Hi everyone, I'm in urgent need of some advice here and any help would be greatly appreciated!
Here's some quick, important background info:
-- Just recently got into the world of DAWs and Virtual Instruments
-- My piano is hooked up to an old crummy Macbook Pro (4GB of RAM) running GarageBand
-- I just purchased my first Virtual Instruments, Cantus and Mystica, two days ago
-- I'm not a professional/not doing this for work. That being said, music composition is a passion of mine and I'm willing to put whatever resources I need to put towards it to get the proper setup.
-- I'm focused on using virtual instruments. I'm not concerned with a DAW that is ideal for recording real instruments as I will not be doing any of that. Furthermore, editing a song's/track's notes is important to me, but I'm not going to be doing any hardcore sound editing like applying filters and doing EQ and that kind of stuff. At least that certainly will not be my focus.
So here's the deal. With my current setup I'm experiencing significant performance issues which are hampering my ability to create music effectively. If I create a GarageBand song, it can handle maybe 3-4 tracks that are using Cantus/Mystica (and subsequently the Kontakt 5 AU plugin) before GarageBand/Kontakt crash with an error that reads something like "Panic: Kontakt 5 could not allocate enough memory." GarageBand also relatively frequently gives me the following error: "This song has too many tracks, effects, or notes to be played in real-time" and then the playback/recording will stop at that time. That error often comes up right at the point where playback is about to start on one of the virtual instrument parts. That being said, even after getting that error, I usually just need to start playback again from the beginning and it will be ok. It's very annoying though as it happens relatively often.
So what I need to know given the above stated problems are the following:
What is most likely to be at the source of the performance issues and what kind of DAW/computer setup should I go with to resolve it?
I'm specifically wondering whether it's most likely that my performance issues are specifically due to my Mac only having 4GB of RAM or if it may be at least in part due to performance issues related to GarageBand itself that might occur even on a computer with more RAM. I'm considering buying a new 16GB Macbook Pro, but I have concern that I might still have problems when composing a song with many virtual instrument tracks. Could anyone provide any anecdotal info here? Does anyone use GarageBand on a higher end Macbook and still struggle with performance? Are there any performance differences between GarageBand and Logic (I've read something about Logic allowing for "multi-timbral" instruments which is supposed to maybe improve performance but I'm not really sure what that refers to)? Or are the differences restricted to the feature set? Are other DAWs such as Cubase better from a performance standpoint? Can anyone who uses GarageBand/Logic on a higher end Macbook confirm that it should be able to handle let's say 10+ virtual instrument tracks with no problems?
I really really appreciate any help that anyone could give me here. I have very little knowledge in this area and have attempted to answer these questions through research but there is so much info out there and I've struggled to really get the answers I need! Thanks again!
-Tim
Need major advice on what DAW/computer setup to go with!!
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- KVRist
- 226 posts since 23 Mar, 2007
Hey Tim,
there are many users out there who are using Kontakt 5 libraries with Garageband successfully so that´s surely not the problem. Garageband is a good starting point for you. Cubase and others daws will also run fine for your needs but that´s more a matter of taste what you´re want to do and what you´re searching for.
In your case... your "old" macbook is the problem. As the error messages points to you´re not having enough ram to get rid of the Sample Library. Not only the library needs this ram... also your system, you´re applications etc. are accessing it. So ram can immediately run out.
So if your planning to buy a new machine, that will help a lot and you should have no problems at all to use the libraries in a normal way.
If you want to go pro... lets talk again
Have fun and a good start into 2015!
Martin aka NoSoniX
there are many users out there who are using Kontakt 5 libraries with Garageband successfully so that´s surely not the problem. Garageband is a good starting point for you. Cubase and others daws will also run fine for your needs but that´s more a matter of taste what you´re want to do and what you´re searching for.
In your case... your "old" macbook is the problem. As the error messages points to you´re not having enough ram to get rid of the Sample Library. Not only the library needs this ram... also your system, you´re applications etc. are accessing it. So ram can immediately run out.
So if your planning to buy a new machine, that will help a lot and you should have no problems at all to use the libraries in a normal way.
If you want to go pro... lets talk again
Have fun and a good start into 2015!
Martin aka NoSoniX
