Logic Express Core Audio Error, always on playback Options

[ciaran06]

Hi, im new to the forum and new to MAC OS & Logic Express....HELLO !! Ive been recording for a few months and have had little issues until playback. Im using the recordings as a backing track through a Motu 828 MK II and i keep getting the error "Core Audio, Hard Disk too slow." The shop seems to think its a hard disk playback speed problem ?

Ive an iBook G4 with 80Gb & 1Gb Ram, ive only 1gb of HD space left. Surely the HD is not paging with 1Gb ram ? it seems to be the same place the songs stop at, it led me to think it was clipping but its not this.

Anyone with any help or advice on this issue.

Thanks for reading.

Ciaran

[ciaran06]

to add... im only using 4 tracks with some synths & piano. doesnt seem too much for the processor to handle.

[rickenbacker]

Four tracks of what? All soft synths? With reverb, EQ etc? What is your audio buffer set at in Logic? 512 or 128? These things all make a big difference (512 and above goes easier on the hard disk).

Yes, the error message pretty much means the hard drive can't keep up with whatever it has to do. The fact that it stops in the same place is obviously the point at which things get really gnarly, computationally speaking.

The fact that you've stuffed it to within 1Gb of its life is not good. Keeping at least 10% of any hard disk free is good practice, as it gives the disk room to work.

Get an external FireWire drive and record the audio to that. You can run it out the back of the 828. Your iBook's processor is fast enough to run a fair few tracks, but dump some of whatever is on its hard drive to the external FireWire drive to free up space.

[ciaran06]

4 tracks of hard synth we connected up to the 828. but yes, plenty of eq and reverb etc. the buffer is set to largest which i think is 512 or 1024 ? (the laptop is at a band members house)

we will run a housekeeping exercise and remove unwanted files and try and free up space. do you think 1gb ram is enough ?

[gdoubleyou]

If you are using the internal drive two things. 1. the internal drive IS probably to slow (48,00 or 5400 rpm), 2. If you only have 1GB storage left you probably have a lot of fragmented files that can slow access, and the OS still needs some disk space for swap files.

Performances suffers if you have less than 10GB available.

I suggest that you invest in an external 7200rpm firewire drive with 8MB cache.

[ciaran06]

thanks. i want to bring up a point though. this problem happens when we play back our intended backing track with 4 tracks on it. the other night we were recording vocals x 4 on a project with 15 tracks and it plays back very loud effortlessly.... now im confused. Ill try and picture for you the scenario that differs when when we get the error message.

band of 4, the drummer has the laptop and motu to set off click track. is it possible the metronome on the playback is giving us the problem. 2 of us use headphones to have click. we use a 4 way racked headphone unit linked to the moto. (we use this on our recording playback too)...

i just dont get it.

any other info i need to give to help get to the bottom of this.

could the vibrations of music from a whole band b e annoying the firewire connection ? maybe we have a crap firewire cable ? ive noticed in the past that a knock into it knocks out the motu and reinstates the iBook soundcard.... im stumped.

[aims28]

Dude my friend just had this exact same problem with his Mac mini! Whenever he jammed alone with just his guitar everything worked great, then when his bassist/drummer jammed with him he got the "Core Audio Disk is too slow" error.

I googled around for people with similar problems and found this post. It then occured to us that since you were having similar problems, it may be that the bass and drums are vibrating the actual computer (which is in the same room as the instruments), causing the hard drive to keep getting jittered and keep having to 'reset' itself.

So we put his Mac mini on a piece of foam then put the foam and computer inside a box to insulate it from the noise/vibration.

Everything works great now!

[gdoubleyou]

Could be, hard drives are delicate. wiggle your firewire cable just in case.

[ciaran06]

Thanks to all who replied, and AIMS28...you were right, i moved the equipment away from the drummer and put the laptop on the floor and it all works okay now. We have the moto and headphone rack in a cheap plastic flight case which is nice and convenient, however the laptop was sat on top of this case...vibrations galore.

Time to invest or make something to house the laptop...

cheers