Optimization Tips

[Ace of Dubs]

Note from admin: Please read through the whole thread to have different opinions on those tips before applying them!

 

To my knowledge, the best way to eek performance out of your machine is the following:

 

1. Reduce Monitor Colors

Unlike graphic work, audio production does not require millions of colors. Go to System Prefs and change Monitor Color settings to "Thousands"

 

2. Use Small Screensaver

The bigger file size your screensaver, the more resources it eats up. My Desktop is a 1x1 pixel image which is stretched to fit and weighs in at a whopping 43 bytes. My system loves me for this.

 

3. Keep the Dock simple.

In the Dock system preference set Minimizing use to Scale effect, uncheck Animate opening applications and uncheck Automatically hide and show the Dock.

 

4. Close Dashboard Widgets

Even though you don't see them, they are there consuming your resources. Open up Activity Monitor and you can see exactly how much RAM and CPU these little guys use up. If I am in online mod, I have at least 6 of these running. But when I Fire up Logic, my dashboard stays empty.

 

5. Free up RAM

If you have been running other programs, simply quitting them won't free up all your memory, as chunks of it stay "inactive". Clear your RAM with a Restart, then run Logic alone so it can hog as much memory as it wants.

 

6. Free up your Hard Drive

Keep at least 35% of your hard drive empty. OS X is constantly paging out swapfiles and doing all sorts of invisible work that is hampered by a cluttered disc. It's also been proven that discs kept close to full capacity tend to die sooner!

 

7. Maintain your Hard Drive

Repair permissions, run routine scripts and clear caches. One of my favorite prgrams for this is Cocktail.. http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.html. It is also advisable to Defragment your disk once in a while. I use iDefrag http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php ...not free but worth the $$$ sonce it is the best defragger I have encountered. DiskWarrior also does a fine job.

 

8. For All You Insomniacs

if you have a late night recording session that might run until 3:00 AM you should use the Cronnix utility ( http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7486 ) to reset the "maintenance schedule" to another time (like 9:00 AM) so that the system doesn't bog down trying to record audio tracks while running "auto-maintenance".

 

9. Turn off Sharing

Sharing files, folders and printing with other computers on the network is something you don't need during the recording process. Sharing keeps additional system resources busy, potentially pinging other machines on the network just to let them know your machine is there. While it's smart to keep the Firewall turned on at all times when connected to a network, both Personal File Sharing and Internet Sharing should be turned off for system optimization.

 

10. Mixdown Buffer Size

When all your performances have been recorded and you are mixing down the track, give yourself a bigger buffer. What you lose in latency, you gain in performance.

 

That's about all I got for now. Feel free to contribute more tips

 

Ace ------> out

 

Sidenote: I did a gig last week at an ad agency (i graphic design on the side) and I found out they had their own customized version of OS X. Their IT department had somehow dug into the code, re-written some of it and optimized everything for use with their programs. I really did feel the difference too. Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator were FLYING!

 

I wonder if anyone out there has done something similar for audio production. Hmm...

[MagicMoon]

Nice Tipps and Tricks

 

u think an optimized version of OSX would also be possible for audio application??

 

best regards

[j]

sure i herd that os x works best in millions

[Ace of Dubs]

sure i herd that os x works best in millions

 

You are the first person I've heard this from. So either most of my friends in the production industry are misinformed or you heard incorrectly.

 

In my head it makes sense that the less visual data the OS has to crunch out, the more resources it can devote to other tasks. This is why I set my colors to thousands and run ShadowKiller on my machine...

 

http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/shadowkiller

 

In my working experience, I do notice a significant difference from when I was running millions of colors, a big desktop image and all the additional eye candy the comes with OS X. Trim away the fat and you get a faster beast.

[j]

i know what ur sayin, i thort that too.

the jist of what i remember was that > mac os x was designed to run in millions,

thus being in hundreds or thousand actually slowed it down.

