Hi all,
new to Mixbus (though not new to DAW in general) I have a question regarding the performance of Mixbus on my Mac. Up to know it takes a lot of time to build up “the visual data”, and after that the performance is absolutely slow…
This is my setup:
iBook G4, PPC, 1 CPU, 1.33 GHz, RAM 1GB, L2-Cache 512 KB
MetricHalo I/O 2882
Mixbus v1.1
The System Requirements mention that “2 or more cores” would be necessary. Is a “core” the same than a “CPU”?
Shouldn´t I have overread the mentioning of “2 or more cores” before I purchased it or is there any reason for the slow performance?
Or Two CPUs is an option. But yes at this point I would expect very slow performance from a single core machine as you listed above.
To clarify a bit, most modern CPUs for Laptops and Desktops often have more than one ‘core’ which is essentially more than one processor on a single chip(Oversimplified but it gets the basics). Unfortunately this became popular somewhat after your iBook was released, so your iBook only has a single core.
To give examples, AMD64x2, Turionx2, AMD Phenom x2, Intel Core Duo, Intel Core 2 Duo, are all dual core chips. AMD64x4, Phenomx4, Turion64x4, Intel Core2 Quad are all examples of Quad core chips, which have essentially 4 processors (or ‘cores’) on a single chip.
As a small side note, while you are free and welcome to ask questions about Mixbus here, just be aware that it isn’t an ‘official’ support channel for it, compared to emailing Harrison. As I said though pleaase feel free to ask questions about it here if you want, it is pretty similar to Ardour and many people hang out here that use it, as well as that use Ardour and may be able to answer questions.
From experience with Mixbus on PPC (I’ve used it on two different PowerMac G4 Mirrored Drive Door units):
A single G4 1.25GHz is completely not enough. A dual 1.42GHz G4 is enough, but not as snappy as you might want. A single 1.33 is not going to be enough. Regardless of RAM size; the 1.25GHz single I tried was maxxed out with 2GB of RAM. A good graphics card is also a must.
The reason is the mix engine plugin needing quite a bit of DSP; also, GTK-OSX isn’t the most efficient thing out there on OS X, either. You need two CPU’s (dual CPU or dual core is essentially the same thing) at minimum. I haven’t tried a dual 1.25GHz, but it should work. A dual 1GHz might be too slow. A dual 2.3 G5 would be a good spot.
Those published minimums are accurate, and 2 or more CPU’s (or a dual-core CPU, like one of the dual 2.3GHz G5 options) is required at minimum. I don’t think a single 2.7 G5 would even be enough, frankly, so two CPU’s (for G4’s) or two or more CPUs or cores (for G5’s) is minimum.
