connected with USB2) and one IDE enclosure with a 7200 8MB cache samsung drive (Connects either with Firewire or USB2)
I've tried every possible combination with these drives...putting the session on one and BFD on the other then swapping then swapping the Firewire for USB 2 etc etc etc. (also swapping back and forth between the 2 available USB ports)
I've done all of the Mac optimizations as per the optimization thread and digi manual.
I've tried pretty much every combination of single/dual processor and processor usage in protools.
I tried setting max layers on BFD to 1 and loading to ram to rule out hard disk latency.
The only unknown is the chipset of the hard drive enclosures but I am able to record 32 tracks with 5 plugins on each track at 128 buffer and 24 bit 44.1 without hickups. (on USB2 only though...with the audio drive connected via firewire with the 002 it crapped out at only a few tracks.....which is maybe where the chipset might be coming in)

So far the closest I've come is with OSX 10.4.7 , BFD 1.5.45.j , PTLE 7.1.1 cs1 , Audio and BFD data both on the raptor drive connected via USB2 on the back USB port (closest to the mini DVI connector) and ONE processor @ 99%.

Which raises q's why it runs better with only one 1 processor enabled. Even being a laptop it should still run much better than this. I will probably try 2 GBs of ram next as I'm running out of ideas.

Anyway any help would be appreciated and it would certainly help to hear if others are able to run it as I'm losing hope.


Kevin

[DigiTechSupt]

Are you sure that Energy Saver is set to Better Performance and that all energy savers are disabled?

[buzzyb]

Of course....was pretty much the 1st thing I did. Have you done any testing with the BFD plugin and macbook. If so what were your results?

[turbosynth]

I have MacBook Pro..(love it). With 002 and BFD light w/ 1 gig of RAM it really wasn't usable at low buffers. I added another gig and it is running better, but still it comes close to spiking sometimes at 128 while recording on one audio track and playing back the grooves on an instrument track. I don't have the samples on a external drive, so I'm checking the pref for "load all to RAM". I think sKot on the KVR forums says it works better when playback engine is set to one processor. It's funny what Digi TS said, my battery or power adapter menu in the top right consistently reverts to "custom" instead of "better performance". The setting doesn't stick for some reason and it does seem to make a noticable difference when set to better performance.. I just have to remember to go tick it everytime when using Pro Tools.

hope this helps,
-Turbo

[buzzyb]

Thanks turbo for the post. Are you recording the audio to an external hard drive? If not doing so would increase the performance. As far as the energy saver setting it should be set to Custom. The other 3 choices are simply "presets" of where the sliders are so if you move the sliders at all from these presets it is now a custom setting.

I've been testing the Macbook with PTLE to see what the performance is like and to find out why BFD is not working well so I decided to share some of the results for the interest of the people here.

I wanted to see how the performance compared to my PC and also see how PTLE ran otherwise so I made a "davec test" of my own which consisted of:

4 band EQ3, Compressor/limiter dyn 3, 3 Stereo sends to hardware output, 1 stereo send to internal bus on every mono audio track.

1 Stereo aux track with D-verb sent to the 3 hardware sends as well.

I duplicated the mono audio track to the limits of the computers. Results:

Macbook:
@ 64 buffer setting and 2 processors @ 99% recording to raptor drive(see initial post) on either USB port:
25 tracks @ 44.1 khz 24 bit and 12 tracks @ 96 khz and 24 bit

PC:
1 gig ram, XP 2500 processor, 7200 rpm IDE hard drives, 333 mhz bus speed.
@ 64 buffer setting , 1 processor @ max (85% if I recall correctly)

18 tracks @ 44.1 and 24 bit

So even though the PC did not perform nearly as well I had no problem running my recent session of 8 tracks of audio, BFD, and Sampletank 2 with three instruments loaded where as the macbook won't run BFD with just the audio tracks. ??? Any more thoughts Digi?

One more note of importance in my findings; once I hit the ceiling and got the increase your buffer error message I could no longer get any where near the performance. I would have to shut down PTLE and restart to get it back to normal. Any thoughts on this as well???

Kevin

[buzzyb]

Okay some more info. Upgraded to 2 gigs of ram.....made a big difference in speed of loading programs etc etc in OSX but didn't seem to help with the BFD. I could still only get my session to play for 15 - 30 seconds before the "increase your buffer setting error" so I did so more screwing around with settings and found a huge breakthrough. I changed the ram cache size to 8192 and the stream buffer size to 65536 in BFD and I actually got through the song. Played it again...no prob. I started adding tracks and pushing the system....I eventually added 21 tracks with EQ3 and recorded these while playing the 11 tracks of the original session with 7-10 plugins and BFD of course while displaying PTLE across the macbook and 20 widescreen monitor and simultaneously surfing the net on airport. I recorded for over 5 mins with no problems.... ALL AT A BUFFER SETTING OF 128. I still could not enable the 2 processors though, even with none of the extras it would play for just a couple of seconds and crap out. Here are my current specs...

2 gigs of ram. 1 processor @ 99%. BFD and Audio on separate external hard drives both connected via USB 2 (In my efforts I formatted both of these with journaling off ...don't know if this helped or not but BFD recommends no journaling on the BFD data drive)

Anyway I gotta go to bed....this not sleeping thing is getting to me ....though at least I've made some progress. I'll post more as I'm getting several weird error messages in PTLE that I haven't seen before and having problems with it locking up. Man... I switched over to Mac to avoid this....


Kevin