G4 powerbook performance question

nyawei · Post by **nyawei** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 9:58 pm

recently changed from pc to powerbook, and seem to have slow performance in all areas of ableton. also get glitching when cpu meter reaches about 60%. i have a new 17 inch g4 powerbook with 1 gig ram and 7200 rpm hdd. i am wondering if this is the limitations of running ableton on this machine, or is there anything i can do to improve performace. i have room for 1 more gig of ram, will adding that increase preformance significantly? i am not running that many tracks or vsts, can any one help? thanks nyawei.

shaneblyth · Post by **shaneblyth** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 11:05 pm

nyawei wrote:recently changed from pc to powerbook, and seem to have slow performance in all areas of ableton. also get glitching when cpu meter reaches about 60%. i have a new 17 inch g4 powerbook with 1 gig ram and 7200 rpm hdd. i am wondering if this is the limitations of running ableton on this machine, or is there anything i can do to improve performace. i have room for 1 more gig of ram, will adding that increase preformance significantly? i am not running that many tracks or vsts, can any one help? thanks nyawei.

i have the same setup and seems fine.. what cpu % does the demo sone use ? mine uses between 7-9%
a couple of things to check is what buffer sizes you are using.. what sort of interface and does it have the latest drivers.
also have you gone to system preferences in OS X and made sure your processor is set to highest.
I also make another user and run any audio in that only..
I have things like a plain background.. dock hidden and you can always pop up activity monitor and see what else is sucking memory and cpu and kill those things

I also use macaroni and delete stuff like all my other localised languages apart from english.. saves me 900 megs of disk space! apart from that you can always use a firewire drive as well when recording audio or stram other stuff off it ..

nyawei · Post by **nyawei** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 12:11 pm

i have a firewire 1814 sound card. i will check the other things you have mentioned and get back to you.

craw · Post by **craw** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 3:45 pm

hi ... I have the same setup as you. Except I use a firewire audiophile.

Anyway, what I have noticed is that the firewire places a big demand on this machine (G4 powerbook).

Here is a very simple test to try. Run the machine using the onboard sound instead of the firewire and see if the performance improves.

I cant explain it, but this is what I observe. I make most of my work with a PC running an internal M-audio card and have no performance issues. I use my laptop to DJ, and thought, OK lets get an external M-audio card ... big mistake in my case because as soon as I hook up the firewire, the machine is just about on its knees. With the on board sound the performance is excellent ... with a G4 and 1gig RAM you shouldn't really need to do any tweaks to run a few tracks of audio! (this is different for different people, as a quick browse through this forum will illustrate!).

In the end I have to use the the onboard sound with the powerbook. This works fine for DJing, but you are kinda fucked if you need any MIDI ins/out or any audio ins ...

GOOD LUCK

shaneblyth · Post by **shaneblyth** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 4:27 pm

craw wrote:hi ... I have the same setup as you. Except I use a firewire audiophile.

..

GOOD LUCK

those units are known to have drivers that are not to good and tend to use alot of cpu up unfortunately.
I have one and the tascam fw1082 i have is a huge improvement but yeah using the internal to playback or whatever makes a big difference and also turning off inputs and outputs in live preferences will always take some more load off the system

nyawei · Post by **nyawei** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 4:46 pm

so craw, do u have similar problems, is this what u mean by good luck

John Sweet · Post by **John Sweet** » Fri Feb 10, 2006 12:50 am

I have the last-ever 15" G4 PB with a 7200 RPM drive & 1.5 GB of RAM. I'm suspicious of this entire run. Have you heard of the built-in soundcard echo problem?

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.a ... /1/27/2676

http://powerbookdefect.info/

The lower 1/3rd of my screen flashes randomly several times a day, I have 3 or 4 dead pixels, I get disk error messages from large image files, etc.

When I used the X-Station as a sound card, I couldn't play back 3 channels with one live input channel set to monitor while using the crossfader. I'd get glitches at low buffer settings that worked with the test tone, then if I increased my buffer things would seem cool until the tempo would randomly slow down & speed up again by 10 bpms or more.

I upgraded to the Multiface to try & get a couple CPU points back & have lower latency, but I have to set the buffer 150 samples+ above what the test tone says I should be using to get adequate results. At that point my total latency at least 11 ms+, which seems poor compared to all the glowing Powerbook/RME stats I heard from people here & elsewhere that led me to buy it.

I know Live is a beast on a G4, but it seems like these PBs have lemon potential.

shaneblyth · Post by **shaneblyth** » Fri Feb 10, 2006 2:46 am

John Sweet wrote:I have the last-ever 15" G4 PB with a 7200 RPM drive & 1.5 GB of RAM. I'm suspicious of this entire run. Have you heard of the built-in soundcard echo problem?

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.a ... /1/27/2676

http://powerbookdefect.info/

The lower 1/3rd of my screen flashes randomly several times a day, I have 3 or 4 dead pixels, I get disk error messages from large image files, etc.

When I used the X-Station as a sound card, I couldn't play back 3 channels with one live input channel set to monitor while using the crossfader. I'd get glitches at low buffer settings that worked with the test tone, then if I increased my buffer things would seem cool until the tempo would randomly slow down & speed up again by 10 bpms or more.

I upgraded to the Multiface to try & get a couple CPU points back & have lower latency, but I have to set the buffer 150 samples+ above what the test tone says I should be using to get adequate results. At that point my total latency at least 11 ms+, which seems poor compared to all the glowing Powerbook/RME stats I heard from people here & elsewhere that led me to buy it.

I know Live is a beast on a G4, but it seems like these PBs have lemon potential.

Have you tried making a new user and seeing if thats makes any difference ?
bar that maybe it would be an idea to get drastic if nothing else seems to work and format and reinstall

haris · Post by **haris** » Wed May 10, 2006 10:03 am

some usefull tips here... cheers

Kuffdam · Post by **Kuffdam** » Wed May 10, 2006 12:51 pm

I have a Powerbook G4 17" with the 7200 hard drive. I also have a Macbook pro and here are my thoughts.

I think the G4 runs pretty well.. I am DJ'ing with it and its working fine with the M-Audio Firewire. I find it normally runs around 10 to 15% CPU but when I add 2 compressors from Reaktor to 2 master channels it still only runs at around 25% CPU.

I am also doing live shows with many samples, waves etc and 2 controllers running off the G4 and the whole set runs at around 45% CPU.

The best thing I have done is to turn off the Dashboard. It uses a ton of CPU all the time. I actually found a post on here on how to do it. I also turn off Spotlight which allows greater access to the hard drive.

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... =dashboard

Turn off the dashboard on the link above.

Give that a try and see how you get on with it....

G4 powerbook performance question

G4 powerbook performance question

Re: G4 powerbook performance question

thanks for your reply

hey craw