I have a late 2014 iMac that up until recently I was only using for casual home recording (MIDI drums/keys, live guitars, bass & vocals w/PT subscription), so no real problems. But I recently decided to try and up the recording quality with the thought of self releasing. So I upgraded some hardware, got a Glyph drive for storage, etc... I also maxed out with 25 titles on the IK promotion. I was shocked at how huge those files ended up being. I previously had only used 10% of the Mac drive. After all the promos were uploaded, the Mac drive was 50% full. And that's where the problem seems to have started. I can barely get a couple of tracks going (midi or audio), and PT becomes so unstable that I can't really proceed. At first I was recording at 192, then I dropped to 96, my last batch was done at 88.2. Between that and "Commiting" the tracks to give the CPU some breathing room, I can get it up to about 5 tracks before it becomes problematic. So before I proceed I was hoping for some input on the following:
- The error messages I get are a mix of advising increase the buffering and disable plug-ins to relieve the CPU. Adjusting the buffering doesn't consistently help, and I need the plug-ins. The Mac originally only came with 8GB of RAM. I bumped that up to 32GB, but it only minimally helped. Is upgrading the CPU as well a viable option?
- Would anyone suggest moving the plug-ins to the Glyph drive as well?
- Before I start re-recording over again, would dropping down to 48mhz or 44.1mhz make that much of a difference in terms of computer processing?
- Since I'm doing a lot of hard rock guitars, I've got Amplitube 5 often going on multiple tracks. I've started "Committing" those tracks, printing the efx on new tracks and deleting the originals. But again once I've got more than a couple of those going, PT becomes unstable and crashes after 5-10 seconds of recording, or becomes very noisy while tracking. Luckily, I think that's just the playback engine getting overworked as the noise doesn't print and goes away when just monitoring. SIDEBAR ON GUITAR RECORDING I'd read good things about the Line 6 Helix LT so I picked up one of those figuring it would become my main source of guitar tones. While it has a ton of sounds/efx and is noise free, I'm having trouble getting a convincing high gain/tube amp sound out of it. Any hints. On the other hand, I can run my guitar thru an old ART Tube Channel, drop in a generic Amplitube 5 Marshall preset and it's pretty much good to go.
- I'm also setting up a guitar buss with compression/reverb/etc... using available PT and IK plug ins. And will be doing the same for vocals once I'm at that point.. But one of my new toys was a MOTU 828x interface, which also has on-board DSP, but I haven't really delved into that yet. Anyone have any tips before I open up another can of worms...
Thanks to all for any advice or input.