 

anyway its just what i think i remember

probably im wrong

[Ashermusic]

Certain plug-ins. ie. Altiverb if my memory serves me, require it to be set to millions.

[Ace of Dubs]

Certain plug-ins. ie. Altiverb if my memory serves me, require it to be set to millions.

 

Really? Will the plugin not run at all in thousands?

 

This is just bizarre...why would an audio plugin need million-color fidelity? It's not like you are going to print your Altiverb!

[Ashermusic]

Certain plug-ins. ie. Altiverb if my memory serves me, require it to be set to millions.

 

Really? Will the plugin not run at all in thousands?

 

This is just bizarre...why would an audio plugin need million-color fidelity? It's not like you are going to print your Altiverb!

 

Have you seen Altiverb? When you choose an IR of a cathedral i.e. it has moving pictures of it.

 

Altiverb will not allow you to choose all the presets and simply does not work properly unless your Mac is set to millions. At least through Altiverb 4 unless they have changed it in Altiverb 5.

[Suges]

i know what ur sayin, i thort that too.

the jist of what i remember was that > mac os x was designed to run in millions,

thus being in hundreds or thousand actually slowed it down.

 

anyway its just what i think i remember

probably im wrong

 

No you're right, it does run slower if set to anything less than millions. Most of Ace of Dub's friends in the production industry are misinformed. The science behind this is the word-length (16-bit color/24-bit color/32-bit color) if you want to look it up. Very very old graphics cards though maybe benefit from lower color settings.

 

As for the rest of the points...

 

#2. I think Ace means "wallpaper" not screensaver. The size in memory your wallpaper uses = the size of the image itself + negligable overhead. Since most wallpapers are less than a MB, you'll be saving about a MB. But of course if you use some 300 MB uncompressed tiff as your wallpaper, well that's not cool.

 

#3. Dock effects do not affect system performance unless they're in action. So, if you have a slow computer and you minimize a program with the genie effect turned on, your computer will slow down for that half a second, then return to normal. Any graphics cards that support Quartz acceleration though (all G5 towers, some laptops) offload this processing to the graphics card so it has negligable effect on your system's performance.

 

#4. Absolutely correct. Dashboard widgets retain the RAM they need even when dormant, but they don't (or just barely) use CPU time while dormant. Go into the Terminal and type 'top' to see what kind of resources they're using, and accordingly trim them down.

 

#5. Absolutely correct. Only run Logic by itself for maximum performance.

 

#6. This is true and very important. Mac OS X falls apart when you don't leave enough space on your drives. The accepted figure is 20% on the system drive or at least 10 GB.

 

#7. You should maintain your drive. This means repairing your system permissions after each install of an application or OS upgrade. Running DiskWarrior or TechTools once a month can catch file corruption and save your drives from complete disaster (although this happens very rarely, it DOES happen; and you do not want this to happen). You do not need to optimize your hard drive for any reason if it's been set to "journalling" mode (in fact, you can't). Most systems are set up this way, but if yours isn't, then yes, you have to optimize often.

 

#8. These services won't run unless your computer is idle, so it shouldn't interrupt your work. More important are the services that won't run at all unless you turn your computer off regularly, and a lot of power users never do. Look below for tips on that.

 

#9. True, although they resources they consume aren't much unless you're actually transferring data. Still, turn 'em off.

 

#10. Good point. You should be able to squeeze noticeable processing power out of your computer when you jack up the buffer size (at the expense of latency).

 

All in all these points seem to be geared towards studio users with REALLY slow or out-of-date computers. I'm only chiming in here because there's a whole lot of misinformation going around in the professional music industry and it trickles down to regular users too. How 'bout some power user tips here. Everybody chime in with your thoughts.

