Musical Instrument Digital Interface

DG

Thanks

Colin:

You do not need to replace the whole drive - - only the enclosure. Heavy duty firewire enclosures with fans are available from a few suppliers. One of these is Granite digital - they have both firewire 400 ($90) and firewire 400/800 ($120) capable enclosures.

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg23_firewireidecasekits.htm

What you'd need to do is extract the drive from its present enclosure and put it in the firewire enclosure. This is usually fairly easy to accomplish. Both USB and firewire work with ATA drives. The difference is in the circuitry (known as the bridgeboard) that goes between the drive and the interface that connects the drive to the computer.

what colin is pointing to is a ready-to-go external drive - the same model exists also with USB/FW400/FW800 connectors ... i thinc you cammot change the enclosure without loosing garantee (like with the maxtor onetouch drives) ... maybe you can echange the device since its almost new?
christian

Everyone is talking about the hard drive, but I thought that the hard drive was only in use to load the samples onto the RAM, which it is doing fine. But no one seems concerned about the RAM. Could that be the cause of my problems? (which, by the way, are growing less since I have been tweaking Logic, thanks to all of your advice). But I would have thought that it would be the RAM, so maybe I don't understand the system that is used.
Also, when I have Logic's CPU meter up, and am playing a song, the CPU meter (both the audio one and the disk I/O) stays very low on the register. But whenever there is a pop or click, the audio one jumps up. This dosn't make sense to me. It has plenty of power when it is playing, but then jumps high when it clicks, and then goes back to normal. Any ideas?

Colin:

With the VI instruments and software only the beginning of the samples is loaded into RAM - - the rest of the sample is streamed from the hard drive. Disk streaming technology was first employed by Gigastudio and is used by EXS24 (if you turn "virtual memory" on under the options menu) and Vienna Instruments. Its advantage is that it allows one to be able to play many more, much longer unlooped samples than would be possible if all samples were loaded into RAM. It is this technology which played a central role in bringing about the shift from hardware to software samplers. However, because it involves streaming samples from disk in real time, it requires high speed disk access. That's the reason everyone is suggesting Firewire drives. Christian's suggestion is a good one - - of trying to exchange your present drive for the Firewire version of the same. However, if that doesn't work, you might try what I suggested - - purchasing another enclosure and putting the drive mechanism in it. It is possible that the warranty for the drive mechanism - - as distinct from the warranty for the drive+enclosure - - will not be voided by this procedure, but you should ask Western Digital about this. It seems possible that the reason the audio meter jumps at the time of the click is that your current sample drive is failing to provide the sample in time.

OK, that clears a lot up. I will try to exchange it and see what happens. Thanks so much for your help, you guys are great.

I thought the USB 2 spec was nearly as good as Firewire. This is false? Are external USB drives much worse than external Firewire?

Thanks,
Jay

jay, this is always the problem with viewing isolated on plain numbers ... of course 480 Mbit/s (USB 2) is theoretically a better value than 400 Mbit/s (firewire 400) but you had also to look at the design, type and protocol for the connection.
although both are serial protocols they behave different - on a USB bus you can have a variety of devices (mice, keyboards, keys, harddisks, video, ipods ... literally hundreds, many of them coming with their own drivers) and protocol versions (USB 1, 2, asynchronous, isynchronous) and in fact you never know what exactly is going on - it just works, but it works *somehow* ...
firewire is a more straightforward protocol (although downward compatible to 100 and 200 Mbit/s you wont find many of such devices) and i don't recommend to have more than 3 devices on a bus to keep data throughput in a useful range. have a closer look at CPU usage when accessing files via firewire and you will notice it's still only the second best choice.

best option ourdays (especially on a macbook pro) would be a PCI express 34 adaptercard for sATA connected to an external sATA disk - low CPU load, fast bus (3 Gbit/s), good protocol, controler sitting very close to the processor ...
christian

So the eSATA thing would be better than a firewire 800? Also, could you provide links to where to buy these things, since they seem to be somewhat specialized. Wuld these two work well together, and are they trusted sellers?

http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/detail.asp?dpno=7125656&Redir=1&description=LaCie-500GB%20d2%20External%20Hard%20Drive%20-%20SATA%20II-External%20Hard%20Drives

http://www.buy.com/retail/Product.asp?sku=203531657&SearchEngine=NexTag&SearchTerm=203531657&Type=PE&Category=Comp&Gad=0&dcaid=15894

Thanks

BTW, I got a firewire 800 MyBook Pro Edition, and that seems to have helped a lot. Still not perfect, but completely workable. Thanks so much for all the help you guys gave me.

Is this eSATA a faster protocol than the internal IDE that came with my Dell?

Thanks,
Jay

So it was workable, but it has grown worse. Now I am constantly getting the core audio overload message. I have gone to the help page on the apple website for that message, and implimented their suggestions. I know that you guys seem to not think that it is a problem with RAM, but, if I open dashboard while I am loading my song and it is transfering files onto RAM, I see the RAM widget go up to 98% and stay there. But the song is continuing to load samples onto RAM for awhile later, so (following my logic), it must be pushing out what it has already loaded, thus my problem. Am I missing something? Will extra RAM help me? I can get a 2GB stick to replace my 1GB if this will help, but I want to know if it will help.

Please? I need to know soon. All I want to know is whether more RAM would help me or not. If I don't get any answers, than I will just start a new thread, but I am trying to make use of the old one. Thanks.

Open Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder). It gives you an accurate reading of how much physical and virtual memory are being used by each application. If you are close to having filled physical RAM, it is possible that this is the source of your problem - - and, in that case, adding a 2GB memory stick might help. However, I do not own a MacBook Pro so I can't speak directly from experience with this machine.

In the activity moniter it shows the memory usage as follows:

Wired: 1.78 GB

Active: 131.46 MB

Inactive: 67.96 MB

Used 1.98 GB

Free: 26.84 MB


Will more RAM help me?

Colin:

I suspect that more RAM would be helpful since you have a very limited amount of free RAM in your present setup. On my computer I have loaded about 2.9 GB of samples (with VI as a plugi within Logic Pro 7.2.3) with no problems and an additional GB using the VI standalone app. However, as I said, I do not own and have never worked with a MacBook Pro.

Thanks for the replies, Stephen. Can anyone using my system tell me if more RAM would solve my problem?

@ColinThomson said:

Thanks for the replies, Stephen. Can anyone using my system tell me if more RAM would solve my problem?

Hi Colin,

I have a Macbook Pro 17-inch 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo and I believe the Intel Core Duo versions only support 2GBs of RAM. The new Intel Core !!! 2 !!! Duo versions (built as of last 2006) will support up to 3GBs of RAM. You can check your own system specs by entering your computer's serial number on the apple website.

To get the serial number in OS X: click on (Apple symbol top left corner) - About this Mac - More Info

Then go to: http://support.apple.com/specs/ and paste your serial number in the box at the upper right corner that says "Find by Serial Number".

I have ordered VSL SE, but have not yet received it to try on my system. I figure that I will not be able to run a whole orchestra of instances all at once, but will need to work on a few tracks at a time and then bounce to disk before opening more tracks with VI instances. Also, I'm hoping the RAM optimizer feature in VI will help reduce the load on my RAM.

Hope this helps, Brian

Brian, yes, my macbook pro can support 3 GB of RAM. Probably I will end up only doing a few instances at a time, but I wanted to make sure I was getting the most out of my system. Thanks.