Instrument storage/ logic crashing

[Rosie]

Hello,

I am having a lot of problem with my logic being slow, freezing and crashing all the time. I bought a new apple mac book pro 2019 last year with a intel core i9 2.3GHz processor. 16GB memory. I have started making a few larger (but short) projects with about 50 VST tracks... Logic was crashing all the time because I was storing all my projects and instruments on a slower external hard-drive. Someone then suggested I should buy an SSD hard drive which was meant to make it faster. I am still having the same problem... about 5 minutes in it continues to crash. I have tried to start transferring some of my instruments over to my internal hard drive but unfortunately i have only 500GB of storage on my laptop.

 

Is there anything you could suggest? I have the Samsung SSD T5 1TB which I was told would make my transfer speed much faster so my logic wouldn't crash. Is there something faster I could buy? I know to freeze the tracks but it wasn't helping either. Is it best to freeze green or blue? Or to export track as audio? but I haven't finished altering the midi. Or should I throw my laptop out the window?

 

Thank you.

[des99]

When you say "crash", do you *actually mean* "crash", or do you mean "Logic stops playback because it couldn't process everything it was asked to do in realtime", which is a very different thing.

 

When you playback your projects, the first thing to check is your activity meters, to see whether either the CPU, or the disk activity (or both) is under load. This will help you optimise your resources to improve the situation.

[Rosie]

Suddenly everything freezes in playback and not in play back. Doesn't matter what I'm doing it can't handle me even opening an instrument. The CPU was very high before I bought this SSD but it's still freezing all the time now. I can't be in the project for more than 5 minutes before it freezes and i have to turn the whole computer off.. what would you suggest I do?

[des99]

That sounds more like a hardware issue than a software one, if the whole computer just freezes and needs to be turned off. Perhaps you should think about taking it to an Apple Store and getting Apple to have a look at it?

 

Is it overheating, if you're stressing it hard for extended periods of time? I know some of the earlier i9's had problems with not enough cooling.

[Rosie]

I thought so also. I took it to Apple 2 days ago and they did some tests and said it was all fine. But it is overheating really badly and it was when I first bought it. Will an external fast SSD card help? They said there was nothing wrong with the hardware... but I am not convinced. It is overheating a lot.. but I haven't used it in a few days and tried on my project again today and it's freezing every 5 minutes or so

[des99]

If it's overheating, it's doing so because you are working the processor hard, for extended periods of time, and that's what's generating the heat. No, drives or SSD's won't help, because it's not the disk that's generating heat, it's the processor (ie running plugins and software instruments).

 

This being the case, you've got two main options - increase the cooling, or decrease the load on the processor. The best way to reduce the processor load is to use less plugins, freeze instruments, bounce instruments to audio files etc and generally lessen the amount of work the processor has to do in realtime, and lessen the amount of times you're stressing the processor hard.

 

As far as increasing the cooling goes - raise the laptop off it's base, allow free air flow, perhaps use an external fan or cooling solution (if you're working on headphones you can get away with this perhaps).

 

The bottom line is laptops are great and powerful, but they aren't really designed to work at 100% CPU for extended periods of time like rendering video all night long or continuously running hundreds of plugins for hours at a time - the cooling systems just aren't designed for that, there's not enough space to really give the laptops proper cooling.

 

Having said that, five minutes of playback before it overheats sounds... very bad. Is your CPU meter topped out? What instruments are you running?

 

If your work is vital, and overheating is an issue, and you can't use less resources or freeze stuff in your workflow, you might want to think about getting a more powerful desktop computer system, perhaps.

[Rosie]

Thanks for your detailed reply. Which is the best freezing option? The blue or green? I tried to do that previously but didn't make things any easier. I'm running plug ins such as spitfire audio so they are very high end plug ins which would require a lot of CPU. I'll bounce some of them to audio but it's hard when you are still in the process of editing midi etc.

 

Would a 32 GB be better than the 16GB should I have bought that? Or what desktop would you suggest? That gives the most power?

 

Thanks again for your answers

[des99]

The Spitfire stuff are sample libraries, so they are probably less CPU intensive than things like synths, but of course, they add up if you are using a lot of them.

 

You should freeze in pre-fader (green) mode, not source only, as you want to freeze the plugins on that channel as well as the instrument. But a lot of this depends on your projects - there's no point freezing things that aren't using much CPU.

 

You'll need to get the CPU meter up, and turn tracks on and off and get a feel for which instruments, and plugins, are the most heavy CPU-wise, and direct your resource saving efforts to those first, for the biggest performance wins.

 

Yes, juggling resources is a pain for the workflow of course - but it's something you do out of necessity, not out of choice, to keep working. Like I say, if your projects are regularly outstripping your computer resources, you might want to invest in a higher-end system, like an iMac Pro.

 

RAM doesn't change how hard you are working the processor - however, if you are using a lot of sample based instruments, more RAM is usually better. But I don't think this is your problem.

 

But it's difficult to give you specifics, as I don't know exactly what you are using in your projects. As I say, the thing is to use Logic's performance meters, and turn tracks on and off and get feel for your heaviest CPU culprits, and start there when it comes to optimising.