 

#1. REASONABLE EXPECTATIONS: You simply can not get top performance out of slow and/or old computers. The best you can do is Ace's 10 tips up there and a few more I've heard of, but even then, you're maybe getting two more virtual instruments or five more audio tracks out of it. A lot of people moan about this on the boards. It's like complaining how come your Hundai can't go from 0 to 60 in 4.5 seconds...even though you lowered it, you took out the stereo to reduce weight, etc. Son, it's a Hundai. You want performance, you need a better computer. That's all there is to it, and there's nothing arrogant or snobby about this. If you're buddy told you Cubase performs "so much better" on the same system, or GarageBand can do twice as many instruments...use them instead. Because what we're talking about here is Logic Pro. And Logic Express IS Pro minus a few softsynths and some arbitrary limits of the amount of this or that you can have...but it still requires the same hardware to work well.

 

#2. THE ABSOLUTE BEST WAY TO INCREASE PERFORMANCE: (Besides getting a faster computer of course!) Increase your RAM. You will notice large, measureable, substanstial performance increases when you increase your RAM. Serious music production requires 2 GB or more.

 

#3. STORAGE SEPARATION: You should be using at least two drives for music production. Your system drive is where Logic and all your plugins reside. Your secondary is where you record all your audio and save your projects. If you're going all the way, hook up a third firewire drive and put the sound banks for your sample library-based plugins on the third drive, and finally, power users can try to divide their sample library-based plugins between two drives based on frequency of concurrent usage, meaning if most of your songs always have Ivory and Elektrik Piano loaded, put Ivory on one drive and Elektrik on another.

 

#4. EXS MANAGEMENT: You can use the Project Manager or even better, EXS Manager, to organize your sample libraries so that all of your samples don't have to be on the system drive. You can also use aliases and do it manually. CDXtract, as noted, is an AWESOME app for converting all your libraries to EXS format. I still find EXS the most stable software sampler in Logic, even though it's fugly and outdated.

 

#5. SYSTEM MAINTENANCE: OS X runs a pile of Unix scripts every time you turn on your computer...some run every day, some weekly, some monthly. CronniX doesn't let you access these since 10.4 I believe (I think Tiger doesn't use cron anymore for those tasks). Instead, use OnyX and manually trigger those scripts (unless you turn off your computer every day; in that case it's not necessary).

 

#6. JOURNALLING: Be sure your hard drives have journalling turned on (and are formatted Mac OS X Extended of course!) if they're not already. Anyone who says they perform worse than unjournalled drives does not know what they're talking about. Learned papers published by doctors of computer science are to be trusted far more readily than your buddy who runs the hip hop studio in his basement and has one beat signed to his high school's rap group. If anything, journalled performance is equal, and can be greater in some cases, and more importantly it negates the need to optimize your discs.

 

#6a. ODD THINGS A GWAN: If weird things start happening randomly to your computer, do the usual things: reset, check permissions, reset PRAM, maybe even go into Open Firmware, check external devices...one thing you should never have to do is reformat your hard drive and reinstall the OS. That's typical Mac-user "I don't know anything about computers so I'll just reformat my hard drive" thinking. If none of the usual things work you should run TechTools or DiskWarrior to check for data corruption (which you'll usually find in these situations). This corruption MAY be caused by a bad drive, but more than likely are being caused by problems with other hardware in your system...probably your RAM, possibly your logic board. Have it checked out if you're not familiar with hardware. How does this directly apply to Logic (besides the obvious)? When your computer's in this state, your Project Manager database will often become corrupted and Logic will crash every time it starts. Leading to...

 

#6b. BACKUP YOUR LOGIC DATABASE: Or at least, know how to delete a corrupt one so your Logic will start again. The database is located in ~/Library/Preferences/Logic/PM Data and is called LogicProject7. You should write an AppleScript to back this up every once in a while or, if you don't really care, just go ahead and delete this if it's corrupt, Logic will make a new (empty) one next time it starts. Which leads us to...

