It will happily host all of the AU plug-ins you can throw at it. Don’t believe me? Try this on:
Believe it or not, it has:
plus a random selection of GarageBand drum loops.
Even with many of the synths playing more than one note, I was still only running at around 70% CPU according to Activity Monitor.
Which machine, the new Laptop? Also, are plugins CPU centric meaning would they get better if more of them were ported to Intel?
LOL. I just tried playing the song again; this time without any other apps running and the CPUs both peaked at around 60%. I guess running mail, a browser with 10 tabs, and two chat clients while making music isn’t a good idea. 🙂
Even better news: I locked a couple of the tracks and tried again. This time I was down at around 40%. Very nice.
To answer Ken’s questions: Plugins definitely are CPU centric, but that wasn’t an issue here since I was running on the G5. Of the plugins I was using, only Crystal was universal. I should check whether the other ones have been updated.
[…] So the obvious thing to do on a Mac is to try Garage Band. As I found, GB actually works quite well. It’s surprisingly powerful, for an essentially free piece of software, with features like commercial-grade software instruments, multi-track recording, the ability to freeze tracks — they call it “locking” –, and pitch correction. It also has an easy to use GUI, with “Mac-like” simplicity at first clance, but lots of flexibility/capability when you need it. I’m sure I could use Garage Band as my main DAW, but it’s missing a few features (like, score creation) that I occasionally need. […]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.