Logic TDM Help And Suggestions with L9 and TDM

[montylmc]

Hi there

Sorry for this long post but I thought Id share my recent experience with you and hope for some constructive feedback from you fellow forum TDM users!
In another post a few days ago I asked for suggestions from fellow Forum members and got some good advice thanks.Bear In mind however that I have been using Logic TDM since 2003 so have a reasonable knowledge about the Logic TDM subject-I managed to Downgrade from OSX 6 Snow Leopard to OSX 5 Leopard-The whole process was a nightmare in itself-Thank you apple for being about as much help as a chocolate fireguard-Anyway that aside I ended up with a brand new Mac Pro with 8 core Xeon 2.26 dual with 10 gig of ram- with OSX 10.5.8 installed and raring to go
Ok I Installed Pro Tools 8.0-Updated it to 8.0.1cs1-I installed every single plugin that was appropriate-This took over two days-I then hooked up the new Magma PE64r Chassis with the five HD cards(3 of them Accel)-Apart from a slight blip when Pro Tools crashed upon the first launch I got it running okay-virtually perfect infact-This so far was a success.Then I installed Brand new out of the box logic 9.0- I updated it to 9.0.2
First I launched ProTools again to check that it launched my Autoload template without any hickups-Again it was rock solid. I then launched Logic 9.0.2............................

It did the obvious au manager stuff-it took a good 10 minutes or so before it loaded the program-O Bye the way-Speed was deactivated in the au manager-It said it was not compatible-But that aside logic booted up okay-I then activated DAE (I left DTDM out of the equation because I believe it will not work correctly with my expansion chassis) I rebooted logic to launch the TDM setup-It booted okay-I then setup the Digidesign hardware within logic-I use an Digi 96 box-an apogee AD8000SE and an apogee AD8000-This gives me 18 outputs digitally and 16 outputs analogue-Ive used this amount of outputs regularly on my G4 for years!

I then went about setting up my Autoload environment
32 x stereo DAE tracks
16 x stereo DAE Aux returns(for reverbs etc)
9 x stereo DAE Master output faders
Quite a few more bits and bobs did a save-Then a reboot-then decided to try out a few TDM plugins to see how far I could stretch the TDM without it getting hot and bothered-I ran a good few instances-for an example-4 TC MD3 s 5 x TC VSS3 5 x TLA spaces 8 x Indigo viruses 12 x TDM EXS24 samplers 5 x Reverb Ones 3 x Pitchblenders 4 x echo farms Loads of waves platinum bits say around 15 About 6 x sonnox Dynamics 3 x Soundtoys filterfreaks

By now the whole logic session was becoming unbearably slow when I went to a new insert on a channel It would take ten seconds before it would open up my TDM plugin list - It never did this on my G4! when I ran Logic 7.1 with ProTools 7.2! Eventually Logic Quit ! (It did save the session though!)

I rebooted it then thought -well I maxxed it out- so fair enough- but it didnt seem to run much more than my G4 setup when I ran A core card and just three accel cards inside the computer! I then went about deactivating the plugins one by one-after deactivating around half a dozen or so the program began picking up pace again and letting me do things faster-So my observation so far.........Logic 9(on a Mac Pro Xeon) is worse than Logic 7 (on an old and trusted G4 Dual 1.42ghz)

I deactivated all TDM plugins and resaved my AUTOLOAD song then I started to setup my CoreAudio bits
I launched a Refx Vanguard and a Refx Nexus and an EVP88 an ImPoscar synth and a few more bits and bobs-Specrasonics Stylus RMX-

Again Logic started to slow down again in performance-Graphics were slow to respond not unbearable but not good enough on a new 3k computer! I had not even started to max this system out yet-Im convinced that the DAE is creating a major problem on this platform-Yes it is useable and I can probably run a serious amount of tracks etc for my mixes but I was expecting something a bit more rock solid as a day to day workhorse

Any suggestions? Is the DAE 8.0.1cs at fault here? should I try a different CS update or am I pissing in the wind here?