 

#6c. BACKUP EVERYTHING! Everybody recommends this, and no one does it. Let this be your motivation: you know who doesn't regularly back up their work? Amateurs. People who will NEVER be successful in music. If you think about it, you'll understand why. Computer failure is a CERTAINTY. Computers are not simple reliable appliances like toasters (as much as Apple wants you to think theirs is!). Your computer CAN and WILL fail when you need it the most (i.e. when Dre finally calls and says, "Yeah we'll take beats 1 and 4 from your demo CD, send the parts by 5."). BACK UP YOUR s#!+! Use long-term storage media (which cheap CD-R's are not). Do not write anything on the media itself, write it on the accompanying case. Keep backups in an insured safety deposit box or, at the very least, a fire-resistant box (there is no such thing as a firePROOF box).

 

There's a lot more but let's start with this.

[Ace of Dubs]

Great post Suges! Thanks for clarifying some of my points. I will be sure to share this info with my friends.

 

Adding to your list I would say there are probably 2 more things you can do to get an added boost

 

1. Whenever your system exceeds its memory, OS X writes "page-outs" to a "Swap File" This means that hard drive space gets used as RAM as the OS writes invisible files to your disc. I have 2 GB of RAM so this only happens when I am in the mastering stage of production or am running too many plugins, but I do feel the performance hit when it does. The system slows down because it only has one head to read/write information and it has to travel between your track and the swap file.

 

If you put the the Swapfile on a separate drive on its own partition (5 GB partition is enough), you will notice a big difference Now you have TWO drive heads doing your grunt work, and since the swap file stays in the same place, the second drive head stays parked right above it and OS X doesn't have to scramble around when you page out. www.macosxhints.com has info on how to do this. It requires a little bit of mucking around in the terminal so if that scares you, then it should! You can cause irreperable damage to your system and files if you are not careful so make those backups before you try this.

 

2. The quickest way to upgrade your system is with RAM, but another often overlooked investment is in a fast hard drive. Pay attention to RPMs! My laptop was on sale with a 5,400 RPM hard drive and this is simply not fast enough for pro audio. I had the Apple Store fit it with a faster one and paid the extra $100. It is best to have your system, apps and samples running off of hard drives with at least 7200 RPM.

[JasonO]

wicked tips fellas, esp suges....its too bad a lot of the lessons in music production making come out of actually making the mistakes, sometimes more than once....

 

well....

 

i'm gonna stop my projects for the next day or two to back-up my last six months

 

end transmission

[miaba]

A quick question from the new guy: I'm running a 1.67mHz powerbook with a gig of ram. I'm stronly considering re-installing osx with less applications if it will help logic in anyway. My questions are: should I make two separete accounts, one exclusively for logic? Do programs such as idvd, imovie, effect logic's performance simply by being on the hard drive? My main uses for my powerbook are word processing, web browsing, itunes, and of course logic. Any thughts on the topic are definetly welcome, thanks!

[SubFunk]

great tips surges...

 

but i disagree out of own experience and that of dozens of other people i know of using MAC OSX and logic for daily pro work. about the journaling issue...

 

surges wrote:

 

#6. JOURNALLING: Be sure your hard drives have journalling turned on (and are formatted Mac OS X Extended of course!) if they're not already. Anyone who says they perform worse than unjournalled drives does not know what they're talking about. Learned papers published by doctors of computer science are to be trusted far more readily than your buddy who runs the hip hop studio in his basement and has one beat signed to his high school's rap group. If anything, journalled performance is equal, and can be greater in some cases, and more importantly it negates the need to optimize your discs.

 

 

for any drive containing the OS YES defenitely turn journaling ON, very important indeed!!

any drive which acts / is used only as a pure data drive for samples audio recording, etc.

turn journaling OFF, the performance is much faster. and you can squezze more simultanious tracks for recording at the same time out of the drives...

 

but that is jsut my experience and testing after having trouble with journaling my data drives, then i saw dozens of articles in british audio mags... about switching it of for data drives, ONLY not for the OS drive!!! did the change and voila no problem since, ever......

[Suges]

turn journaling OFF, the performance is much faster. and you can squezze more simultanious tracks for recording at the same time out of the drives...

