Hello,

Has anyone noticed how terrible quad core processors are when using logic? I have loaded up Ivory 2 piano software instrument and my processor cannot even handle it. It goes into the red and sound cuts out. My previous computer was a 6 year old G5 2.2 Dual, and this could run ivory and loads of other software instruments all live, without any problems.

Apparently with logic it can't use all 4 cores on 1 channel, so you get 1 core per channel and i've been told you have to bus other channels just so it engages another core (unbelievable). If 1 core can't even handle 1 software instrument what am i supposed to do? I really feel like i've gone back 10 years with this new iMac, it's so frustrating. Can anyone help at all? Everyone who uses logic must have a similar problem?

Please help, I'm trying to compose a piece and i just can't do it, literally.

Don

My experience using Logic Pro 9 latest up dated version was to actually limit my 4 quad cores to get more out actually! I'm using the Imac I7 quadcore with hyperthreading. I went into Preferences-Audio-Devices-Core Audio- Processing Threads and Picked 6 instead of 8. Since I have hyperthreading I have 8 cores but I only found using 6 cores for me worked much better. I have couple of instances of Omnisphere, Trilogy, RMX plugins in and more plus atleast 20 effects going on with no problem. As with all projects it may vary. Also you might try your buffer settings and in the Core Audio Tab.

Try Apple support too. Go to "Logic: CoreAudio System Overload Messages."

Hope I may be a little of help, I'm still a new Mac User!

Quote donnie darko:

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Has anyone noticed how terrible quad core processors are when using logic?

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Not really. My quad-core processor is awesome.

Quote donnie darko:

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I have loaded up Ivory 2 piano software instrument and my processor cannot even handle it. It goes into the red and sound cuts out. My previous computer was a 6 year old G5 2.2 Dual, and this could run ivory and loads of other software instruments all live, without any problems.

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What buffer sizes are you running at? What speed drive are you streaming samples from? What version of Logic are you running? What version of Ivory are you running? Are you running in 32-bit or 64-bit mode? Are you running under Rosetta? What's your audio hardware? Does it happen under inbuilt audio? Do you have any other bottlenecks in your system?

Quote donnie darko:

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Apparently with logic it can't use all 4 cores on 1 channel, so you get 1 core per channel and i've been told you have to bus other channels just so it engages another core (unbelievable).

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I don't think any plugin on any platform under any DAW can run on multiple cores. You are always constrained by a single core, afaik.

A single channel is processed on one core - so if you had 20 heavy plugins on one channel, more than one core could handle, the workaround to split the load is a useful helpful extra - because now you can effectively run thaht single channel on processing across more than one core.

Quote donnie darko:

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If 1 core can't even handle 1 software instrument what am i supposed to do?

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Check all the above, make sure you're not doing something stupid like running an old PPC version under Rosetta. I would have thought Ivory should run on your system without problems.

Quote donnie darko:

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I really feel like i've gone back 10 years with this new iMac, it's so frustrating. Can anyone help at all? Everyone who uses logic must have a similar problem?

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I don't think I've come across any instrument that wouldn't run on a modern system.

Quote desmond:

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A single channel is processed on one core - so if you had 20 heavy plugins on one channel, more than one core could handle, the workaround to split the load is a useful helpful extra - because now you can effectively run that single channel on processing across more than one core.

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And just to expand very slightly, in practice, most users will usually have multiple channels / tracks in their arrangement, so multiple cores will get utilised efficiently, without the user needing to do anything special.

Thank you for replies everyone i really appreciate it.

Quote SoNaR X:

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My experience using Logic Pro 9 latest up dated version was to actually limit my 4 quad cores to get more out actually! I'm using the Imac I7 quadcore with hyperthreading. I went into Preferences-Audio-Devices-Core Audio- Processing Threads and Picked 6 instead of 8.

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Thanks SoNaR X, I just checked core audio settings and under threading it is set to automatic, maybe i should select 4 and see what happens. Below that process buffer range is set to medium, maybe i should change it to large :s

Quote desmond:

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What buffer sizes are you running at? What speed drive are you streaming samples from? What version of Logic are you running? What version of Ivory are you running? Are you running in 32-bit or 64-bit mode? Are you running under Rosetta? What's your audio hardware? Does it happen under inbuilt audio? Do you have any other bottlenecks in your system?

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Ok desmond, the imac is 2.5 i5 quad core, 4 gig ram. My buffer size 256 which was the same as my old mac, now I have noticed when i increase it to 512 it really helps but i don't see why i should have to do this when the old mac worked perfectly well at 256. Disc speed is 7200, logic 9.1.7 32bit, Ivory 2.0.1 b50 x86.

