How to Optimize Mac OS for Music Production:

[Mod & Op]

How can I disable MAC OS processes down to almost safe mode levels (like windows xp) so that my music partition will be as "lite" as possible?


I'm about to wipe my Mac and reinstall all my music making software. I do this every 6 months because I test out a lot of stuff and after a while it get's really cluttered. I go through and pick the stuff I actually use and get rid of everything else.

This time I'm going to partition my drive and have one partition that's specific to music production, and one that's for everyday life.

for the music partition I want to disable as many mac os features that I dont' need.

I can think of these:

time machine
expose
universal access
run monolingual - get rid of extra languages

there's gonna be nothing on it besides music making software... I'm gonna keep safari so that I can look up random things if I need reference... like KVR
but everything is gonna go using App Delete.

[jancivil]

On Snow Leopard, nothing much starts up that isn't launched unless you specifically enable it to. You have to turn Time Machine on. (tho, One time I turned something called Q Master on only because I wondered wtf it was, and it stayed on as a preference pane which I had to remove.)

This is a non-issue unless you're on some older OS version. These aren't windows services which require disabling or they'll always start and run as background services. You turn them on and off; except some *preference panes* start automatically. So you remove those. Time Machine is not one of them.

Why a music partition? Do you mean a samples partition? Which won't really suffice, you need another physical drive. I don't see you getting more performance by separating out apps by partitions, unless you're on an older machine and an older OS version. I used to use Process Wizard to prioritize running processes on a single core PPC under Panther as there were a number of things to turn off then, and I need to, the difference was very noticable. Apple has streamlined the OS quite a bit since then.

There are little things which use really nothing of resources which appear in certain cases, like Apple Spell when you've used text editor or something that you can quit in Activity Monitor.

[Mod & Op]

hey thanks, good to know.

I have an external drive connected using esata that i run samples off of etc. I want a separate partition so that my os is just clean and uncluttered.

I want to have one partition for the stuff I use for entertainment (adobe stuff, web stuff, downloading etc etc) and one that's just dedicated to my DAW and my third party music production plugs. I think it'll help me to be less distracted and I work better when I have a clean space... makes me calm and focused.

[jancivil]

actually, that's a good idea, you won't have to clean up, defrag after all of that so often.

when I had that slow old PPC I used a separate user account for similar reasons.