hugeeee problem please help

aramism

aramism

Member
Dec 2, 2006
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ok this is the first time this happened to me since i got my mac book pro.

i was doing my friends band a favor. they just got a new bass player and they wanted to record some songs so he could learn. so i set up a few mics in their small rehearsal space. 6 mics total. this was just to record drums and 3 guitars (they have 3 guitarists)

i have had my mac book pro running logic 7.2 pro since the summer and have never had any problems with audio. in my studio i have two firepods and have tracked drums with upto 16 tracks of audio recorded simultaneously. and like i said, not even one problem.

so i took one of the firepods and went to their studio. set up the firepod and my laptop. i got levels then i started to record. then it gave me a "core audio system overload disk too slow" error.

BOOM. pure embarrassment. i tried restarting, this and that they kept starting the songs and stopping them and i felt like an asshole. i got frustrated and yes i tried changing buffer sizes, lowered bit rate, sample rate, all that stuff. no dice. still getting the error.


then i said ok let me try to use garage band, these are just demo songs maybe i can at least record. so i opened up garage band, it seemed more stable but it still gave me error messages but unlike logic it didn't freeze it kept recording. we recorded a few songs back to back but then for some reason once i saved it the audio files just disappeared. i know i didn't delete them because there was nothing in the undo menu except undo recording. it didn't even ask me for anything. i just clicked somewhere else and boom the disappeared. i dont have much experience with garage band so maybe it exceeded the song length or whatever but i doubt it.


also i noticed that i can just record like room noise and stuff but once they started playing, and the music is very heavy and very loud since it is in a small room, but once they started playing and the guitars were going fast and chuggy, and fast kick drum and stuff like that i can see the meter on the tracks and the wavelength preview thing in the arrange window start to drag and start to hiccup. then i get the message. i don't know what this is, i'm thinking maybe the noise or something the vibrations in a small room with 3 amps and drums playing LOUD. or maybe the really fast and intense "sound" and "waves" going into the mics then into my computer and i'm guessing the more sound and stuff the more it takes to process even during recording to render a wavelength and actually write it to disk. so that is why i get the freeze during the most "notes" and "volume" i'm not an audio guru so i may be wrong. someone please help.


mac book pro specs

2.16 ghz core 2 duo
2 gb ram
40 gigs left on HD. i still have two projects im working on 10 songs each which is taking up a lot of HD space.



could the fact that the majority of my HD be full be a problem. but i've been hovering around 40gb free for a while since i have been busy with projects, i haven't had this problem.


sorry for long, disorganized, and rant of a post it's just like 2 am here and i had a really bad night with this shit. please someone help!!
 
hmm. james murphy pointed out my ignorance and stupidity for recording to my system drive. so that seemed to be the problem. i'm going to get a good external firewire drive and record on there. i think the fact that i have so much stuff compiling on my HD is causing this error. so sorry for the rant but i think i got my answer.

thanks james.


and once again sorry for the ranting "emergency" post
 
Yeah i had that exact same prob when i first started recording with my powerbook. Got a external drive, transfered project to that, no problems.
Now its only juicy plug ins that cause me grief:)
 
aramism said:
also i noticed that i can just record like room noise and stuff but once they started playing, and the music is very heavy and very loud since it is in a small room, but once they started playing and the guitars were going fast and chuggy, and fast kick drum and stuff like that i can see the meter on the tracks and the wavelength preview thing in the arrange window start to drag and start to hiccup. then i get the message. i don't know what this is, i'm thinking maybe the noise or something the vibrations in a small room with 3 amps and drums playing LOUD. or maybe the really fast and intense "sound" and "waves" going into the mics then into my computer and i'm guessing the more sound and stuff the more it takes to process even during recording to render a wavelength and actually write it to disk. so that is why i get the freeze during the most "notes" and "volume" i'm not an audio guru so i may be wrong. someone please help.
Click to expand...

I had the same problem when recording a cool old, but reeeeaaaaally loud 100 watt Marschall JCM800.
My computer gave the same sort of messages you talked about, i then put the amp and mics a little further away from the amp and all was fine.
 
odd i've never had problems mixing even with all the plug ins all over the place. i guess the more stuff on my HD the worse it gets. at least my friends were jokin around about how their music is "so heavy we managed to overload a mac" but yeah it definitely needs some earplugs or something.


i'm looking at the glyph FW800 models and the OWC mercury FW800 models. leaning towards the OWC.
 
