Any Mac users Rewiring Reason 4 to Live7 without CPU probs?

sdmiddleton · Post by **sdmiddleton** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 2:49 am

Hello..

I'm desperately overdue a new Mac since having bought the old G4 powerbook (currently 1GB RAM) 1 week before the macBook Pro came out 3 years ago...However...do i go Mac Pro, Imac, or 17inch Macbook....???

I know I can ever expand the Mac pro to 8GB Ram and beyond...But also i can technically get the 17 Powerbook to 8gb although no more...However, the Imac would be the cheapest all in one solution but falling in short at 4GB max? I would love to know if i could open and rewire simultaneous instances of Reason Drums, Reason Bass, Reason Pianos, perhaps some RPB8's with thor and an NNXT, a few audio channels with a couple of insert reverbs, perhaps about 4 send FX channels and also a control surface, a couple of Midi controller Keyboards, and for ableton/the CPU not to even break a sweat...I know i can bounce down after a while but I would love to be sure i had head room to push things just a bit further without any glimmer of hesitation on the 24' Imac at 4GB....

Please can someone with a similar setup advise me if i'm living in a dreamworld if i expect to do this on the Imac or not...I still need to get an updated laptop for Live, but was thinking of getting the entry level mac Notebook for a cut down Live setup at a later stage... Or should i just bite the bullet and get the 17Incher now???

A bit of a general one here i apologize but in major need of persuasion...

Thanks in advance

S...

myxomat0515 · Post by **myxomat0515** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 4:02 am

Hey

I use this setup:
Reason 4 rewired to Live 7 on a Mac Pro quad 2.66, 5gb, osx 10.4.11. I use 3 or 4 MIDI controllers at any time. You'd probably be happy with one of the newest iMacs, but its nice to have the expandability of the pro, no doubt. Although I wouldn't say my mac 'never breaks a sweat' ... up the sample rate, add a few vst synths and handful of returns and it can start getting ug.....ly....

So...maybe go with the pro? Depends on your needs. Reason is a pretty efficient program. You can get away with a pretty big rack and very little CPU drainage.

Jekblad · Post by **Jekblad** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 5:25 am

i'm done with reason four, going to Live 8 Suite. CPU and usability issues.

thefinger · Post by **thefinger** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 6:46 am

i used to run ableton and reason rewired on my standard white macbook (1 gig ram, 2 khz duocore) all the time, had tons of reason devices streaming over the rewire to ableton, and an instrument track for each seperate synth in reason. 2 external controllers. never had any problems whatsoever. reason is the most stable program ive ever used, frankly. i can load on tons of devices and still be at like 5-10 percent cpu.

SubFunk · Post by **SubFunk** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 11:39 am

make sure that if you use rewire... no matter which apps you rewire that all apps involved in the rewiring setup are set to the same sample values in the audio preferences... :::THIS IS MAJORLY IMPORTANT:::

e.g. all set to 256 or 512 or whatever. NOT one to 256 and one to 512...

Kilroy · Post by **Kilroy** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 1:46 pm

I have a white 2.4ghz with 4gig of RAM. I rewire Reason through Ableton and am playing live on stage with it. I have a rack of about 15 synths, with about 10 effects in reason. I play up to three of the synths at any given time. And I occasionally simultaneously stream 3-4 tracks of audio from Ableton. I have never had a glitch, pop, or, click.

The only thing I did with the Mac was go in and turn off a lot of the things that happen automatically in the background. There are a ton of options in system preferences that try to do things while I am playing live, such as:

-Screensaver
-The option to change your background graphic every few minutes
-Software Update
-Various power schemes that make your CPU underperform
-etc.

I have all these things turned off. I even turned off the auto-daylight savings time option, just to be on the safe side.

K.

Jekblad · Post by **Jekblad** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:50 pm

my biggest problem was using Reason Drums, and Electro mechanical. All those samples really slowed things down.

Also the CPU meter in Live does not aggregate the cpu usage from all sources, just Live. I think. This is from the manual
" Note that the CPU
meter takes into account only the load from processing audio, not other tasks the computer
performs (e.g., managing Live's user interface). "

"other tasks" the computer performs would be Reason, Pages, Firefox, the other stuff you might have open at the time. If the audio sounds fine when you're doing it that's great, maybe you still don't have a problem. Bust out Activity Monitor and see how your whole machine is working. Again, i could be wrong, and if so someone please speak up.

I've used Reason as a synth rack before for on-stage performance, and it as stable. But running synths outa there and running sample libraries turned out to be a BIG difference for me. That issue can also be tied to the speed your HD spins and how much you have on it. None of these were in my favor i think, so maybe you'll be ok.

I'm looking forward to Sessions Drums and smart priming. I don't know what you could use to replace the actual bass sounds, but I'm sure there are VSTs out there for that. The Live Suite would not address that need specifically. I know it comes with Tension, but the Live effects don't emulate guitar/bass amps very well, so it doesn't matter how good the string part does or doesn't sound. Then again, the new "overdrive" unit will probably help this. If you have guitar rig or similar, then you'd be in good shape. Waves is giving away a free ONE YEAR trial of their "solo" product. No joke, i'm using it, and i LOVE it. has a different sound from guitar rig, and i like it a lot.

Another big part for me was workflow and automation. I never figured out what cc's controlled what on the reason synth's, and it just seemed laborious to do anything. Yucky for me.

Hope that gives you some more stuff to think about.

sdmiddleton · Post by **sdmiddleton** » Fri Feb 06, 2009 1:50 pm

THanks to everyone for the response... I actually tried the Mac pro at a friends house running several instances of reason drums, Bass and pianos rewired into digital performer which is his host programme of choice. He has 8GB of ram and actually barely even worked up to 20% CPU in digi perfromer. I guess Ableton could be different but this certainly gave me a good idea of what's possible...I may test the Imac next but really it makes sense long term to get the Mac pro, otherwise i'll back here in 2 years when they replace all the audio cards with USB 3 and can't update the Imac or MacBook pro...

sdmiddleton · Post by **sdmiddleton** » Fri Feb 06, 2009 1:50 pm

THanks to everyone for the response... I actually tried the Mac pro at a friends house running several instances of reason drums, Bass and pianos rewired into digital performer which is his host programme of choice. He has 8GB of ram and actually barely even worked up to 20% CPU in digi perfromer. I guess Ableton could be different but this certainly gave me a good idea of what's possible...I may test the Imac next but really it makes sense long term to get the Mac pro, otherwise i'll back here in 2 years when they replace all the audio cards with USB 3 and can't update the Imac or MacBook pro...

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