I have noticed something, when Logic has been left idle for a little while, the clipping occurs when i go back to playing. If i quit and re-open logic it plays fine, using about half of the processing power. What could be causing this? this could be half of my problem. In mac preferences i have set HD to stay on so it's not to do with the HD is it?

Also core 4 always seems to be the one doing all the work, 1 and 2 barely register and 3 does nothing lol

Thanks chaps,

Don

Quote donnie darko:

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Ok desmond, the imac is 2.5 i5 quad core, 4 gig ram. My buffer size 256 which was the same as my old mac, now I have noticed when i increase it to 512 it really helps but i don't see why i should have to do this when the old mac worked perfectly well at 256. Disc speed is 7200, logic 9.1.7 32bit, Ivory 2.0.1 b50 x86.

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What OS are you running? Is it Lion? If it's Lion, your performance problem is most likely your small amount of ram - upgrade to 8GB minimum. Lion is barely comfortable in my experience running with 4GB of ram, even before you load a large application like Logic, and use large streaming sample sets inside that.

Upgrading to 8GB of ram will cost something like £30 so it's not exactly a back breaking purchase.

Quote donnie darko:

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I have noticed something, when Logic has been left idle for a little while, the clipping occurs when i go back to playing. If i quit and re-open logic it plays fine, using about half of the processing power. What could be causing this? this could be half of my problem. In mac preferences i have set HD to stay on so it's not to do with the HD is it?

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Most likely, it's the OS paging in memory off of disk and doing some work before Logic can playback.

Quote donnie darko:

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Also core 4 always seems to be the one doing all the work, 1 and 2 barely register and 3 does nothing

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Well, tasks will be allocated to available cores. If one task requires a full core, then whatever core it's assigned to will be loaded heavily. This doesn't affect the other cores. It's normal. The human need to have core performance look "equal" is meaningless and doesn't happen in reality, and doesn't make much of a significant difference.

I have documented a cure on this very forum some years ago as CPU overload was clearly a programming issue on the part of Apple and doing my nut in

The trick is RAM & how you use it.
Ideally you want 8gig or more.

In the EXS24 under Options/Virtual Memory - set to "Active".
In the most recent versions of Logic, you can choose wether this VM is used for more EXS instances or more VI.
Mine is set to more EXS as I use my library more than anything else.

Also, in the same window, regardless of how wonderful you think your HD is, set Disk Drive Speed to "SLOW".
This is REALLY important as it changes Logic behaviour as it forces Logic to cache the data in ram
- and as we all know, ram is faster than any HD, even solid state (i.e. no Sata bus to slow things down )

Now set Hard Disk Recording Activity to "Extensive", again this will increase the amount of ram Logic uses, but who cares, its only a couple of hundred meg.

Lastly click Apply / OK

If it glitches after this lot, then the problem lies elsewhere........

Fantastic thanks. I can fit another 4 meg in the imac so that's what I'll do. I have mountain lion desmond.

Scope, does that exs24 thing affect the whole of logic then? or just when using the sampler? if i change the things you mentioned it could help me when using ivory etc?

Thanks, sorry for delay i was away for the weekend.

Don

Hi everybody

BTW advising someone to have 8GB of RAM to run an instance of Ivory before accepting that Apple screwed up with this, is preposterous.

Scope is the only one who points that out.

Just my humble opinion...

Kisses...

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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BTW advising someone to have 8GB of RAM to run an instance of Ivory before accepting that Apple screwed up with this, is preposterous.

Scope is the only one who points that out.

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Sorry, I don't follow. What have Apple "screwed up" now?

Actually, it's not Apple's fault. A quad core chip means that you have 4 'processors'. Code runs as fast as it can within a processor, so if the underlying engine is running flat out in one processor, it _can't_ simply grab more processing power from another one. Not unless it starts multi-threading and within an engine that may not be practical (a lot of the processing is linear ). Most of us worked this out a while back and realised that throwing more cores on chips was a red herring for audio performance.

Now what Apple _have_ done, is introduce a new multi-threading manager (Grand Central - in Lion iirc) so that the code actually can run any additional threads in another processor / core. But, this isn't just a problem with Apple / OSX - it's a standard problem for all OSes. So if the engine _can_ multi thread AND is written correctly, it will spread the load around.

But I don't think that this is the OP's problem ... just thought I'd give a geek's insight into the issue..