OWC makes good FW hard drive enclosures. I have three of the mercurys' and have used them for years. But, yeah recording to the system drive is hell on your computer. And at 5200 rpm, really rough. It you can't get a FW drive, try Disc Warrior. At least it'll rebuild the drive so there's no items out of order. It'll help some. You'll have to start up from the C.D. (of course :)) when running DW.
 
no, it's not a Mac issue... every DAW warns to not put sessions files on the same drive as the system, regardless of the platform. it's not wise. you have been lucky.
 
yea i was lucky too for the last year i had thing. i never had an issue but i guess my luck ran out so it may be a good idea to do what i'm doing F0RBIDDEN. maybe you luck will run out too.

i've recorded upto 16 tracks of drums before fine but that was like literally when my laptop was a few months old and the HD wasn't as filled, and the recorded sound wasn't as intense, and like james said, i was lucky. i learned my lesson though. i'm about to upgrade my ram from 2 gb to 3gb also but i'm kind of in a limbo with that because there are conflicting theories which state that matched ram is better than more unmatched ram. there are 2 slots for ram in my MBP which each contain two 1gb modules. in order for me to max out the ram at 3gb i would have to get rid of one 1gb module and replace it with a 2gb module thus making them unmatched. and apple claims (as per a few tech support guys i've spoken to as well as documented articles and stuff both from apple and third party websites) that the dual channel feature on the MBP enables more ram to be used with matched pairs. however i've read on some other forums that that is the case mostly for video intensive applications, and some other people i've spoken to said that having more ram outweighs the dual channel performance. so i don't know, i think i'm going to flip a coin. i just don't wanna run into any more issues during sessions like that.
 
USB is too slow, some say it's not. FW is recommended. Lap Top 5200 rpm drives are too slow for audio. 7,200 or even 10,000 rpm is required. Don't let the big companies talk you into a glyph drive, unless you can afford it. YES, Glyphs are awesome for audio, but not neccesarily needed. A good 7,200 r.p.m. FW drive will do you good. Some facilities even partition the drives into 10 gig partitions. That way the drive isn't working real hard locating files. It has one 10 gig partition to work in, therefore it works better/ quicker. I have 13 drives!!! But, I do a lot of HD video and that's another thread in it's own.


Good Luck. OWC is good or you can go to Best Buy and get a FW drive there. Be careful with where you get your ram. My Bud fried a brand new G5, by getting some cheap ram and mixing it with the stock ram. Fried it!! It's now a 55 pound paper weight! :lol:

More ram you have the more soft / virtual synths and libraries you can run.... DFHS / Atmosphere / ect.
 
aramism said:
odd i've never had problems mixing even with all the plug ins all over the place. i guess the more stuff on my HD the worse it gets. at least my friends were jokin around about how their music is "so heavy we managed to overload a mac" but yeah it definitely needs some earplugs or something.


i'm looking at the glyph FW800 models and the OWC mercury FW800 models. leaning towards the OWC.
Click to expand...

How many tracks do you usually end up with? I usually end up with anywhere from 30-34 tracks. The hard drive eventually just doesn't keep up and the sound drops out.
 
when you mean how many tracks do i usually end up with do you mean in a project? because i've had upto 40something tracks in a session. i like to spread out different parts of songs and overdubs over different tracks. however when it comes to recording the most tracks i've recorded at once were 16 (all inputs of both firepods) @ 48khz/24bit and i had no problem. that's why i was so upset and confused when i had a problem with 6 tracks. but like i said those 6 tracks that i was getting error messages were very excessive amounts of noise thus more data. but i don't know, it could also be that i haven't recorded more than 4 tracks at once in a few months. and my laptop isn't even a year old so i may have gotten lucky the two sessions i used up 16 tracks. and my HD is much more filled now.
 
well I've sure learnt something today. never record straight to external or ever mixed of one. i always thought it would have problems and properly crash my computer.

that could explain why from going from 512 ram to 2gig on my PC didnt seem like that much difference. im guessing its because i'm recording and mixing from my internal hard drive.

i got a usb external, 200 gig, but now thinking i should be getting a fire wire one.

will this actualy help a shit load? coz i've always though of it like your playing from a CD or something. and that can be SLOW some times!
 
James Murphy said:
no, it's not a Mac issue... every DAW warns to not put sessions files on the same drive as the system, regardless of the platform. it's not wise. you have been lucky.
Click to expand...

Why is this? What if you have say 400 gb of free space?
Is there always other stuff going on/processing in the background of the system drive that we don't know about while working in our daw that causes things to slow down?

I thought maybe that could have been my problem with my old G4 but with my G5s 400 gb of free space and 4 gb of ram, things seem to be running smooth now...so far. I plan on getting an external anyway but am wondering about the specifics of why...
 
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