Help needed from Mac/Cubase users...

[Ethanfox]

Hi there,

I'm trying to best advise my friend. She has a brand new Mac Pro with all the various bells and whistles, Cubase 5, a few PLAY libraries and the three main Spectrasonics instruments. It is a 2.6 gig with 8 gig of RAM.

Thing is, she can't seem to utilise the power of her Mac as cubase crashes which seems to be down to how many instruments she has loaded. Cubase isn't yet 64bit on a mac, so my questions are as follows -

1 - So how do you all do it? How do you get round the 2gb ram limit in Cubase? Tried Reaper as a VST host but it doesn't have rewire on a mac and Bidule doesn't have any Mac demos available at the moment so no way of knowing if that would work without buying it.

2 - Does anyone know of when Cubase goes 64 bit on Mac?

3 - I understand PLAY is also not 64bit on a Mac yet, any idea when that will be?

4 - Should she just switch to Logic?

Any help would be great as she is very frustrated at the moment....

Many thanks,

Ethan

[aptmusic9]

Install Windows 7 on it using bootcamp. lol.

Most mac people are using a combo of Bidule and/or PC slaves running VE PRO. Also once play gets supported on VE PRO in a few weeks hopefully, You can host everything in that in the background and have VE PRO connect to Cubase. Idk if it is 64-bit yet, but VEPRO would at least allow 4GB plus the 4GB limit of cubase so you are pretty much set. You said 2gb limit? Isn't it 4GB?

What sound card are you using? For the price of switching to Logic you could get VE PRO and a down-payment on an 8GB PC slave

[Ethanfox]

Thanks for the reply... I think her goal is to get it all working on the one machine, she doesn't need a massive template or anything. It looks like Bidule is the best way forward - maybe I'll suggest she takes a gamble and buys it out right, though it is a shame there is no demo.. The sound card is a focusrite something.... I forget what exactly.

[theitalianpianist]

Originally Posted by aptmusic9

You said 2gb limit? Isn't it 4GB?

To my knowledge, it's actually 3 gb and some mbs since the other ram is being occupied by crucial system activities I think.


So to sum it up in the end you actually have 3 gbs free to load up samples.

I'm currently running firefox only and in the activities monitor on my macbook pro it says I have 1.28 gbs of ram used.

[interpolate]

You know switching to Logic not might be a bad idea as this is 64-bit compatible now. Although there's the learning curve that comes with it.

[Ethanfox]

I am thinking that moving to logic may be best... I tried setting up a VST host today with her, no demo of Bidule available, can't get rewire working with Presonus studio one, Reaper doesn't support rewire on a mac...

I'm still not sure how others are doing it on here - there must be other users of Cubase who are getting round the RAM limiting issue, I was hoping some of them might chip in... But sadly not...

Thanks to those that have though!

[aptmusic9]

If you buy logic, its rewire cabable right? @Italianpianist are you sure? Isn't that just on 32-bit OS? On 64-bit windows the cap is increased to 4GB I though due to support for "Large address aware" applications that are 32-bit running in a 64-bit environment.

Bottom line is, if you get logic you should be able to use all your ram in 32 OR x64. With 32, you could rewire logic with Cubase, setting aside ~3.5GB or so per app.

[tearsinraine]

I'm assuming you've already updated all the relevant software? Mac OSX updates, PLAY 2.0.9, Cubase 5.5, etc?

#1: With regards to the 32-bit application memory ceiling, the Mac version of PLAY has its own memory server in order to use memory external to the DAW to get around the DAW's memory limitation. Also, to help spread out load, it's been recommended that you spread your instruments out over multiple PLAY instances, instead of filling up a single instance. Does it also crash with PLAY-only projects or does it mainly crash when using PLAY with other plugins? non-PLAY projects? If you're using a combination of plugins, the Performance FAQ recommends that you try and load PLAY prior to other plugins such as Kontakt. In order to check system resource usage you could try running Activity Monitor alongside as you start loading up your project. Not sure if you've tried any or all of this already. I'm running an 8-core Mac Pro with 6GB and haven't had any major crash issues (other than with Wordbuilder, which has already been documented as not being supported in C5). Then again, maybe my templates just aren't as big as the ones you are using. Hope some of this helps a little.

#2 & #3 are (unfortunately) easy to answer: No ETA for both. With PLAY, apparently it's dependent on an ILOK update and with Cubase, Steinberg has yet to make any official announcement regarding 64-bit Mac support. If you need to base current decisions on a firm ETA, words like "soon" and "in the works" are basically meaningless.
#4: Sorry, I don't have Logic so I have no opinion on this

Good luck with your decisions

[Ethanfox]

Originally Posted by tearsinraine

I'm assuming you've already updated all the relevant software? Mac OSX updates, PLAY 2.0.9, Cubase 5.5, etc?

#1: With regards to the 32-bit application memory ceiling, the Mac version of PLAY has its own memory server in order to use memory external to the DAW to get around the DAW's memory limitation. Also, to help spread out load, it's been recommended that you spread your instruments out over multiple PLAY instances, instead of filling up a single instance. Does it also crash with PLAY-only projects or does it mainly crash when using PLAY with other plugins? non-PLAY projects? If you're using a combination of plugins, the Performance FAQ recommends that you try and load PLAY prior to other plugins such as Kontakt. In order to check system resource usage you could try running Activity Monitor alongside as you start loading up your project. Not sure if you've tried any or all of this already. I'm running an 8-core Mac Pro with 6GB and haven't had any major crash issues (other than with Wordbuilder, which has already been documented as not being supported in C5). Then again, maybe my templates just aren't as big as the ones you are using. Hope some of this helps a little.

#2 & #3 are (unfortunately) easy to answer: No ETA for both. With PLAY, apparently it's dependent on an ILOK update and with Cubase, Steinberg has yet to make any official announcement regarding 64-bit Mac support. If you need to base current decisions on a firm ETA, words like "soon" and "in the works" are basically meaningless.
#4: Sorry, I don't have Logic so I have no opinion on this

Good luck with your decisions

Thanks so much for this, I shall pass it on to my friend to try all you have said.

Thanks again,