--------------------
Veni, Vidi, Aesculi
(I came, I saw, I conkered)

Thanks for the clarification.

I still think that having to install 8GB of RAM to run 1 instance of a plugin is too much...

Am I the only one who thinks that this is unacceptable?

I may seem harsh but think of the poor fella that invested 2500$ on a machine only to find out that he cannot run something that run perfectly on his much older computer...

The answer "go out and buy more" just don't seem fair. Anyway our beloved experts pointed out that RAM had nothing to do with it...

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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I still think that having to install 8GB of RAM to run 1 instance of a plugin is too much...

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4GB of ram is ok for the casual user who buys a MBP to do regular, non-power user things (web, email, word processing etc).

It is not ok to run heavy, professional-scale, performance-dependent real-time software, like Logic, with heavy-weight, large-ram footprint plugins.

You don't buy a cheap consumer car, enter it into an F1 race and expect good performance without "souping" it up a little.

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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Am I the only one who thinks that this is unacceptable?

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I find your use of the term a bit strange. If you are saying Apple should make 8GB a standard minimum ram config on MBP's then I would agree with you. Otherwise I do not know what you are saying...

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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I may seem harsh but think of the poor fella that invested 2500$ on a machine only to find out that he cannot run something that run perfectly on his much older computer...

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Well, a G5 from, what, 6 or more years ago, running OSX, what Panther/Tiger, was less demanding on ram, as the OSX was smaller and had less features. This mean there was more ram available for applications - which in themselves were also smaller and less demanding (Logic 7..?)

6 years of envelopment further in and OSX is bigger, has more features (although it also got leaner along the way) and Lion onwards simply requires more memory than those old versions. The good news is that RAM is significantly cheaper now than the equivalent RAM back then. This is a good thing.

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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The answer "go out and buy more" just don't seem fair.

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"Fair" is a silly term. A user running Logic simply requires more resources in terms of RAM than a base configuration machine comes with - in that case, the advice to spend £30 to get more ram to significantly increase performance is good advice, particularly since I've gone through this on a similar spec machine and a colleagues, and seen many other reports of the same thing on the internets, so I have confidence that this is a good thing, and *may* well be the source of the OP's issue (it may not too, but the advice is still good).

It has nothing to do with "fair".

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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Anyway our beloved experts pointed out that RAM had nothing to do with it...

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I must have missed that post.

Quote Scope:

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I have documented a cure on this very forum some years ago as CPU overload was clearly a programming issue on the part of Apple and doing my nut in

Quote Dave B:

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A quad core chip means that you have 4 'processors'. Code runs as fast as it can within a processor, so if the underlying engine is running flat out in one processor, it _can't_ simply grab more processing power from another one. Not unless it starts multi-threading and within an engine that may not be practical (a lot of the processing is linear ). Most of us worked this out a while back and realised that throwing more cores on chips was a red herring for audio performance.

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desmond

our friends above clearly state that the problem lies with the way the OS handles the available processing power, NOT the RAM.

Adding more RAM maybe a remedy but the real cure lies with a new, more efficient code.

i'm surprised that you find a remark silly without first considering that you advised someone to spend money on something without making sure that this will solve the problem.

i know people who make great productions with 4GB and 5GB of RAM... and their tracks are full of instruments and plugs... So I find the OP's issue a bit more complex than simply lacking RAM

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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our friends above clearly state that the problem lies with the way the OS handles the available processing power, NOT the RAM.

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The first quoted issue is a consequence of the way logic buffers audio files and EXS samples and isn't really a factor for the OP (though the advice is sound). Perhaps you didn't understand the exact details of his advice. I do (which is why my settings are basically the same as he documented, and have been for a long time before he write that original post). They won't really affect the issue the OP describes, as with a third-party instrument, Logic is not handling the streaming.

The second quoted issue is an extension of what I already wrote - generally speaking, a single plugin can't exhaust a single core. As was mentioned, the situation is getting better, but Logic still in the main processes one entire channel on one core.

So - neither of which are practical solutions, unlike mine, which, through experience, may well be the biggest culprit. But feel free to think my advice worthless and of no value and call into question the tiny amount of money it would take to improve performance noticeably. Whatever you think, I know that 4GB of ram with Lion or ML is simply not enough to run large scale applications without the system really chugging up. (ML is a bit better in this regard, I understand, though I have no practical experience of this.)

Final Cut Pro X was also a complete dog with 4GB of ram under Lion.

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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Adding more RAM maybe a remedy but the real cure lies with a new, more efficient code.

