As a Logic Pro X user, is using the Onyx utility advisable?

Onyx... as far as I know and from many reports in other forums,,, Onyx causes more problems than it fixes, generally speaking, OSX can take care of itself.

Personally I recommend none of the 'system tweaker apps like Onyx.... as they tend to not only 'break' or change certain OS X functionality at times.. leading to all kinds of weird behavior and odd issues that can be hard to track down and fix... but also they tend to break themselves every time OS X is updated... Hence the need for different specific versions of these tweaks.. for every OS X version and sometimes sub versions that are released. Waiting on these kind of apps.. to fix things each time.. can be very frustrating.

I have never 'defragged' an OS X drive ever.. nor tweaked any OS X system configs.. as OS X handles all such things itself as and when or if needed... and many of the so called system tweaking apps really don't help much and play on past Window Users expectations... where for example, defragging was the norm... so causing users to pay for or donate to apps they really dont need.

Just a personal opinion.. Others may vary 🙂

Pancenter said it much more succinctly than I

This is not an uncommon event!

🙂

If your Logic Project files past and future consist of a lot of audio recording, yes it does make sense.

However... the main concern is to keep the audio recording drive separate from the system drive as OSX is a "busy" operating system and does a considerable amount of writing to it's install drive.

Careful with all of the restoring, I hope Logic handles a restructured drive(s) and path names better than it used to.

I use a two drive system with the system drive (750 GB) partitioned into a 120GB system partition and the remainder in a 2nd partition for sample libraries, drive #2 is reserved for audio recording.

Hopefully AOS can comment.

p.s. I think some of the problems mentioned from your first post are related to the Access Virus driver... doesn't that come with AU plugins as well?

Also, have you looked at both locations for MIDI drivers, there could be some in your user library as well.

Hopefully AOS can comment.

Well, for what it is worth.... (As I set things up in a way thats very specific to my own way of working.. and the fact I have a healthy amount of paranoia...:) )

My new main LPX/Mac Pro rig is as follows... (I basically use a similar setup for my iMac / Logic Pro 9 rig too..)

Internal HD - Only used for OS X, Apps and Logic's Essential and Additional content.. and third party Plugins.. (But not their libs)

External HDs #1 WD TBolt 2TB 10K Velociraptor Duo - All Logic Projects.

Additional info: I save all projects out of Logic with all audio files and content included as Folders not single files... For older projects I re-saved Projects from different drives again including all content options available in the Save dialog box.. to this drive too. The reason I include all content, audio files etc with the project.. is so that each project is then self contained and so is easy to backup, restore and transfer to other systems. Note: This can use up a lot of drive space but it's well worth it imho... I save using the older Folder format for ease of access to data/audio files within those projects.

External HDs #2 WD TBolt 2TB 10K Velociraptor Duo - All 3rd party Sample Libraries, Loops and Plugin libraries (such as Omnisphere's library)

External HDs #3 WD TBolt 2TB 10K Velociraptor Duo - All remaining 3rd party Sample Libraries, wave files and Loops

Both the Internal System drive and the #1 external drive are backed up daily overnight using SuperDuper! to external 2TB USB2/3 HDs

External #2 and 3 are backed up on a weekly basis using SuperDuper! to external 2TB USB2/3 HDs

The Project Drive is also backed up onto another 2TB HD weekly which is then stored off site... (In case of fire, theft and so on.. Better safe than sorry!

Note:

I use multiple WD TBolt 2TB 10K Velociraptor Duos simply because they are reliable and fast.... almost as fast as SSDs but much cheaper per GB than SSDs... and for samples, audio libs, Projects etc... Speed and reliability are important as well as the amount of available storage.. Modern Sample Libs,. especially Kontakt' Orch libs.. are pretty demanding in terms of GB sizes! If SSDs were available at reasonable prices for similar amounts of Storage, I would have gone for those but currently (March 2015) that simply isn't the case.

Hope that helps a little...

Cheers..

Nigel

I had planned to restore my Logic projects by simply dragging each project folder from my external backup drive to the internal drive,

See my post above.. for how I did and continue to do this.. using the folder type save and also including all audio files and other such content in each project...

I re-saved all my older projects this way to my new Projects only drive..

