Optimizing Intel Mac

malxwal · Post by **malxwal** » Wed Sep 13, 2006 10:13 pm

Does anyone have any good tips for optimizing Intel Mac for using Ableton ? I don't run anything else on it, but I do have Logic Express onboard which I will be using when I've got the time to learn it....

(MacBook 2.0Ghz, 1GB RAM,soft synths and audio)

DeadlyKungFu · Post by **DeadlyKungFu** » Thu Sep 14, 2006 3:15 am

Search for "DAW optimisatio guide" on the web, there's tons. Dunno, I'm a PC guy.

shaneblyth · Post by **shaneblyth** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 4:42 am

malxwal wrote:Does anyone have any good tips for optimizing Intel Mac for using Ableton ? I don't run anything else on it, but I do have Logic Express onboard which I will be using when I've got the time to learn it....
(MacBook 2.0Ghz, 1GB RAM,soft synths and audio)

yep buy Live 6 when it arrives and see your cpu meter drop by 50%
apart from that use a fast hard drive.. maybe an external firewire.. fiddle with your settings for the interface you use to optimise things..
The OS itself there is not alot to really do.. turn a few services off .. keep bluetooth and wireless off if not needed.. hide the dock out of the way.. you can get little apps to turn dashboard on and off. there is a little app to remove all the languages you dont want... that can save a give of space.. turn off networking and the like.. there is alot you can do but really on that sort of system it is not going to make an big difference ..
it may free up a little memory which would always be good... start up activity monitor inthe utilities directory and see whats eating up what.. make sure all processors are showing and if u want try killing a few of them to see if it makes a difference.. OS X grabs a huge amount of memory if it can for things but then it is very good at releasing it when it is needed so it is not a problem.. things like safari left running over a period of time will suck up heaps of ram so exit everything u dont need and slap as much ram as you can and if you have a 7200 rpm drive it will be snappier... this old 1.5ghz powerbook came alive with a 100 gig 7200 rpm drive it is very snappy

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 6:26 am

What shaneblyth said.

malxwal · Post by **malxwal** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 7:11 pm

Cheers folks, I think the budget would be most wisely spent on Live 6 with the external drive maybe later. The laptop spends half its' life offshore with me, so working from an external drive is possibly less important than having the new Intel optimized software. I'll have a go at disabling as much as I can, and I really don't use the laptop for ANYTHING Ableton, so should be able to save on some memory byt disabling unused apps.

gomi · Post by **gomi** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 8:10 pm

malxwal wrote:Does anyone have any good tips for optimizing Intel Mac for using Ableton ? I don't run anything else on it, but I do have Logic Express onboard which I will be using when I've got the time to learn it....

(MacBook 2.0Ghz, 1GB RAM,soft synths and audio)

there are some services you can turn off.. but you won't notice the difference.

namely the sharing services, and some Directory Access Services that
may or may not be on by default.

Seriously though OSX multitasks for real.. when an app isn't doing anything
it's not taking up real ram or cpu... like windows..

check out /etc/hostconfig

read up about it.
you can turn some things off and on there too.

looprock · Post by **looprock** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 11:19 pm

I actually just wrote something this weekend to do some general system tweaks on the fly:

Here's the DL:

version: 0.1

Upbeat automates tasks to improve performance of CPU and IO intensive applications. It was originally written based on recommendations from forums and discussions about Ableton Live (hence the name Upbeat), however is should be reasonable for any CPU and disk intensive tasks (games, video applications, etc). It works on PPC and intel platforms.

When enabled it performs the following operations:

Disables Dashboard:
-defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
-/usr/bin/killall Dock

Disables indexing on all volumes:
-mdutil -i off /Volumes/*"

Lowers processing priority of Dock.app
-/usr/bin/renice 20 `/bin/ps -x |grep -i Dock.app|/usr/bin/grep -v grep|awk {'print $1'}`"

When disabled, it does these steps:

Enabls Widgets
-defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
-killall Dock

Enables indexing on all volumes
-mdutil -i on /Volumes/*

Anyone interested can pick it up here:
http://looprock.com/?q=code/upbeat

noiselevel · Post by **noiselevel** » Tue Feb 12, 2008 8:08 am

Does Upbeat works under Leopard?

Thanks.

Optimizing Intel Mac

Optimizing Intel Mac

Re: Optimizing Intel Mac

Re: Optimizing Intel Mac

Upbeat: OS X general system optimizer