 

[tigerman]

i've also noticed an increasing delay in all logic graphic once the project starts to be a bit full.
But i am FAR for reaching cpu limit, i have only 4 bars working in logic and 3 of them are under 20%, only one is at abut 50% load. But graphic is already slowed.
note that i use very few tdm plug-ins and i do all audio and instruments in core audio.
i don't think it depends from TDM
i'm quite sure we will have sluggish graphic even with dae off.
Have you tried with DAE disabled from preference aswell? i don't think it will change anything about laggy graphic response..
Basically i've gone away from my g5 also to get a better graphic response, but i can say i'm not really satisfied about logic performance on this new mac pro.

I have some doubt also, i'm not so sure this mac pro uses core i7 turbo boost feature, is there a way to check it?

Yesterday during my second project on this machine logic has about to run out of memory, so no more "processor overload" messages, now i have "memory is getting low", fantastic, and obviously we can't use 64bit version because of dae and snow leopard.

my first project was corrupted, lost all work day, there's a thread in logic 9 section about it.

this is not a good start indeed

Question.. do you get slugghis graphic when you was on logic in snow leopard ? even the 64bit version ?

i would like to understand if it's a operating system bad implementation of this new cpus or if it's a 10.5.x issue, or if it's a dae issue, or it's just logic that sux.

i've tried working a bit on pro-tools hd.. well i've falled in love with it in 5 minutes....
I saw some videos on digidesign website and now i'm asking myself why i'm not using it, i'm quite sure that it will have 1/100 of the issues i encounter in logic right now.
I've stayed away from it for many years, i'm just too lazy to learn everything from scratch again, but every day i encounter problems in logic i start to think that maybe learning pro-tools really worths...
Midi is not the best but they feature full resolution automations for everything and many more automations options than logic.
The workflow looks really friendly aswell...I have to test NI stuff, if they work fine there's a chance i change daw.

You can update to 9.1, you will have at least exs24 multiple sample import feature woring again like logic 8, else is unusable.
I have graphic issue with some bombfactorie also, can't see knobs until i load a preset, then they appears, i should put a "default" preset so it should automatically load that when i first insert the plug-in...

 

[tigerman]

I've tried maxing out cpus i have 8 cores (4+hyperthread) using 8 reaktor
as i was supposing turbo boost doesn't works, if i turn of all reaktor except one processor usage is not lower than when i use all, so there is no turbo boost at all
Also the last cpu is never used by logic.. in fact i cannot open the 8th reaktor, when i try logic uses that on the 7th processor making overload.. so basically logic uses only 7 out of 8 cpus..

By the way during this test graphic is not laggy so it must be something else rather than cpu usage....

 

[montylmc]

Last week when I had Snow Leopard 6 installed as my OSX I found Logic 9.02 to be exactly the same with its sluggish graphics etc-However I did have 8.0.3 installed also which I now know is incompatible anyway but I admit I did not try Core Audio to check its performance because TDM was my main concern!
ProTools 8 has been a consideration for me too! It seemed so rock solid and very very quick in everything it did! My main problem would be loosing my EXS24-EVP88-Autofilter(which I adore) and a few more of the quirky plugins that exist in logic-I know that I could transfer my samples to Structure etc but I have serious EXS24 sample library(Vienna etc with tens of thousands of presets)Do I really want to start converting patches to another format-The answer is No! I have no time for this!

 

[tigerman]

i have a lot of exs instruments also.. btw kontakt can read exs files so you can load them in kontakt when you're on protools
kontakt 4 is quite fast to search ofr samples if you have moved that, they have added spotlight search, really fast.

i use autofilter a lot aswell.. ES2, delay designer and psace designer...about all the others i can live without them.. i use just channel eq, but another eq would be fine, i own waves also, so i don't miss eqs and compressors.
Used structure and ultrabeat very few times, spectral gate and ring shifter even less.
I do not use all the others basically.

other than plug-in i think I will miss logic midi mainly..

and remember we can always use both togheter, i can use my motu adats to bridge pro-tools with logic, or else using vst to rtas adapter + wormhole it should work aswell, wormhole also supports delay compensation so no manual delay to get everything in sync.