GarageBand in problems in Lion

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Level 1

18 points

GarageBand in problems in Lion

Since upgrading to Lion, I have problems running GarageBand. iMac 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Lion and GarageBand up to the lastest upgrade.

I use GarageBand to make one hour mixes, made out of several real audio tracks, sometimes 5 (stereo)tracks run at the same moment in time.

GarageBand stops regularly and I get a message saying that the memory is not sufficient, most of times resulting in the pizza-of-death. I didn't have thisproblem in Snow Leopard. Trying the same on my MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3) leads to the same.

On my iMac several times this has resulted in a serious slowing down of the iMac, like two minutes for a window closeing. Even a restart (of some 5 minutes) didn't cure this, zapping the pram made no difference. I have had to re-install Lion several times now.

The text of the pop-up is: "This project has too many real instrument tracks to be played in real-time. To optimize performance, see the 'Optimizing GarageBand performance' page in GarageBand Help."

Ok, sounds reasonable. But the results tell me that there is more to the problem. One: my configuration should be sufficient for this task. Two: why does the problem even survive a restart?

Or am I wrong? Like in "Things get bigger and there comes a time that your Mac does not cope anymore".

But, again: then why would such a problem be able to survive a restart?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on May 10, 2012 1:36 PM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

195,053 points

May 11, 2012 7:33 AM in response to hajeetrom

With MacOS Lion most applications build larger caches than with previous versions of MacOS. For me this problem stopped after upgrading my RAM to 8GB.

Also it helps to to make sure that no other applications with huge demands on RAM are running at the same time, e.g. Safari or iPhoto.

To see if you have a problem with RAM launch the Activity Monitor (from Applications -> Utilities) and look at the "Real Mem" column. Clicking at the Column header will sort the processes according to the memory usage.

Regards

Léonie

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Answer 2

hajeetrom Author

Level 1

18 points

May 11, 2012 12:30 PM in response to léonie

(Hm, I thought I had opted for not publishing the question.)

Thanks Léonie. I tested all kinds of stuff, used Activity Monitor, and more or less came to the conclusion that it is a problem of having not enough RAM. And the question why the problem would persist thorugh a restart, might have been answered as well: a restart does not clear all cache, while a shutdown does.

My dealer says that my type of iMac has a RAM max of 4 GB (officially). Alas.

By the way: the problem even occurs if GarageBand is the only application!

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