My LPX 10.0.7 suddenly has major CPU issues

Hi ppl,

I've always been able to make pretty full featured, plugin heavy tracks using just my MBP i7 (see signature) and Logic X and before that LP9, with heaphones using just the Mac's internal soundcard. Of course I've been forced to bounce stuff when the plugin count gets too high, but that's all and well.

As of about a two or three months ago ago, sometime after updating to 10.0.6, I can hardly work at all. Logic can't seem to handle anything anymore and will crap out and start to crackle and complain even in freshly started projects that contain no more than two or three instruments - sometimes for example just two or three instances of Retro Synth will give me the "system overload, The audio engine wasn't..." or "Error while trying to synchronize audio and MIDI, Sample rate 30966 recognized" error messages.

The CPU meter will max out completely when playing, and hover around the 50% or 60% mark when no music is playing. I was hoping 10.0.7 would fix it, but things may even have become worse...or not.

I've been trying to scientifically test different scenarios to determine the point where Logic can't take it anymore, but I always end up giving up, as it's all a bit random. What I do know is this:

1. Nothing new (that I can think of) was installed on my Laptop around the time problems started.

2. Kontakt is out of the question, I'm posting a screen dump of a project that uses three 17mb instances of Kontakt with no effects added.

3. The combination of Xfer Nerve and and Sonic Academy ANA seems to be a bad combo, even with just one or two of each loaded.

4. Activity Monitor shows Logic taking up 28% of CPU during error message, then slips back to 18% when Logic is stopped.

5. Running Logic with no other software running except Mac OS seems to make no difference.

6. This is probably all in mind, but older tracks I started on before the problems arose seem a little more stable then new ones. (ignore this if you're into hard facts)

Well, that's where I'm at right now. This is sucking all the fun out of making those Laptop tracks that I later take to the studio and never finish. And bringing work home so I can tell my family I NEED to sit on the sofa with heaphones on doesn't work anymore either.

So please, does anyone have a clue? Or a reasonably scientific method of testing this out so I can determine if it's sudden hardware (memory?) issue, or someting else?

Any help would be a big help.

Thanks

How much free space on system drive?

How much free space on system drive?

 

Hi there.

About 100 GB free space on a 500 GB drive.

I feel your pain.

I had the same problem earlier in the year and after much fruitless investigation and pondering I finally opted to completely wipe and rebuild my system drive. Tedious, but this (mostly) fixed the problem, although I will very occasionally get weird CPU spikes while in LPX, which go after I either quit and restart LPX, or restart my iMac.

Hope this helps.

Rz

2010 2.93GHz Intel Core i7 iMac , 16 BG RAM

OS 10.9.4, LPX 10.0.7

I feel your pain.

I had the same problem earlier in the year and after much fruitless investigation and pondering I finally opted to completely wipe and rebuild my system drive. Tedious, but this (mostly) fixed the problem, although I will very occasionally get weird CPU spikes while in LPX, which go after I either quit and restart LPX, or restart my iMac.

Hope this helps.

 

Yup, it's painful alright. I'm not really looking forward to wiping the drive and authorizing hundreds of plugins, so I kind of see that as a last, last, last (and so on) resort. What bugs me is that the problem more or less occured one day out of the blue. So I'm still hoping there's a fix...or at least some way of finding out what's causing it.

How about just reinstalling Logic first, being sure to delete any/all of its' preference files also. New ones will be created.

You could make a list of any particular preferences you like, so you can configure the new install to your liking, including any custom key commands you are using. Actually you could just keep a copy of that one, I would think.

I had tried all of the above, to no avail. It seemed that my basic system (in some unknown, weird, perverse way) had become corrupted over the course of a few years. Reinstalling the system was the only thing that worked - reauthorising plugins was onerous.

I've read (somewhere) that that reinstalling the system every couple of years is a recommended maintenance procedure. OK if all your plugins authorizations are on iLok!

Best of luck.

Rz

While this is probably a less likely explanation, you may want to at least check to make sure that your default audio sample rate for new projects didn't get changed to something much higher than you were using before. If that value somehow got changed upward (perhaps by corrupted preferences), it could certainly cause newly created projects to start to lag severely with only a few tracks. (It probably wouldn't be an explanation if your preexisting, once-fine projects also have started acting this way, though.)

I just ran into this the other day myself, not via corrupted preferences, but from loading an older LP9 project, being puzzled why LPX was choking badly on it, and then finally checking and realizing that for some silly reason (probably by mistake) I'd recorded that one project at 176Kbps rather than 44Kbps. Ouch! For a few minutes there I thought my LPX installation had gone belly-up.