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You are of course free to have whatever opinions you wish. And I'm free to disagree with you.

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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i'm surprised that you find a remark silly without first considering that you advised someone to spend money on something without making sure that this will solve the problem.

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Actually, I was reasonably confident, through practical experience with multiple systems, and evidence seen elsewhere, that my recommendation would indeed have a big effect. I cannot guarantee anything, or course, but I'm not going to hold back what I geniunely believe is the cause of the problem - someone trying to run something without the proper available resources. We'll see if the OP gives it a try. And if it doesn't improve anything, the OP can try out your suggestions to fix his issue.

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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i know people who make great productions with 4GB and 5GB of RAM... and their tracks are full of instruments and plugs... So I find the OP's issue a bit more complex than simply lacking RAM

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Of course. And so did I - until Lion, where, on a new machine, I was surprised how bad the performance of the machine was, due to all the paging of memory. More RAM sorted that performance issue out (on multiple systems with all kinds of different configurations). It doesn't mean I couldn't have made music on it, with plenty of plugins, but it absolutely affected the performance, particularly on ram hungry plugins like virtual samplers (synths and FX plugins are less affected as they don't require huge amounts of memory in the main).

Anyway, I'm bored of justifying my recommendations. ymmv.

Fair enough...

Wouldn't you suggest for him to try installing Snow Leopard instead of Lion?

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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Wouldn't you suggest for him to try installing Snow Leopard instead of Lion?

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Given the amount of time, hassle and work involved in backing everything up, wiping it and completely installing an old OS from scratch, reinstalling all his applications, plugins, and configuring everything (it takes me more or less about a week to do that):- No. I'd advise him to drop the £30 on more ram.

Particularly as there is some debate on whether you can even install Snow Leopard on newer machines - I think it's possible but might require some workarounds depending on the OP's machine. I'm not sure of the facts here without some research.

However, I used to get plenty of work done on a 2.4 Core2Duo MBP with 4GB of ram under Snow Leopard, which is my fave version of OSX to date. 4GB was ok with that (though 6GB, the max my machine could handle) was definitely better.

Oh - and about half an hour ago I've just ordered 16GB for my MBP from Crucial, and looking forward to it. £60 for 16GB is too good a deal to ignore. Particularly because I can max out 8GB of ram with one Photoshop file...

I have just acquired an old Mac Pro with 1GB of RAM in which I clean installed Snow Leopard.

I am waiting for 4GB to arrive via post and I will definitely report back once I have installed them.

Meanwhile, in a previous post I opened, everyone advised me to use Snow Leopard and since my Mac Pro (Early 2006) won't handle Mountain Lion, I'll stick with SL.

Once I have my extra 4GB I will report about the performance...

It would be nice to hear from the OP though...
I would also suggest that he contacted the Ivory development company to report the problem...

Can I apologise again I keep forgetting I have asked questions in forums etc. Thanks for the heated discussion it was very interesting!

I keep getting this after Logic has been idle the cpu keeps clipping issue, so annoying.

I am going to buy more RAM. desmond where do you buy yours from for that price?

One last thing, when i login to sos how do i see what threads i have started, at the moment i'm having to search for my own user name - posts by user, just so i can reply to my own thread.

Don

Yeah ive experienced this kinda of thing, its a pain in the a$$, there are a few things you can do to make life easier, here is what I do:

Run all my audio off an external 7200rpm firewire drive
Have my applications and sound libraries (for sample based instruments like Trilian) on my internal SSD Drive
Have 8gb Ram with everything running at 64 bit
I have a quadcore and as someone said above, run at the highest buffer setting and only assign half of the cores to Logic
Create an empty Audio channel with no plugins and when playing back, have this channel selected (this way you dont have a processor heavy VI channel in record mode)
Use track Freeze where possible, this really is your friend!
Make sure things like iTunes and Safari arent running in the background!

Hope this helps...

Justin

--------------------
www.soundcloud.com/blackmagicdisco

Cheap memory - branded and guaranteed so not the cheapest, but still close - is generally ordered from Crucial ( www.crucial.com ) as their online prices are pretty darned good.

--------------------
Veni, Vidi, Aesculi
(I came, I saw, I conkered)

desmond

> I don't think any plugin on any platform under any DAW can run on multiple cores. You are always constrained by a single core, afaik.

You're totally misinformed and I'm struggling to think of another modern DAW other than Logic that has the same, horribly designed brain-dead audio system that forces all active live parts to a single core. It's part of the reason that Logic performs so poorly (apart from it running under Osx). I can (literally) get over 10x the live performance of Logic/OsX under Nuendo/Win7.

