Keeping ya Production PC ninja

[kminus1]

Right Lads n ladyboys I have gathered all my superpowers together for the second time, to give you a free solution to all of life's problems including computer slow downs. I promise you this bundle will be special in some way to you (Sorry Mac 'n' Linux etc users this one is for Windows users only). It's taken fekkin ages so some feedback wouldn't go amiss. CLICK HERE:NINJA PC UTILITIES 2 feel free to post the link wherever..I guess

[zonetrooper5]

One piece of advice, stop using a 10 year old OS and start using Windows 7 or hell buy a Macbook.

[JBE]

Avoid Vista entirely.

[Electric_Head]

Install Reaper

Everything loads and runs better and faster

[Sparxy]

Man you guys would fucking run a mile from my production PC lol... I have a laptop for general use and aPC for production, but obviously I use it for everything haha!

All my project files are strewn across my desktop, MP3s, WAVs, samples, resampled bits everywhere. It's organised chaos! I manage to find everything I need but anyone else coming round for a production sesh is like WTF

That said, I run defrags regularly, virtual memory is set, I have the thing running fine its just my file organisation SUCKS

[futures_untold]

@ Sparxy:This link may interest you? organising-a-sample-library-t133144.html

[gen_]

As for finding out your RAM, if you have a pre-built machine and cat be assed to search for ages get CPU-Z

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

Will also tell you your CPU socket so you can upgrade that too. Unless you have a laptop... or a mac like me

[apoplexiamusic]

And Macs are for girlboys before that one comes up...

yeah, don't mean to be rude, but not everyone who uses a Mac is a fashion/tech/victim or a hipster you know...

[brettheaslewood]

have you seriously dug this up from 6 months ago?

did you dsf search MAC? haha

[VirtualMark]

have you seriously dug this up from 6 months ago?

did you dsf search MAC? haha

[Towany]

Become a fully blown girlyboy and get a mac.

[gen_]

Macs are great, just a bad investment in the long term. F*ck what the fashionistas and camp male hairdresser types with their comb-overs say. If you care enough about fashion in the first place to reject a Mac just because you don't want to look like someone who thinks Windows PC's are difficult to use (aka an idiot) then you shouldn't be a producer.

Mac

+ great machine, reliability, superior drivers and the option to run Logic.
- no upgrades, you pay for what you get even if you don't need it (e.g iMac artist grade screen, lathed block aluminum case, stupidly expensive price), terrible long term investment. (They hold value well but you still won't like upgrading).

Oh, not to mention you need on average double to memory for the average project, but a Mac will run waaaay more tracks due to the nature of CoreAudio. 64bit is great, but the Logic bit bridge (like all stopgap solutions) is buggy as hell.

[apoplexiamusic]

actually i was just looking for tips on getting my mac more efficient.

it's getting kind of slow sometimes and i don't know of any programs to defrag my harddrive or do some maintenance

[gen_]

Okay 3 things cos I've been round the block with this and can tell you a hell of a lot more than your average Macfag will (by this I refer to the people that actually believe that Apple do everything in good faith without a firm eye on profits).

1. Don't upgrade OS if you don't have to. Lion may seem snappier than Snow Leopard as soon as you install it, but every new release Apple makes uses on average double the RAM the last version did, this is the simplest way to convince users to update their Mac as all computers get incredibly slow when their out of RAM it's not easy for Nan to tell what it is.

1.1 Ditch Safari, its got massive memory leaks, use Firefox or Chrome.

2. Get yourself something like iFreeMem. The Mac Religious will tell you it's useless because the all powerful mind of Steve Jobs has risen again in you machine and is able to use his predictive powers to load apps before you click them and purge your memory from everything else if you need more for a certain program, but in reality OSX is god awful at memory management and Windows craps all over it for this. Run iFreeMem whenever you want to use your DAW and wait for it to finish before you load it.

3. Buy more RAM. If you're running less than 4GB on Snow Leopard, you WILL experience lag after an hour with 10 tabs open in Safari, and if the Apple devs couldn't sort that then they sure as hell didn't even test Logic 9.1.5 on OSX 10.6.8 with all their memory consuming updates.

