One Reason Macs Suck...

[ryan.mcallister (ryanmca)]

hey people. so i got NI Massive about 6 months ago when i upgraded to Komplete 5. I’ve never really been able to use it without it glitching out and shit (even when just playing in standalone on economic mode). I knew it was a CPU intensive synth but i figured my macbook pro core 2 duo could handle it. well i was wrong, and i’ve never used it much with the notion that it will just sit around until i can afford a quad-core computer or something…

skip ahead to tonight…i’m working in cubase doing some orchestral work and after only loading 3 or 4 string instruments into my single instance of kontakt 3, my song again started dropping out and so on. so naturally this was unacceptable and i checked my latency settings and such, but nothing worked to solve the problem. after lots of browsing through the net i stumbled across one guy on one forum who mentioned “try turning off airport” (mac’s built in wireless networking system). i laughed at the thought of airport causing the problem but tried it anyway. take a guess what that did…

…AHA!!! Everything works perfectly again! I can run many instances of massive on it’s Ultra mode, my kontakt 3 orchestral piece runs smoothly. I once again began to feel the power of the core 2 duo and 3 gigs of ram that i once felt before. this sucked, because i went a long time before figuring out the problem, and a long time working under poor performance standards, but now i am very pleased. basically i want to relay this message to all my Apple friends that may just happen to be having similar problems:

IF YOU ARE USING A MAC AND FIND THAT IT SEEMS YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT POWERFUL ENOUGH SOMETIMES, TRY TURNING OFF AIRPORT TO SEE IF IT MAKES ANY DIFFERENCE!!! IT COULD RESULT IN A PERFORMANCE BOOST!!!

so i guess this means i can no longer watch these forums like a hawk while i make tunes…

[Conner_Bw]

Are you sure that the whole turning off the airport thing isn’t actually turning off some sort of file sharing or spambot / trojan horse? Or the program(s) itself (i’m going to go ahead and assume it’s pirated) contacting home base and slowing you down?

Run Activity Monitor (Applications -> Utilities) and sort by CPU usage. What’s hogging the CPU when using Airport and your app?

Check your firewall settings. (System Preferences -> Sharing)

Also try little snitch to see what’s going on with your outbound connections: http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Check the terminal, type: cd /Users; ls -al; are there any users there that aren’t you and aren’t “Shared?” I had a buddy who got hacked and some other account was on their system.

It very well may simply be “the airport” but I find that hard to believe.

[anon79899543]

@Conner_Bw

Are you sure that the whole turning off the airport thing isn’t actually turning off some sort of file sharing or spambot / trojan horse? Or the program(s) itself (i’m going to go ahead and assume it’s pirated) contacting home base and slowing you down?

Run Activity Monitor (Applications → Utilities) and sort by CPU usage. What’s hogging the CPU when using Airport and your app?

Check your firewall settings. (System Preferences → Sharing)

Also try little snitch to see what’s going on with your outbound connections: http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Check the terminal, type: cd /Users; ls -al; are there any users there that aren’t you and aren’t “Shared?” I had a buddy who got hacked and some other account was on their system.

It very well may simply be “the airport” but I find that hard to believe.

dats true. confirmed shit. with new macs. some of pre-santa rosa, santa-rosa and hm may be post santa-rosa machines.

[ryan.mcallister (ryanmca)]

@Conner_Bw

Are you sure that the whole turning off the airport thing isn’t actually turning off some sort of file sharing or spambot / trojan horse? Or the program(s) itself (i’m going to go ahead and assume it’s pirated) contacting home base and slowing you down?

Run Activity Monitor (Applications → Utilities) and sort by CPU usage. What’s hogging the CPU when using Airport and your app?

Check your firewall settings. (System Preferences → Sharing)

Also try little snitch to see what’s going on with your outbound connections: http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Check the terminal, type: cd /Users; ls -al; are there any users there that aren’t you and aren’t “Shared?” I had a buddy who got hacked and some other account was on their system.

It very well may simply be “the airport” but I find that hard to believe.

I heard it has something to do with one of the recent airport driver updates. It makes sense because about a month ago i decided to do a clean wipe of my system. did it, checked programs like massive and they seemed to work fine. then all of a sudden i come back to them and there are all these problems…well in between trying it and having it work and now, i updated my mac with all the recent drivers and updates, including the recent airport driver.

I’m not positive this is the problem, but it seems to be. I don’t pirate anything, all my software is legit. I’m very careful about my internet activity and seriously doubt i have any trogans or anything like that.

I have already checked Activity Monitor. CPU levels are always fine, sitting with around 40-50% idle all the time. The only two things that hog the CPU when doing this is Massive itself, and the “kernel.task” or whatever it is that runs the system. Other than those two it’s just a bunch of tiny CPU loads (0.02%, etc.)

