Garageband - "System Overload. The audio engine was not able to process all required data in time. (-10011). Im making a song on Garageband and I have recorded guitar, drums recorded on the musical keyboard, and vocals. It now says this, and won't play.

Could you do this?

1. Go to Finder
2. Go to Applications
3. Go to Utilities folder
4. Launch Activity Monitor app
5. go to its Memory tab on top
6. tell us what you see at the very bottom?

Here is a sample of mine.

I bet your page/swap amount will be huge.

If there is not enough RAM, OS X temporarily stores RAM data on the harddrive and tries to retrieve it back into RAM when needed, unfortunately that is so slow that GB throws an error as it cannot play it all in real time.

I just discovered this from another thread about that blasted "System Overload" message:

"Locking tracks (or freezing is another word) temporarily renders tracks to audio and so frees up CPU use. Its a good way to manage big track counts."

I was having the "system overload" issue. I went in and locked all of my tracks. Bingo! No more message.

RAM is your problem.

2GB is not enough.

even 4 will have some hiccups with numerous tracks and using heavy samples

Your macbook can probably be upgraded up to 8GB

I just upgraded my i7 mini to 16GB and boy do I see the difference

hi my name is andrew and I'm having the same problem is there anything i can do to fix this

Hi to all, I have the same problem. Macbook pro core 2 duo and 8GB of Ram. It seems to me that proccessor is the weakest point. Am I right?

Unfortunately, 8Gb of RAM is the max for that type of processor.

is it possible to manage buffer size in garageband?

Apple have changed the goalpost for garageband. I paid £140.00 for garageband and quite honestly it uses more ram than any other programme on the market. They're a bunch of sharks and give no feedback and no help whatsoever. My next computer will be windows!