Logic 8 and CPU power

Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 9:52 pm

Hi everyone. I'm a newly registered member, but have been appreciating the wealth of information offered here for quite some time.

I'm working with Logic 8, using a dual 3 GHz Intel Xeon Mac Pro with 5 gigs of ram, and using a Presonus FireStudio. I thought that would be more than enough power to run logic, but logic seems to crawl most of the time. Granted, I'm often running somewhere near 50 tracks at a time, and though I mostly use the logic built-in plug-ins, I have been making good use of Celemony's Melodyne, IK Multimedia's Amplitube, Art Acoustic's reverb, and a couple other third-party plug-ins.

I'm continually getting "system overload" messages, despite trying all sort of different buffer sizes. Does that seem right? Am I just over-taxing logic? If that's the case, what I'd like to do is do what I used to do in Pro Tools, which is to disable certain tracks so that they don't affect CPU usage. This was easy to do in pro tools, but I haven't been able to find a way to do it in logic. Is there a way, or it that just not a function that exists in logic? Is there a way to do something similar?

Sorry for the long post, and thanks for all the help.

Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 10:27 pm

Make sure you're not writing to your system drive. You can freeze tracks but you have to be willing to commit. When you're mixing, you should be able to increase the buffers full on and it shouldn't be an issue.

Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 10:52 pm

Thanks for the reply. I have a separate internal drive set aside for audio, so I don't believe I've been writing to the system drive at all. As far as the buffer is concerned, you're saying I should have it set to 1024 when mixing?

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 7:51 am

althought your system is more than capable of handling the load for Logic there is one thing that can make a big difference.

Make SURE that you run your main effects, sound designer etc., on an aux instead of creating a new instance for each channel. If you are unsure of how then take the time to look up this procedure in the manual.

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 8:10 am

Okay, thanks. That sounds like that must be the problem. I'll do some looking into how to make that work. But it's possible to put a plug-in on one aux, and then have it effect various tracks differently?

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 8:27 am

Yes. I can't believe you were creating a new instance of each effect for each track. In that case, I'm amazed you were able to get 50 tracks!

You simply create an auxiliary track and use the effect as an insert. Then you just send a signal to the aux. via whichever aux. bus. You control the amount of effect via this aux. Make sure the mix of the effect is set to 100%. It's just like working on an analogue desk.

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 8:39 am

Okay thanks. I'll give that a try. I knew I had to be doing something horribly wrong to be getting the terrible performance I was. Thanks so much for the help!

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 12:01 pm

Alright, another question. I did some reading and I think I understand how one goes about adding plug-ins through aux channels and what the benefit is. But take a plug-in like Amplitube, which I use often. This seems to a big CPU power suck, but I use different settings for each of my various guitar tracks, and sometimes for other tracks too like, vocals or some percussion. If I put the plug-in on an aux track, I can't change the settings at all, only the mix level, right? So does that mean that in order to use Amplitube differently on different tracks (i.e. different amps, or different amounts of gain or something), I have no choice but to put it directly on the inserts?

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 3:48 pm

If you need it to have different settings for each track you send to it, then you need to bite the bullet and suffer the performance drain.

Unless you find some way of creating a ridiculously complicated pre and post transform on the audio.

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 4:31 pm

When you need an effect to affect the entire signal, like an amp sim or compression or eq, in that case you would use it as an insert on that track. When dealing with other effects like delay and reverb though where you only need to affect a part of the signal, you use an aux. send.

With amp sims I like to use the amp and speaker modelling only. I like to leave all the other effects like phase, chorus et al to other plugins.

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:56 pm

like hueseph said before, freeze the tracks. record your guitar track, adjust your sound and then click on the little freeze button (you may have to configure your track header to see the button). when you push play it will print the track with the insert effects and bypass the original track afterwards. now record your next track, and so on.
if you need to change something on a frozen track, just click the button again and unfreeze it. it's so easy in logic 8.

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