 

but that is jsut my experience and testing after having trouble with journaling my data drives, then i saw dozens of articles in british audio mags... about switching it of for data drives, ONLY not for the OS drive!!! did the change and voila no problem since, ever......

 

Yeah I've read all the same articles. When I tried this myself I was not able to squeeze more tracks out of the drive, all the studios I work at don't bother. I'm VERY wary of the "wisdom of audio mags"...let's not forget a lot of these mags, back in the early 90s, used to publish monthly shootouts between different brands of minidiscs. You'd get bullshit like: "While the Maxell had a deep and round bass response, we found the crisp mid-section and overall transient response of the TDK discs to be more pleasing for the ear." Finally when it had to be scientifically proven to these "experts" (what the rest of us already knew) that there was no sound quality difference between brands--and OF COURSE there wasn't, it's f$@%ing 1's and 0's, and how could "experts" not know this?--the magazines quickly got rid of their MD reviews, reassigned the experts in question to review other things, and never published any of the reader mail regarding the issue.

 

In any case, I'm strictly interested in techniques which are quantitatively tested, not "this guy told me". You can tell I have a hard anti-expert bias, I apprenticed in studios for years and realized a lot of the knowledge is passed-down lore which is either wrong, outdated, or the result of trial-and-error instead of just actually figuring out the science behind the problem and solving it that way. Talking strictly about the technology side of course, most of the knowledge you pick up regarding how to mix, record, mic, etc, is solid gold.

 

ANYWAYS, I propose a test! Let's see if this one is right or wrong once and for all. Let's set some parameters and run this test. I'm going to say right now: there has to be at least a FIVE track difference between journalling and not-journalling to be considered significant, anything less than that is not worth losing the benefits of journalling. I say what we do is create a project with 100 audio files running simultaneously...that's it, no plugins or effects of any kind, just audio...and make sure it's all muted. Put the project on the testing drive, press play and starting unmuting tracks one by one, see how many you can unmute before Logic starts choking. Then try again on the same drive, but unjournaled. See what the results are. NO looping though: Logic caches part of the audio files in memory, you gotta play the whole track through, gotta be at least a minute long.

 

Let's try this.

[SubFunk]

hi suges, i totally agree with your post / statement.

 

you see i admit that i am a full nerd when it comes to computer issues, anything IT is complete chinese to me....

 

i am the happy guy when logic and peak performs the wayu i want!!

that's the progs i do use mainly for my work (at least in my own facility, in hire studios i can't choose sometimes...)

 

i had problems with error messages during recording sessions and got rid of it since i turned journaling off, i don't argue that it is generally better, it just worked in my case...

and yes i did got about 4-5 tracks more out without error messages... (i use 7200rpm seagate barracudas for recording... (mhh.. dead silent, that's why i like 'em...) and never had a single problem with any of my drives itself since several years and after turning journaling off....

 

but that's just my case.

 

if anyone has still some sugestions about enhancement, please let us know, it's always good to hear user experiences, rather then theory...

[SubFunk]

hi suges, i totally agree with your post / statement.

 

you see i admit that i am a full nerd when it comes to computer issues, anything IT is complete chinese to me....

 

i am the happy guy when logic and peak performs the wayu i want!!

that's the progs i do use mainly for my work (at least in my own facility, in hire studios i can't choose sometimes...)

 

i had problems with error messages during recording sessions and got rid of it since i turned journaling off, i don't argue that it is generally better, it just worked in my case...

and yes i did got about 4-5 tracks more out without error messages... (i use 7200rpm seagate barracudas for recording... (mhh.. dead silent, that's why i like 'em...) and never had a single problem with any of my drives itself since several years and after turning journaling off....

 

but that's just my case.

 

if anyone has still some sugestions about enhancement, please let us know, it's always good to hear user experiences, rather then theory...

 

and suges, please what is the actuall advantage of journaling, cause i don't know!!!!!!