Firewall should be fine, there’s nothing in those settings that i would want to change, simply for my own safety. I’d rather just shut airport off once in a while than go unprotected.

I may try this little snitch thing later today.

I don’t know much about terminal speak, but i tried entering that:

ryan-mcallisters-computer:~ ryanmcallister$ cd /Users; ls -al;
total 0
drwxrwxr-t 5 root admin 170 May 10 23:32 .
drwxrwxr-t 29 root admin 1088 Jun 17 22:14 …
-rw-r–r-- 1 root wheel 0 Aug 19 2006 .localized
drwxrwxrwt 4 root wheel 136 May 11 12:13 Shared
drwxr-xr-x 14 ryanmcal ryanmcal 476 Jun 18 00:09 ryanmcallister
ryan-mcallisters-computer:/Users ryanmcallister$

Don’t know what it means, maybe you do.

But ya, like i said, it seems to be a common problem people are having after updating airport drivers, there was even a write up about it on the Create Digital Music site (although i think that was referring to Leopard, i am still on Tiger). I’ve got a fix for it, turning off airport is fine and easy enough, i just thought i’d let anyone else know that this could be a possible culprit if they can’t figure out their problems. Write back though Conner let me know what you think.

[JBL]

once your macbook will be outdated I suggest you try the OS X 86 solution to get a mac pro for about 1000$

[Conner_Bw]

@ryanmca

ryan-mcallisters-computer:~ ryanmcallister$ cd /Users; ls -al;
total 0
drwxrwxr-t 5 root admin 170 May 10 23:32 .
drwxrwxr-t 29 root admin 1088 Jun 17 22:14 …
-rw-r–r-- 1 root wheel 0 Aug 19 2006 .localized
drwxrwxrwt 4 root wheel 136 May 11 12:13 Shared
drwxr-xr-x 14 ryanmcal ryanmcal 476 Jun 18 00:09 ryanmcallister
ryan-mcallisters-computer:/Users ryanmcallister$

This is fine, you are the only user on there. Nothing looks suspicious.

@ryanmca

But ya, like i said, it seems to be a common problem people are having after updating airport drivers, there was even a write up about it on the Create Digital Music site (although i think that was referring to Leopard, i am still on Tiger). I’ve got a fix for it, turning off airport is fine and easy enough, i just thought i’d let anyone else know that this could be a possible culprit if they can’t figure out their problems.

Ya, I have to admit it’s sounding more like a real problem. I guess I was in denial.

Good to know the workaround!

[Conner_Bw]

Mac OS X 10.5.4 Fixes AirPort Issues with Logic (And Other Audio Apps) :

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2008/07/01/m…out-other-apps/

[hseiken]

Here’s one thing PC users can do that mac users can’t:

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant

[anon79899543]

@hseiken

Here’s one thing PC users can do that mac users can’t:

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant

B.S.

The same B.S. with mswin, *nix, amigaos and many others.

The solution is - PROPER HANDS AND PROPER HEAD. And it doesnt depends on which OS u r.

[vvoois (vV)]

@hseiken

Here’s one thing PC users can do that mac users can’t:

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant

The guy has put up a lot of irritating crap on his website.
He considers himself a hot-shot while i have an idea the rest of the world considers him to be full of sh*t.

[hseiken]

@vV

The guy has put up a lot of irritating crap on his website.
He considers himself a hot-shot while i have an idea the rest of the world considers him to be full of sh*t.

If you read much of his site, he doesn’t think he’s a hot shot…he’s just a goofy writer. You’ll see him make fun of himself as much as everyone else (“Hey babe, I got 3 inches of dynamite for you!”, etc.)

If you can watch southpark make fun of something you like or are a part of and laugh, you can definitely find some humor in a Maddox rant. They’re the same thing except one is huge white text on a black background and the other is horribly animated with crappy voice acting.

[norton (nsound)]

“If I want to manufacture biological weapons with my copy of iTunes, I will, fascists.”

"which leads me to my second point:

2. Fuck you."

made me laugh

[vvoois (vV)]

@hseiken

If you read much of his site, he doesn’t think he’s a hot shot…he’s just a goofy writer. You’ll see him make fun of himself as much as everyone else (“Hey babe, I got 3 inches of dynamite for you!”, etc.)

If you can watch southpark make fun of something you like or are a part of and laugh, you can definitely find some humor in a Maddox rant. They’re the same thing except one is huge white text on a black background and the other is horribly animated with crappy voice acting.

I don’t doubt that lots of this stuff ain’t serious and are for sure to provoke folks.
But this kind of stuff is not really my hobby so i don’t see humor in the majority of the stuff he puts up there. If i want to provoke folks, i rather use hard facts about serious stuff rather than joking around on it.

[Aeon_Aesthetic]

mmm… komplete