3.1 There are stopgaps. Install Onyx and run CRON scripts. Do not go hunting for a defragger unless you want to buy iDefrag, and the only reason this is of any use whatsoever is because it creates Hot Zones. HFS+ defrags on-the-fly whenever you're not using your Mac. Also run Activity Monitor and switch the bottom tab to system memory. If your wired is more than 250mb and you aren't running Parallels or another VM then get your system disk and repair your main HDD. Google for instructions. This can be a real memory hog as the OS likes to fix the blocks and then just store the fixed block in memory for the whole time you use the OS without fixing the drive (due to the possibility someone could design a virus for the disk repair that could write stuff into system files).

[VirtualMark]

Mac

+ great machine, reliability, superior drivers and the option to run Logic.

sorry mate, but thats bollocks. my pc is reliable as anything, i'm running windows 7. superior drivers? any proof on this, such as benchmarks? my drivers work just fine as far as i'm concerned. while logic may be seen as an advantage, theres still cubase, ableton, fl studio, pro tools etc that run on the pc, so logic isn't necessary(i do like the look of it tho).

the only real advantage to running a mac is that it makes your wallet less heavy to carry round. i spent just over a grand for my dual monitor, dual hard drive, 8gb fast ram, passive graphics card 5ghz i7 system, which would piss all over ANY mac at the same price point. in fact, it would piss all over a £6000 mac pro.

I've just checked the mac site, for over 6 grand, you can have a system with a quad core 3.33ghz processor. Wow, 66% the speed of mine, for 600% the price. I put in all the ram upgrades, bigger hard drive ect that i have on my system. the mac monitors cost a fortune! to be honest apple is the biggest rip off going at the moment, they are disgustingly expensive.

at the end of the day, i'm not a fanboy of the pc. if the mac was a competitive product, i would take them seriously. but i just want the most for my money. i built my own system, overclocked it etc. this is an objective opinion, based on fact. the mac pro is at least 6x as expensive to get similar computing power as the pc.

[vertx]

shit people it's called a hackintosh

[gen_]

Long post ahead.

the only real advantage to running a mac is that it makes your wallet less heavy to carry round. i spent just over a grand for my dual monitor, dual hard drive, 8gb fast ram, passive graphics card 5ghz i7 system, which would piss all over ANY mac at the same price point. in fact, it would piss all over a £6000 mac pro.

Here we go. Firstly I already covered pricing by saying its a poor investment from a monetary stance so stop bitching, also you 'top of the range' Mac Pro is due for an update any moment now, so complaining about it being a little old now is like complaining about a new Xbox 360 being overpriced the day before the next-box comes out. Obvious.

Secondly, hardware reliability shits on PC parts, people will rave about build quality all day, but usually we dismiss them and say 'its the same parts inside' Well I'm a system builder, have been since I was 14, (I'm in Uni now) and I'll tell you they have great attention to detail. Is every single part and component in your PC wrapped in breathable film to stop dust from getting into it over time? Does your PC use workstation grade parts (which are far more expensive and reliable than consumer-grade), a 1000watt redundant PSU, a case that will take a vicious attack from the biggest dog you or I know (the Mac Pro case alone is like 13kg or something and solid as fuck). The drivers never falter, I never have to find an install CD except to do a full system reset or install rosetta. This is what I mean by reliability. To me no sound is the same as no system.

. superior drivers? any proof on this, such as benchmarks? my drivers work just fine as far as i'm concerned. while logic may be seen as an advantage, theres still cubase, ableton, fl studio, pro tools etc that run on the pc, so logic isn't necessary(i do like the look of it tho).

Which brings us to Drivers. CoreAudio is statistically superior to ASIO because it is it's evolution (OS 9 used ASIO). Other than the native multi-audio source support meaning you can actually play youtube whilst producing etc, you can run far more tracks on CoreAudio drivers. You aslo get super low latency by default, tiny buffers (I run usually with 128 samples, 7ms simplex, 13.8ms duplex and can run 35-50 tracks with on average 4 plugs per track on a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo Mac Mini 2010, I can give you evidence) I have tested this personally on both my Mac Mini boot-camped and my Quad Core hack, and if you really insist I will fire up the old Ableton and do an example running the same plugs in the same session cross platform when I get the time.

Just to look at why, ASIO is designed to create a direct, bit perfect connection to your sound-card. Your buffer is filled and off you go. CoreAudio submixes before sending to the buffer and contains its own 'soft buffer' as well in memory. This soft buffer allows your cores to be more asymmetric as writing to the soft buffer is not classed as an interrupt, whereas writing the the hard one is. This is why I am able to run more tracks, because the time critical part of any DAW (writing to the Hard buffer) isn't handled by the DAW anymore.