Quote Dave B:

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Actually, it's not Apple's fault. A quad core chip means that you have 4 'processors'. Code runs as fast as it can within a processor, so if the underlying engine is running flat out in one processor, it _can't_ simply grab more processing power from another one. Not unless it starts multi-threading and within an engine that may not be practical (a lot of the processing is linear ). Most of us worked this out a while back and realised that throwing more cores on chips was a red herring for audio performance.

Now what Apple _have_ done, is introduce a new multi-threading manager (Grand Central - in Lion iirc) so that the code actually can run any additional threads in another processor / core. But, this isn't just a problem with Apple / OSX - it's a standard problem for all OSes. So if the engine _can_ multi thread AND is written correctly, it will spread the load around.

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It is Apple's fault, Logic forces all live instruments and effects onto a single core regardless of how they're coded.

As to the "red herring" of adding more cores, I get 3.5 times the performance using 4 cores than 1. Seems reasonable...

Grand Central won't help threads run on additional cores as it's not designed for real-time DAW usage.

Quote Dishpan:

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It is Apple's fault, Logic forces all live instruments and effects onto a single core regardless of how they're coded.

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Oh - didn't realise we were discussing "live" mode.

Quote:

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As to the "red herring" of adding more cores, I get 3.5 times the performance using 4 cores than 1. Seems reasonable...

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Ah, so it's Logic is efficient after all

Yes, it's efficient on playback but most DAWs are now. Logic is just crippled at low latency because it's running under OsX.

Quote Dishpan:

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You're totally misinformed and I'm struggling to think of another modern DAW other than Logic that has the same, horribly designed brain-dead audio system that forces all active live parts to a single core.

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That's a different thing to the bit you quoted from me. Logic's choice of processing single, entire instrument strips on one core is what you are talking about here. It does this for efficiency, but there is an easy enough workaround on the channels that you are running a lot of plugins on, so it's not a big deal in practice - certainly on various Logic forums over the years it's not a massively complained about limitation. And "Live mode" in Logic is another efficiency thing, which is actually a very clever one and a nice feature.

The bit you quoted was me talking about single plugins which themselves can run across multiple cores - and I didn't categorically state this as fact, I was quite clear to say "I don't think..." - which is my understanding.

However, if you say this is common, I'll break out another DAW and run various single plugins to see if their load gets spread across multiple cores. I'm pretty sure that in the main this doesn't happen, but I'm happy to be proved wrong. Certainly modern, complex plugins are heftily multi-threaded these days, so it should be possible to split threads across cores - although there may well be performance issues in doing this, which is why real time plugins may not typically do this.

Quote Dishpan:

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It's part of the reason that Logic performs so poorly (apart from it running under Osx). I can (literally) get over 10x the live performance of Logic/OsX under Nuendo/Win7.

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Hmm. Logic is generally regarded as pretty much the most efficient heavyweight daw out there, and has been for some time. It's difficult to compare completely different systems (Nuendo on Windows on a PC versus Logic on OSX on a Mac) as there are too many variables to derive significant meaning from.

Try benchmarking Nuendo + OSX + Mac versus Logic + OSX + Mac, running the same plugins with a decent test and show me some numbers and convince me... I'm open minded.

> Logic's choice of processing single, entire instrument strips on one core is what you are talking about here. It does this for efficiency

Well yes this is the claim. I'm just not sure how less performance = efficiency.

> The bit you quoted was me talking about single plugins which themselves can run across multiple cores - and I didn't categorically state this as fact, I was quite clear to say "I don't think..." - which is my understanding.

Sorry if I misread what you were saying. Some plugins can, some can't but you're right that it can be an advantage if they don't as the host gets less control and it can cause overloads.


> Hmm. Logic is generally regarded as pretty much the most efficient heavyweight daw out there, and has been for some time.

On Mac maybe but even here for live parts it's poor (especially if you want to run lots of instruments live). For example, under Nuendo I can run Superior Drummer, Guitar Rig 5, multiple Halion Sonic instances and multiple plugins all at a low buffer and all live. I couldn't get close to this in Logic.

Cheers

Quote Dishpan:

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Well yes this is the claim. I'm just not sure how less performance = efficiency.

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Yeah, and it's difficult to substantiate this or argue too much one way or the other as none of us other than the developers have the real facts anyway.