The other benefit (apart from what I mentioned earlier) for using this method is you don't have to then worry about audio files being lost/deleted/moved/cannot be found by Logic etc.... no matter where the projects may be moved to in the future...

As I also said, this method uses up extra disk space because essentially you are duplicating everything to the project drive for each project you save.. but again, better safe than sorry and you never know what you might have to deal with later on.. (Crashed drives... damage from fire or flood... theft and so on)

Cheers..

Nigel

trobert225 wrote:

Hey Pancenter, thanks for your extra help. Yes, my Logic projects contain a lot of audio. Most of the audio files are bounces of software instrument parts, or bounces of parts with a lot of processing, etc… I render everything to audio before mixing, mostly to save processing power (but also as a way to commit to parts & sounds).

Regarding being careful restoring files, that brings up another question for me. I had planned to restore my Logic projects by simply dragging each project folder from my external backup drive to the internal drive, rather than doing a Time Machine restore. My thought (and I don’t know if this is correct), is that if you drag the project folders back, they will write everything close together on the drive, but if you do a Time Machine restore, it might write elements of the project (like audio files) to their original locations, which might be far apart, and thus make the drive work harder to read the files. I figured that, after restoring, even if a Logic project can’t immediately locate an audio file, it will be easy for me to manually relocate the file.

So, you're not really writing/recording and reading from the same drive, as in recording multi-track audio like a group, recording 7-8 tracks at a time and then playing those back while overdubs are going on. That's what stresses a drive, reading audio files is relatively easy

After formatting a drive, I have restored much the same way as you describe, moving the large permanent libraries first. I even go one step further... I have all my drives formatted with "journaling" off, even though Apple doesn't recommend this.

Hi Tim,

When I restore my Logic Projects, would it be better to restore each project to the root of the drive, rather than to "Productions" folders at the root of the drive? Or would doing this mess up Logic's internal directory? I

I would restore it exactly as it was on the older drive.. with folders etc, intact.. It shouldn't make any difference if you change the structure but, having said that, I've had weird issues when taking projects folders and moving them into sub folders folders (or out of folders) for reasons I do not fully understand and the real confusion comes from why it only sometimes happens and not always or never...

Therefore, I adopt the practice of.. "Lets not risk anything messing anything up" and just keep the structure exactly the same... 🙂

I recently began saving all the content to the project folder, whereas with some older projects I didn't save the sampler instruments/samples to the Project folder (but I always saved the audio files/midi files etc. to the Project folders).

I did much the same thing originally but then I had the opportunity (and time) to go back through all my old projects and re-save them with "everything included" and I am glad i did.... although in all honesty I didn't fully test all my older projects prior to moving them and re-saving them but again, that "healthy paranoia" of mine got the better of me and so I just re-saved every project "Just in case.." as i had one project that for some unexplained reason wouldn't load all the project's custom IR's used by Space Designer.. (even though they remained were they had always been located prior to the moving of the projects and so in theory, that shouldn't have caused any issues) and so that put me on guard so to speak.

I had been saving my Logic Project folders not to the root of my 2nd internal hard drive, but to folders titled "Productions A-F", "Productions G-L", "Productions M-R" and "Productions S-Z". All those folders were at the root of the drive.

I do a similar thing.. sorting out individual projects into grouping folders named in relation the the major overall project they are a part of. Example Grouping Folders named Movie XYZ, Album 123, TV Show ABC and so on... and projects sorted out and saved to those Grouping folders.. I personally find it a much cleaner way of keeping everything neat and tidy and have noticed no issues in doing so.

Cheers..

Nigel

Leaving Journaling Off does make the drive work less, the usual scenario (for some) is to leave Journaling off on the audio drive as it offers no help with large files and leave it on for the System drive. Default is on. I'm a rebel, I keep journaling off on all drives, same with the PC I have, the indexing service is disabled.

I too advise keeping the structure of the drive intact, I've had similar "unexplained" experiences as Nigel, with some projects working and others needing to search for audio files. I keep everything the same, including the drive names.

Fingers crossed

...and toes, knees and whatever else.... 🙂

Seriously though, you should be fine but please let us know how things progress...

Cheers...

Nigel