Finally, Hackintosh is a great option if you can't afford a mac, but I had to buy a Mac when it started getting to the point where I needed my Mac to be reliable. Hackintosh is good, but everytime a major update came out or I updated my PC, I would be spending like 2-3 weeks re-kexting, doing my DSDT etc. and thats not good for productivity.

Nowadays, I recommend buying a mac mini, and some aftermarket RAM. Thats what the practical guy would do. Sure you can look at XYZ laptop and say 'oh the Mac is a ripoff', but unless you DJ or are touring you're not buying a Audio machine if buy a Laptop as your main system, its just not a smart thing to do.

(Note: OCing is all well and good, but in a serious environment like the one I work in now, you would be an idiot to even suggest it. It's for people who know what their doing, not people who are asking for advice on a forum, any old slip of the hand on the Vcore and its bye bye CPU.)

PS: With all due respect sir, your name is VirtualMark. I will make the humble suggestion that maybe, like me, you know a lot about PCs, but maybe, unlike me who was forced into the situation, you have never had to adapt to using a Mac and never wanted to because it take all your power and mastery of computing away from you. (You can't mod it, and customization is shite, not to mention there being no root control of daemons aka services so you cant pare down and optimize its footprint like a Windows PC)

[VirtualMark]

some interesting points. firstly, i can't find any evidence of macs having way lower latency and cpu overhead than pc's. i would think that pc's latency would depend on the driver proviced by the manufacturer of your audio interface? but if you have some links i'd be interested to read them. i can use youtube, listen to music etc while using my daw btw, i'm using the native instruments driver for my card. get very low latency, i've tried it set on 32 samples which worked until the project got a bit bigger. got it set to 128 now.

its all very well having dust covered components, but when i priced up a similar system to my own i could buy 6 of them. so i could upgrade my pc every 2 years for the next 10 years for the price of just one mac now - reliability isn't really an issue when you look at it like that. plus the fact that i gave away my 10 year old pc, its still working fine. the laptop im using now is 3 years old, working fine. my new desktop is working fine so far. so i can't really see a problem with reliability with pc's. i suppose a cheap one may have problems, but i buy decent quality stuff and believe you get what you pay for, within reason. i'm not too bothered about my pc having to withstand a big dog attacking it, its not really an issue that happens in my life.

Here we go. Firstly I already covered pricing by saying its a poor investment from a monetary stance so stop bitching, also you 'top of the range' Mac Pro is due for an update any moment now, so complaining about it being a little old now is like complaining about a new Xbox 360 being overpriced the day before the next-box comes out. Obvious.

i didn't say the components were old. just overpriced and not as fast as my system thats a fraction of the price. and the xbox 360 analogy doesn't really hold up as they've been upgraded and reduced in price since they were released. obvious...

Nowadays, I recommend buying a mac mini, and some aftermarket RAM. Thats what the practical guy would do. Sure you can look at XYZ laptop and say 'oh the Mac is a ripoff', but unless you DJ or are touring you're not buying a Audio machine if buy a Laptop as your main system, its just not a smart thing to do.

i was talking about desktops, the one i priced up was the mac pro. but i couldn't disagree more - a laptop is as capable as a desktop. if you can name one task that a desktop can do that a laptop can't, i'd be interested to hear it.

as far as overclocking goes, it took me a few hours of reading, i bought a motherboard that was made for overclocking and went ahead and did it. the i7 2600k is known for its overclocking ability(people are getting 5.5ghz on air), and any smart company that needed more computing power should consider it as it could save a fortune. you can even overclock slightly without adjusting the voltage.

[sunny_b_uk]

at the end of the day, i'm not a fanboy of the pc. if the mac was a competitive product, i would take them seriously. but i just want the most for my money. i built my own system, overclocked it etc. this is an objective opinion, based on fact. the mac pro is at least 6x as expensive to get similar computing power as the pc.

ahh kool i did that too, i built my amd 3.0 ghz quad core with 4gb ram (no overclocking because im ascared ) for under £200 lol some parts were second hand, also a Buy It Now on ebay for a samsung 35" hdtv £130 (off a stupid chick). last year was an amazing lucky year building such a cheap studio it would have friggin cost tha bomb if i tried to iMac myself

[NickyXplosion]

Deadly rabbit quotes: "that canned shit that will get you higgggghhhhh"

Listen to bassnectar on that shit its too intense