[Vankarius]

To disable spotlight and dashboard to preserve resources see below,

 

Cheers Vank

 

**System Preferences & Settings to check:

 

Appearance –  Disable ‘Smooth Scrolling’ (may not make much of a difference, but could help)

 

Dock – you can turn ‘Magnification’ off if you want to.

 

Security – File vault – make sure it’s off.  Select ‘Disable Automatic Log-in’

 

Energy Saver – everything should be set to ‘Never’

also, under ‘Options’, set processor performance to ‘Highest’ NOT ‘Automatic’ 

( http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86612 )

 

Display - matching resolution and refresh rates) also check that the resolution is native for flat panel(s)

 

Screensaver – none. Also disable any ‘Hot Corners’

 

Accounts – Fast user switching turned off.

 

Users – make sure that they have only admin users.

 

Software Update (and Automatic Upate for QuickTime) – Both should be turned off.

 

Sharing – All options could be turned off.

 

Speech – Could also be disabled.

 

Universal Access – Both options set to ‘Off.’ Also, since OS X added the ability to create shortcut keys for almost any action or function, make sure that the Universal Access settings are not set to use any used keyboard shortcuts.

 

Login Items (located under ‘Accounts’) – you should keep this list as clear as you can.

 

Date and Time – Make sure that it’s not automatically setting itself.

 

Dashboard/Expose – for safety sake, set all options to the ‘-‘ listed at the bottom.

 

Also, if you want to disable Dashboard entirely:

Launch Terminal and then enter the following commands.

 

To turn Dashboard off:

 defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

 

To turn Dashboard on:

 defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

 

You have to restart the Dock after making either change for it to take effect:

 killall Dock

 

with thanks to: ( http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050723123302403&lsrc=osxh )

 

Spotlight - After installing or upgrading to OS X 10.4, Spotlight might be automatically enabled on

your media drives. For the best system performance, Avid recommends disabling Spotlight for your media drives.

 

                   To disable Spotlight:

a. Go to System Preferences > Spotlight.

b. Click Privacy.

c. Select a disk on the desktop, click the + button to add to the list. (or drag & drop from the desktop)

d. Continue to do this for every disk. You will need to add new disks as you add them****

[Holger Lagerfeldt]

#6. JOURNALLING: Be sure your hard drives have journalling turned on (and are formatted Mac OS X Extended of course!) if they're not already. Anyone who says they perform worse than unjournalled drives does not know what they're talking about. Learned papers published by doctors of computer science are to be trusted far more readily than your buddy who runs the hip hop studio in his basement and has one beat signed to his high school's rap group. If anything, journalled performance is equal, and can be greater in some cases, and more importantly it negates the need to optimize your discs.

 

Well, I do know what I'm talking about.

 

Turning off journaling on the audio drive (not the system drive) can increase track count up to 20%. In my case from 111 tracks to 138 tracks of audio.

 

So I don't find that comment true. Not only does it make sense, but the practically of many users with this same experience speaks volumes IMO.

 

A few minor things I don't think was mentioned includes turning off anti-aliasing in Logic (except now for the graphics bug in 7.2 in automation mode..), and making sure iCal alarms are off when iCal is not active (a small CPU hog).

[Holger Lagerfeldt]

Hm, can't edit on this board?

 

Anyway, enabling Journaling *doesn't* negate the need to optimizing/maintenance on the HD, however defragging in OS X is generally not a good idea - contrary to what some posts here suggests.

 

Apple posted a long and interesting look into why this is so in their knowledgebase.

[Tabnetic]

 

#6b. BACKUP YOUR LOGIC DATABASE: Or at least, know how to delete a corrupt one so your Logic will start again. The database is located in ~/Library/Preferences/Logic/PM Data and is called LogicProject7. You should write an AppleScript to back this up every once in a while or, if you don't really care, just go ahead and delete this if it's corrupt, Logic will make a new (empty) one next time it starts. Which leads us to...

 

can anyone point me in the direction of a useful resource for writing scripts? i'd love to figure out a way to automate backing up, and more specifically backing up ONLY NEW elements of folders rather than re-copying everything.

