#OPTIMIZNG PRO TOOLS FOR MAC FULL#
#OPTIMIZNG PRO TOOLS FOR MAC MAC#

Remember, you will probably need a third drive at some point to back up everything you have created. Keep audio on external hard drives, and samples on another external drive.

#OPTIMIZNG PRO TOOLS FOR MAC MAC#

This gives your Mac plenty of room to work with and stops your main Startup Disk from filling up too quickly. If you use large sample libraries, you may want to keep these on another external hard drive. This is the recording space for your audio files on. This means recording to a dedicated external hard drive, either an HD running at 7200 rpm or an SSD. Nowadays almost all of us will be recording to a computer hard drive. Once upon a time, everyone recorded to magnetic tape. Your Startup Disk contains OSX, your DAW and plug-ins, but ideally not your song files. If you have space to work, you can get the job done a lot faster. It slows you down and makes it a lot harder.

#OPTIMIZNG PRO TOOLS FOR MAC FULL#

An analogy I’ve often used in conversations with customers is decorating in a room full of furniture. If the drive is chock a block full of data, that gets very difficult. The reason is that your Mac uses that space to move information around. As a rule of thumb, aim to leave at least 20-25% of it empty. We don’t want to fill the internal drive completely or the Mac will slow to a crawl. Keep it tidy, do not partition it and, ideally, keep some of it completely empty. It is where all your programs live and run from. The internal drive is what we call the Startup Disk or System Drive. Your Mac will also have things like Mail, Calendar and Safari installed as well, and although you may not use them they are part of the system and take up some space. You may also have separate audio editing software. This will hold your Apple OSX operating system, your DAW like Logic Pro X, Ableton, Pro Tools or Cubase, and any third party plug-ins you decide to add to your studio for example NI Komplete, Waves or IK Multimedia. You should have a minimum of 500GB of storage space on your HD or SSD. Like a recording studio, your DAW needs space for all the virtual instruments, effects and more. Some simple housekeeping rules will keep everything runnning smoothly. Think of your Apple computer as an physical recording studio. This where our DAW will be running from, so it’s a vital part of your system. Make sure the internal storage is either an HD running at 7200 rpm or more, or an SSD. We can always add a fast external storage device to our Apple Mac after we have purchased it. As musicians, we tend to use external drives to record our projects onto. However, prices are dropping continually. SSD drives are a lot faster, but they cost a bit more than traditional mechanical HD drives. Slower HDs may give you audio dropouts and poor track playback on audio projects. With music production you want a 7200 rpm mechanical drive as a minimum. There are two main formats: mechanical drives, often known as HD, and SSD (Solid State Drives). Regarding storage space, you will often see something like 1TB or more with desktop machines, or perhaps 256GB or 512 GB on offer with laptops. So it’s a good idea to try and get one with as much RAM you can. Unfortunately, Apple laptops, smaller iMacs, and Mac Mini cannot be upgraded with more RAM later. If buying a MacBook Pro, for example, you should always try and budget for as much RAM as possible. For music production, you want a minimum of 16GB of RAM, or you will struggle. RAMĪn Apple Mac’s RAM is your working area it is where the CPU puts tasks it is working on in real time. But that won’t be for a little while, so we will be focusing on its current models in this article. It will last longer and give you a better return for your initial investment.Īpple has announced that it will be moving to its own ARM-based CPUS. But honestly, I would always suggest you bite the bullet and go for an i7 CPU at least. If you are working on small projects with minimal track counts and only a small number of virtual effects plugins, you can often get away with just an Intel i5 chipset. CPUS – Intel i5 vs i7 and beyondĪs a musician, Intel i7 and i9 chipsets for your CPU are ideal These will give you enough power to handle larger, more complex productions. Be on the look out for these if you are interested in investing in a new Mac system.

Some CPUs also have a feature called hyper threading, which effectively doubles the number of cores at your disposal. This will give you plenty of power to process complex tasks in real time, which is what making music in your DAW is all about, computationally speaking. As musicians, we should always be aiming for 6-core and 8-core CPUs, where budget allows.

In multiple CPU computers, each is called a core. Most clock speeds on the current Intel Macs are somewhere in the 3.00 – 3.5 GHz range. The CPU is the ‘brain’ of your Mac, and has a clock speed and a number of cores.

Optimizng pro tools for mac