Forum - SOUND ON SOUND : Mac Music

I've tried various set-ups over the years and messed around with partitions, external drives, defragmentation etc and I think it's true to say that the optimal solution changes from year to year, as hardware and software change. Right now there are three governing factors in your set-up.

1) CPU speed. How many processes you are throwing at your CPU.
If, like me, you use your laptop for e-mail, browsing and the rest of your life, you will see (in Activity Monitor) how much stuff is going on which is nothing to do with your music. One solution is to create a user account just for making music which has no log-in items, no shareware utilities, a reduced font set, a plain grey screen, no wi-fi, no routine back-ups that kick-in every hour and no superfluous user processes. Since doing this I have have never had a CPU stall while running Logic. If you do 'run out of cycles' regularly, you might consider an external device like a Powercore to share the load.

2) Hard disk speed.
The mantra is: faster is better, which currently means 7200rpm. An internal disk at this speed will be able to handle many, many tracks but you still might run up against a speed barrier which is why most DAWs offer a 'freeze track'-type function (this also relates to available CPU). I have tried having my sample and audio files on an external HD. Some people swear by this, but it didn't make any difference for me and was outweighed by the convenience of having everything on one internal disk. It gets quite tedious when applications (e.g. Cubase) keep forgetting where their audio files live.

3) Hard disk space.
Personally, I have let all the installers put their files exactly in their default places (see above). This causes fewer problems for updates (e.g. Logic expects to find itself at the top level of Applications). However it does mean that about 50Gb of my HD is dedicated to music files. Current thinking is that defragmentation, whilst making things pretty, does not offer any advantages to speed, unless you have very large media files e.g. video and audio which are read more fluidly if sitting in a contiguous block. But if you maintain 10-20% free space at any time (opinions vary) that should be enough for caches, temporary file swaps and all that stuff. If you have no free space, you will definitely encounter problems.

But even with a 250 Gb disk you might start running out of space when you have created several projects, and at that point you might have to store older projects on an external HD and just keep the ones you are currently working on in your laptop. But at this point you're really into managing your own working practise and preferences. You should in any case have a large external disk for keeping back-ups. Some people like to keep all their active projects on a 7200 external HD which they can carry separately from their computer for security reasons or easy transportation to a studio, or just to keep things organised.

As regards firewire, many devices will have more than one firewire port so you can daisy chain external units. Just be aware that firewire (unlike USB) very rarely provides enough power for external devices so each will still need its own PSU. A properly powered-up Firewire chain works just fine.