garageBand - hard disk too slow??

solrac

solrac

Mac Ninja
I just installed GarageBand and opened the Reflection demo song included with it. It says, hard disk too slow, or system overload, cannot play back all the tracks at the same time. Try muting some tracks. So I muted all the tracks except for Strings and Nylong Guitar solo.... still same problem!! Is there a way to get around this? Or am I just screwed? I'm on a Powerbook 17 inch G4 with 1 GB of RAM, the 1 Ghz G4.
 
Well I guess I fixed the problem by placing the song files on my external 200 GB FireWire 800 drive, which cost me $450 when it first came out. So what, that drive is like 10 times faster than my internal one???!!

That also sucks for people who are not fortunate enough to have an external hard drive like that. Is there a way to make it work on the internal drive, still?
 
Did you first play the Reflection song from the DVD or did you copy it to the hard drive? They don't play correctly from the DVD... guess it's just too slow.

I've got an old G4/400 PCI upgraded to a 500, and it plays ALMOST all those G4-G5 tracks flawlessly. On two or three of them, I have to mute one or two instruments, but they all play fine! I copied the loops to an internal 7200RPM hard drive connected to an ATA/100 PCI card, so there shouldn't be any disk issues involved.

I see you've got a quad-G5 there, so computer speed shouldn't be an issue... ;) Seriously, what kind of computer are you trying to play it on?
 
I got the same thing on my 1.25Ghz, 1GB RAM, 5400rpm drive. I had everything installed on the HD. Maybe we need 7200rpm drives?
 
If you're doing stuff with audio then it's good to have as fast a hard drive as possible but with a recent Powerbook I would have thought it could cope with anything GarageBand could throw at it. Usually that sort of stuff happens when you try to use lots of virtual instruments and effects at the same time but that's more a processing thing, I wouldn't have thought that it would get stuck with the hard disk with something like a demo track. I'd like to get my hands on it and see how it performs, after all, it's based on a pretty solid program.
 
ElDiablo... I'm on a Powerbook G4 1 Ghz, 1 GB RAM (which I wrote in my first post). Based on all the replies, I would expect a fix from Apple.

But then again, it does work fine from my LaCie External 200 GB Firewire 800 HD. But if THAT was required for garage Band, Apple would have needed to make that super clear all over the place!
 
That 'Reflections' is a demo, perhaps there's simply some corruption in that demo file. How does GarageBand work when creating a new project, any performance issues then?
 
Same problem for me on a 12" PB G4, even if I'm only recording one track. I'm gonna try my FireWire drive, but this sucks.
 
solrac said:
ElDiablo... I'm on a Powerbook G4 1 Ghz, 1 GB RAM (which I wrote in my first post). Based on all the replies, I would expect a fix from Apple.

But then again, it does work fine from my LaCie External 200 GB Firewire 800 HD. But if THAT was required for garage Band, Apple would have needed to make that super clear all over the place!
Click to expand...

The hard drive in your Powerbook is only 5400 rpm at the most, so that may be why you're seeing the inability to play those songs with a lot of tracks and effects.

I think since I had the loops on a 7200 rpm drive connected to a true ATA/100 interface was why I could play most all of the sample songs. Some of them did stutter a little bit, but that could be chalked up to my slow machine. I think SoundTrack is a lot more dependent on the speed and throughput of the hard drive rather than raw processor power, although the processor does play a role in the performance of the app.
 
Well, that would be if the program was written to load entire songs into memory -- we don't know how GarageBand was written, so we can't say that it should or shouldn't be able to do something like that.

Still, GarageBand needs constant access to the hard drive to play all the instruments and loops -- they're all individual files on the hard drive, and they all have some processor-intensive effects added to them (open up the info window on an instrument and you'll see that four or five effects are applied to it by default).

This is all speculation, as I don't know how GarageBand was written and don't know the exact way it processes the files. It just sounds like hard drive speed is a major factor in getting multiple tracks with multiple effects to play, since a lot of people with portables (where the hard drive is significantly slower than in a desktop machine) are having similar problems -- even with superfast machines with oodles of RAM.
 
I've found that a few Apple packages (Garageband being one) run like a dog with half a leg if you've enabled "FileVault". This is because they store all their data (by default) in your home directory and, if you've been mad enough to trust your home directory to the tender care of FileVault, the resulting perfomance is crap.

iMovie is another culprit - it captures to the home directory and it all goes wrong with FileVault enabled.

If you've got it enabled - try disabling it and you may find that Garageband works fine (this worked for me).

Dave.
 
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