 

thanks!

 

Tab

[gpiccolini]

Hm, can't edit on this board?

 

Anyway, enabling Journaling *doesn't* negate the need to optimizing/maintenance on the HD, however defragging in OS X is generally not a good idea - contrary to what some posts here suggests.

 

Apple posted a long and interesting look into why this is so in their knowledgebase.

 

Can you please explain how to disable journaling? Disk utility has a button for enabling it but it´s greyed here... it doesn´t work...

[theblotted]

Hm, can't edit on this board?

 

Anyway, enabling Journaling *doesn't* negate the need to optimizing/maintenance on the HD, however defragging in OS X is generally not a good idea - contrary to what some posts here suggests.

 

Apple posted a long and interesting look into why this is so in their knowledgebase.

 

Can you please explain how to disable journaling? Disk utility has a button for enabling it but it´s greyed here... it doesn´t work...

 

 

hold down "option" before you click on "Edit" up top. this'll allow journaling on/off.

[nikkik]

Hi!

I hear that "disabling" spotlight is a good idea. I have had a really hard time finding any truly good reason to do so though. Would someone please explain why I should disable it.

 

What would I gain by disabling, and then using something like Spotless by fixamac? And what about Google Desktop?

 

BTW- David- I noticed posts where you have suggested using Spotlight to find things...does this mean you do NOT have it disabled?

[David Nahmani]

No I don't. I used to tweak my macs like a madman, disabling things, installing 3rd party utilities up the wazzoo....but lately I got tired of it and work with a simple install of OS X and my apps (ok maybe a few tweaks here and there) and my machines have been running better ever since.

[Justin-Ch]

I couldn't manage without Spotlight, but I was very pleased to learn how to disable Dashboard & those pointless Widgets here.

 

Can someone confirm the following: I use MacJanitor every day to run daily, weekly & monthly maintainance scripts just before I switch off my G4 for the night. I'm running 10.4.8 but have been doing this since Jaguar days. I had read that it was a good idea to do this, but if the computer was left on overnight they would be run automatically at something like 3.30am.

 

However earlier in this thread it looked as if someone was saying they actually get run every time you switch your computer on. Does this mean I am doing something unnecessary as part of my switching off procedure last thing at night, but also that these scripts are not run automatically in the middle of the night if the computer is left on?

 

Is it something that has changed between Jaguar, Panther & Tiger?

[luckyal]

My Post re: this issue.

 

http://www.logicprohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=74799#74799

[Kent Sandvik]

Hi!

I hear that "disabling" spotlight is a good idea. I have had a really hard time finding any truly good reason to do so though. Would someone please explain why I should disable it.

 

What would I gain by disabling, and then using something like Spotless by fixamac? And what about Google Desktop?

 

BTW- David- I noticed posts where you have suggested using Spotlight to find things...does this mean you do NOT have it disabled?

 

LP8 is using Spotlight, so disabling it will just cause more strange problems, EXS not finding samples, and so on... The biggest hit you get with Spotlight is when a brand new disk is inserted into the system, or after you reinstall the OS and it needs to do a full scan. Otherwise, the hits from Spotlight are marginal, most likely there are other issues with underpowered HW that needs to be fixed in case you have performance problems (more RAM, more disk space on boot drive so VM will work properly and so on). --Kent

[Intercede]

Hi guys.

I am new to the forum just came across your posts, really great stuff, Helped me sort a few things out,. One question? with spotlight i seem to be having trouble preventing spotlight from searching my external drives, not really the best with knowledge on the mac!

 

Basically i tried dragging the drives in to spotlight as stated, no luck though,.

anybody got any ideas?..

 

operating OSx Tiger 10.4

 

Cheers For all the Help.

 

Wyatt aKa Intercede

[David Nahmani]

One question?

 

Welcome to this forum, but the "Tips & Tricks" forum is not the place to ask questions! I suggest you re-post your question as a new thread in "The Control Room".