alexjholland wrote:You wouldn't have thought (if it is so simple) that Apple would have reason not to install a simple function for 'performance mode' to switch it to prioritising any number of programs for live use etc?
If I made an OS I wouldn't want to advertise to the average man in the street that they could change apps priorities if they thought they knew better than the OS scheduler. There's a lot of idiots out there who would try maxing out too many things and just being a twat with it and possibly jamming their OS up by trying to put everything in "performance mode".
The fact is though that I
do know that Live's scheduling is a lot more important than say givng MS Word and Excel a high priority "because I want my spreadsheet to calculate faster and my document to scroll more seamlessly". No-one bats an eyelid with all the fiddles people do to Windows turning on and off system things to make their OS work smoother with fewer overheads to help the DAW run smoother. I remember in XP changing many system settings that would schedule more server-like processing in exchange for GUI updates, and turning off lots of other things that would make the OS run smoother for the
normal people at the expense of possible DAW processing power continuous throughput. I regularly see new Mac owners on here saying "what do I do to OSX to make it run great as a DAW", to which the answer is always "sod all - it's not windows". Maybe this is something us Mac users
could do to give our DAW use an additional edge.
Until there's more evidence maybe it's not any improvement, or there's some unexpected price to pay in some other process though. I can't think of a possible one if applied carefully though. Proof of the pudding is in the eating. I'm just gonna see if it works! If it does, fantastic. If it doesn't all I need to do is restart Live and not renice Live next time. Seems silly not to try unless you're one of the lucky ones with a 128-core Mac SuperPro and have never had the tiniest glitch in any of your projects ever in the history of time. There's plenty of people flogging their old MacBooks out there with sets near their limit. This just might save them buying a new one quite so soon. I guess it's one of those odd things in life that if no other bad side effects happen and the DAW performance doesn't seem to decrease, then logically it must be the case that good things are happening if I never notice anything bad happen in Live since it's obviously doing
something! I'm gonna try it. Would just be nice to think others might be so we can compare notes!
On which note, anyone out there got an old mac that struggles a bit with some of their projects? Would be interesting for them to try this and tell us the results. Mine are usually fine so the odd glitch I get is not reproducable enough to really tell.
Obviously this isn't gonna give you a higher powered CPU though, it'd just help prioritise it over background tasks, so it wouldn't help a continually glitching song that will barely play, but it might take irregular occasional pops and clicks out. I was impressed that I could rip a movie and be maxing out my CPU but Live was totally glitch free at the same time. Normally it would only be the same priority as my movie rip and get glitchy. If it works in a limited fashion (since at the end of the day it's not magic and won't invent CPU cycles from thin air) at the least it means I can sit writing tunes in the evening with Mail/Adium/facebook/iCal/whatever open in the background, and I should be glitch free.
