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Disk I/O very high


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I am running logic 7.1 with a g5 dual i.8 and 2 gigs of ram. all audio is on external drives. the song in question has about 40 tracks. I tried freezing 90% , but it doesnt help.
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yes, since freezing uses 32 bit floating point audio bounces. It's not magical: instead of CPU, you use disk bandwidth. It's a trade off.

 

how many tracks can logic comfortably run?

255. The actual amount, though, depends on so many factors it's hard to tell. Disk size, bandwidth, seek time, interface, CPU, RAM...

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I have found that for Rock / Pop with real drums I'm always well over 40 tracks and I had to get a SATA raid card and have a dedicated hardware raided audio drive before I didn't have to worry about the disk i/o crapping out. Now it sits around 30-50% all the time with the occasional spike.

 

In Protools you can assign a drive to a track so this does a way with the need for a raid. But for Logic SATA Raid is one of the best and cheapest solutions to your problem. There are kits to mount up to 3 extra HD's in the G5 case.

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You should definitely switch to an internal drive if you can, but this can be a bit impractical if you're moving around a lot. I would suggest you try defragmenting your disk. I know apple says there's no need to do this on macs but I have found it drastically improves disk I/O performance. Use third party software like tech tool pro. Also, use disk utility to check your external drives are all Mac formatted (Mac OS extended/HFS+). A lot of external drives are supplied with FAT32 format as this can be used on numerous OS, but I've found FAT32 seriously under performs on macs and suffers from a lot of strange bugs. I've had firewire 400 disks running at least 70 tracks of 24bit 44.1 audio. As long as they're 7200RPM disks with a reasonably good cache size and seek time this should be within their capabilities.

 

On the subject of freeze files, while the manual says they are saved as 32-bit float files if you examine the files stored in the freeze file folder they are in fact not. They are 16-bit aifs and the option to change this seems to be mysteriously missing from the preferences. But they still probably won't lower your disk traffic - since a frozen track will be playing back audio for the entire duration of your song, wheras an unfrozen track will usually have gaps in it. Freezing can be very useful but it isn't very smart!

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