Logic Pro prevents MacBook Pro from sleeping

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Level 1

8 points

Logic Pro prevents MacBook Pro from sleeping

I've been having trouble of late with my MacBook Pro -- it has been refusing to go into sleep mode on its own. I sat down and did a bunch of careful experiments turning various things off and on, and I've narrowed it down to Logic Pro 8! If this application is running, my MBPro will not sleep automatically. If I exit the application, it sleeps like a baby. In any case, I can force the machine to sleep manually no problem.

I am not sure whether this problem first occurred with 10.5.4 or 10.5.5.

-Luddy Harrison

MacBook Pro, MacBook, iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Sep 20, 2008 6:56 PM

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Answer 1

Pancenter

Level 6

14,788 points

Sep 21, 2008 4:13 AM in response to luddy3

luddy3 wrote:
I've been having trouble of late with my MacBook Pro -- it has been refusing to go into sleep mode on its own. I sat down and did a bunch of careful experiments turning various things off and on, and I've narrowed it down to Logic Pro 8!

Lud,

Cubase does the same thing on both PC & Mac, it's by design. Using a high performance low latency setup make the audio system sensitive to interruptions causing audio to cut out and often not return. (that's one of the main reasons, there are other related issues)

pancenter-

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Answer 2

Pancenter

Level 6

14,788 points

Sep 23, 2008 1:57 AM in response to Pancenter

One last post on this....

If your Mac will sleep with a completely empty project (no soft-synths or plugins) it could be something like a soft sampler (EXS, Kontakt) with direct-from-disk enabled.

pancenter-

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Answer 3

Eriksimon

Level 6

15,428 points

Sep 21, 2008 2:00 AM in response to Larry Mal

Yep, Larry's quite right. Disable auto sleep alltogether when working with Logic.
And the fact that it will not go to sleep does not have to be due to Logic, the OS utilises many background processes - just open Activity Monitor and you'll see what I mean.

regards, Erik

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Answer 4

Pancenter

Level 6

14,788 points

Sep 22, 2008 2:41 AM in response to luddy3

luddy3 wrote:
Hi,

The reason I want it sleep is that I work in Logic every day (so it's always running), and when I step away to, say, eat lunch, I don't want my computer to keep running. The computer gets quite hot under the load of Logic and I would like to give it a break when I'm not using it.

Programs like Logic (DP, Cubase, Nuendo, ProTools are "real-time" based, their functions using several subsystems, such as Disk I/O, Audio System, MIDI I/O..etc. Putting a computer to sleep breaks these connections, especially audio. If in fact it is Logic preventing the system from sleeping (and I think it probably is) this is new since version 8 and is probably the direct result of all the complaints version 7 received. I haven't checked lately but as I recall, version 7 would let the system sleep but there were many problems, usually an audio system not coming back to life or a disk that wouldn't wake up, causing Logic to spit out a bunch of errors.

pancenter-

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Answer 5

Pancenter

Level 6

14,788 points

Sep 23, 2008 1:16 AM in response to luddy3

luddy3 wrote:

Pancenter wrote:

If in fact it is Logic preventing the system from sleeping (and I think it probably is) this is new since version 8 and is probably the direct result of all the complaints version 7 received.

I'm afraid I don't find these responses to be very compelling, sorry.

Luddy,

After changing my energy saving settings I did get the Mac to sleep with Logic both open and minimized in the dock.

I did not find a setting in Logic that controls this.

With Logic open, type "sleep" in the help/search dialog, then "preventing your computer from sleeping" under related topics select "sleep" and then "if your Mac won't go to sleep".

Perhaps some of the suggestions will be helpful.

Interesting that it lists possible malfunction of USB and/or Firewire devices.

So, I was wrong in my assumption that Logic disables sleep like bith Cubase and Nuendo do.

good luck-

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Answer 6

Larry Mal

Level 2

369 points

Sep 20, 2008 9:47 PM in response to luddy3

I'm not sure why you would want it to. The first thing I did was change my settings to disallow sleep, and not let the energy saver do anything, as well as not allow the discs to sleep when possible. The last thing I wanted when I was recording and hour long concert was for my computer to try to go to sleep, or anything except record what I was telling it to record. I also disallowed any software updates, and I checked my login items to make sure no software updates or email checkers were active.

I don't know if this would be applicable to you, but it's likely that Logic thinks you would not want the computer to go to sleep either and won't let it happen for added stability. Anyway, I would probably not let it sleep when I was running Logic, but by all means let the screen saver come up. Just my advice.

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Answer 7

luddy3 Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 21, 2008 4:50 PM in response to Pancenter

Hi,

The reason I want it sleep is that I work in Logic every day (so it's always running), and when I step away to, say, eat lunch, I don't want my computer to keep running. The computer gets quite hot under the load of Logic and I would like to give it a break when I'm not using it.

Is this really by design? The computer doesn't run any faster when sleep is disabled. The way the sleep function is designed to work, if the computer has been idle -- and that includes disk I/O and keyboard / mouse use -- for more than a certain period of time, then the computer sleeps. Recording a live concert hardly fits that description -- it would be constant disk I/O, the farthest thing from idle. Anyhow, I'm not recording live concerts in Logic every day -- I'm arranging music, and I don't want to put more thermal stress on my computers than necessary.

I mean, even critical utilities like DiskUtility don't disable sleep. It would be just as disastrous for the computer to stop or fail partway through a disk image backup as it would be to fail during a recording, or at least it might be. But there's no danger of that -- the disk activity itself prevents the computer from sleeping.

-Luddy

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Answer 8

luddy3 Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 22, 2008 8:59 PM in response to Pancenter

Pancenter wrote:

If in fact it is Logic preventing the system from sleeping (and I think it probably is) this is new since version 8 and is probably the direct result of all the complaints version 7 received.

I'm afraid I don't find these responses to be very compelling, sorry.

First, it has always been trivially easy to turn off the sleep function on an Apple machine. Everyone who owns an Apple knows how to do this simple thing.

Second, sleep does not cause failure of any kind for properly working audio hardware and other attached devices. I have three audio interfaces connected to my machine, plus an eSATA drive, external video, and ethernet cable, and the machine sleeps and wakes up just fine. No problem. This has nothing to do with audio or real-time anything, it's just a question of writing a device driver correctly. It would be the same for a printer or a camera or anything else attached to the computer. I have one device that does not sleep and wake properly: a western digital hard drive when connected by eSATA via the ExpressCard/34 slot. Again, there's no relation to audio or recording or Logic.

I wonder if there's anyone from Apple reading this newsgroup who can comment on the actual intention. If it is indeed to disable sleep, it would be nice to know. If on the other hand, it's unintentional, maybe it means that some other setting is wrong or there's something to be done about it.

Thanks,

-Luddy Harrison

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Answer 9

luddy3 Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 23, 2008 11:48 PM in response to Pancenter

Aha! It's good to know that your machine sleeps with Logic running. That's what I wanted to know. I'll keep hunting for the problem in that case. Thanks for the suggestion about the samplers running with direct-from-disk.

-Luddy

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