SSD, Spotlight, and Logic Pro

[bLiss]

I have a new computer (MacBook Pro 2011) with an SSD as my OS/DAW drive, and another internal HDD for recording.

After reading various pro audio sources online I took advice to format my Record Drive as non-journaled.

But I want to make things as efficient as possible. Namely, I don't want Spotlight or anything else doing business in the background, i.e. using resources, while I'm recording or mixing. I just want me and Logic Pro. Is there anything else I should be wary of in preferences, system settings etc.?

However I have seen a couple comments that Logic Pro needs Spotlight to function, for some reason, so I shouldn't put / in the privacy tab of Spotlight preferences. I can't find an official stance on this from Apple. Can anyone confirm?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Jolly Jimmy]

I can't see any reason why Logic would need spotlight indexing of the drive/folder you are recording to. Have you got any links where this has been said?

 

[bLiss]

I can't see any reason why Logic would need spotlight indexing of the drive/folder you are recording to. Have you got any links where this has been said?

Trying to re-trace my search steps the first thing I found was on this gearslutz thread dry county says:

However, if you use Logic, turning off Spotlight will also screw with that program's ability to see certain files.

I'd contact the guy myself but his website doesn't work and he hasn't been on the board for 3 weeks. As far as Spotlight goes it seems like common wisdom to just disable the whole thing but again I'm also interested in disabling other random background processing that is unnecessary.

 

[paolo-]

After a bit of googling, https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1624719?start=0&tstart=0 , http://www.logic-users-group.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4713 , it seems that you don't need to turn off spotlight when using Logic as some parts of the program use it and it automatically disables the indexing when it's not idle.

Honestly, if you're not having trouble with your drive being too slow I wouldn't bother.

 

[bLiss]

Sweet, didn't see that before, thank you

 

[ChrisA]

I have a new computer (MacBook Pro 2011) with an SSD as my OS/DAW drive, and another internal HDD for recording.

After reading various pro audio sources online I took advice to format my Record Drive as non-journaled.

But I want to make things as efficient as possible. Namely, I don't want Spotlight or anything else doing business in the background, i.e. using resources, while I'm recording or mixing. I just want me and Logic Pro. Is there anything else I should be wary of in preferences, system settings etc.?

However I have seen a couple comments that Logic Pro needs Spotlight to function, for some reason, so I shouldn't put / in the privacy tab of Spotlight preferences. I can't find an official stance on this from Apple. Can anyone confirm?

Thanks in advance.

You are trying to fix a problem that does not exist. There is zero reason to disable other processes while using Logic. mac OS X itself does a good job of gettig Logic the CPU cycles it needs when they are needed. Logic can tel the OS that it is about to do some real-time recording this is taken care of.

Sounds like maybe you used to use MS Windows and still want to mess with all the workarounds that Windows required.

A non-journaled file system is a bit of a risk. If the drive gets unplugged or the power goes off you might loose work that you've not backed up to another drive. It's a latst ditch thing you do after you discover you are getting drop outs.

What are you trying to do. If a vocalist takes 4 minutes to sing a song you can't hot-rod the computer and finish the job in 3 minutes. Likewise id the CPU is running at 50% idle then turning off some background job and getting the CPU to be 55% idle will not improve the sound

What you should do is look at Activity Meter while you work. Is the CPU usage higher then about 50% on all cores? is the disk I/O rate close to what it can support? If not then "fixing" this will do nothing

 

[bLiss]

You are trying to fix a problem that does not exist. There is zero reason to disable other processes while using Logic. mac OS X itself does a good job of gettig Logic the CPU cycles it needs when they are needed. Logic can tel the OS that it is about to do some real-time recording this is taken care of.

Sounds like maybe you used to use MS Windows and still want to mess with all the workarounds that Windows required.

A non-journaled file system is a bit of a risk. If the drive gets unplugged or the power goes off you might loose work that you've not backed up to another drive. It's a latst ditch thing you do after you discover you are getting drop outs.

What are you trying to do. If a vocalist takes 4 minutes to sing a song you can't hot-rod the computer and finish the job in 3 minutes. Likewise id the CPU is running at 50% idle then turning off some background job and getting the CPU to be 55% idle will not improve the sound

What you should do is look at Activity Meter while you work. Is the CPU usage higher then about 50% on all cores? is the disk I/O rate close to what it can support? If not then "fixing" this will do nothing

I appreciate the advice – and I think you're right I still have a lingering Windows fix-it mentality despite years of Mac use.

No, a 4-minute recording can't be done in 3 minutes, obviously. But I just got this nice new system (2.2GHz i7) as an upgrade from a Late 2008 MacBook Pro. I'm sure things will be vastly improved (work starts Monday) but problems I encountered with the last system were more along the lines of... Recording an overdub on a session with many tracks and many plug-ins proved difficult regarding latency, sometimes minor audible cracks (due to the processor redlining to keep up with everything?), and sometimes playback/recording would be stopped by the system.

So it's more a concern of processing efficiency, not the time it takes to get the live take recorded, which is unchangeable.

I have my record drive set to non-journaled, but I have a Time Machine backup hourly when I'm not in session, and a remote backup service online also when I'm not in session. If you care to explain how the journaling is less risky I'd be interested to know. The impression I got from reading audio-geek boards was that non-journaling makes file read/write access faster, enough to warrant formatting the drive that way.

 

[johnwicks]

thanks man