Quote Dishpan:

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Sorry if I misread what you were saying. Some plugins can, some can't but you're right that it can be an advantage if they don't as the host gets less control and it can cause overloads.

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Yep. My general understanding is that typically, bar a few more complex examples of things like Kontakt or Omnisphere with sophisticated engines operating outside the host), most plugins do not spread load across multiple cores. This was simply my point, and the one you called me on. As always, if I have a knowledge gap here, I'm happy to be shown my understanding is incorrect with some more recent evidence to the contrary.

Quote Dishpan:

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On Mac maybe but even here for live parts it's poor (especially if you want to run lots of instruments live). For example, under Nuendo I can run Superior Drummer, Guitar Rig 5, multiple Halion Sonic instances and multiple plugins all at a low buffer and all live. I couldn't get close to this in Logic.

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Is this Logic vs Nuendo though, do you think, or is the issue OSX vs Windows? You've already pointed out that you think OSX has a worse real-time performance than Windows, and it's certainly not the first time I've heard that, though I don't have any explicit data to show (though I'm sure there are tests others have done out there).

Anyway - not to labour the point. I just want to clarify when someone calls bullshit on something I've said (it seems to be a trend this week..!

> Is this Logic vs Nuendo though, do you think, or is the issue OSX vs Windows?

Probably a bit of both mate. Nuendo doesn't differentiate Live parts like Logic so you get full performance at all times. Not sure if that performance is lower than Logic on playback though :-)


> You've already pointed out that you think OSX has a worse real-time performance than Windows, and it's certainly not the first time I've heard that, though I don't have any explicit data to show (though I'm sure there are tests others have done out there).

It's not too bad at higher latencies, but plugin count is much lower when you lower the buffer size. I still usually run Nuendo under OsX as I do like the interface a bit more and I usually get enough performance for my needs.

Horses for courses innit

Quote desmond:

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Anyway - not to labour the point. I just want to clarify when someone calls bullshit on something I've said (it seems to be a trend this week..!

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I hope you realize that there's nothing personal mate...

Just daw geeks arguing...

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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I hope you realize that there's nothing personal mate...
Just daw geeks arguing...

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Nah, it doesn't worry me, because I'm not usually wrong...

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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I have just acquired an old Mac Pro with 1GB of RAM in which I clean installed Snow Leopard.

I am waiting for 4GB to arrive via post and I will definitely report back once I have installed them.

Meanwhile, in a previous post I opened, everyone advised me to use Snow Leopard and since my Mac Pro (Early 2006) won't handle Mountain Lion, I'll stick with SL.

Once I have my extra 4GB I will report about the performance...

It would be nice to hear from the OP though...
I would also suggest that he contacted the Ivory development company to report the problem...

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Well, I did my tests and here's what I found:

1. I did not experience any significant difference between Logic Pro and Cubase (in OS X 10.6.8)
2. Both programs didn't like the small buffer sizes of my trusty M-Audio FW 410
3. On Windows 7, Cubase was more tolerable with smaller buffer sizes (same card)
4. In both programs, performance was OK in 512 buffer size and above (even with only 1GB RAM)
5. ProTools 9.0 needs at least 2GB to get installed.
6. ProTools 9.0 requires a little higher buffer size than Logic Pro

So, the problem that the OP experiences can be improved, and to an extent solved, after taking these steps:

1. Increase buffer size.
2. Install Snow Leopard.
3. Buy memory.

Kisses

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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Well, I did my tests and here's what I found:

1. I did not experience any significant difference between Logic Pro and Cubase (in OS X 10.6.8)
2. Both programs didn't like the small buffer sizes of my trusty M-Audio FW 410

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I have a FW410 knocking around, and have no problem running it at the lowest buffer size (32) with Logic although obviously smaller buffers result in an increased CPU load as expected.

Quote Athanasios C. Paschalis:

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1. Increase buffer size.
2. Install Snow Leopard.
3. Buy memory.

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I'm assuming the OP ha sdone all the usual things like experiment with buffer sizes, turning off any big CPU draws like plugins own internal convolution reverbs and so on, putting samples on faster drivers etc. If not, then try all that stuff as well, obviously...

Hi folks,

Just an update for you. I bought 16 gigs of ram, lol i know it probably wasn't necessary to buy that much but it was fairly cheap. The problem has been solved! it was ram after all.

I opened up the activity viewer from the utilites folder and with 4 gig it was going down to as little as 30mb left. Now it's all good! loads of ram to spare

Thanks everyone.

Don

Cool to hear - thanks for the update.

Glad everything is working out for you