Yoonchi's Logic Audio Page

Yoonchi's Logic Audio Page These pages are here to help the users of Logic Audio Windows to achieve better performance with their systems. Not every PC system has the same performance; the performance of a PC system depends on the various components it consists of. The Central processing Unit(CPU, processor) is the most vital component in a PC system. The CPU is the main component that controls the processes in the PC system. But other components also contribute to the performance of the system. Amongst these are the controller cards for the disk system, the bus system, the memory, the video accelerator and the sound card.

To optimize the performance of your PC system, you need to know besides how your hardware system works, how your Operating System(OS) does some of the work. Most of PC users use Windows, be it Windows 3.1 Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows 98, as their OS. Some people still want to use MS DOS as their main OS, others use the now defunct OS Beos or the lately very popular Linux. All OSs have their pro and cons. The task of an OS is to handle a lot of processes, so the PC user is relieved from the task of deciding what actions should be taken so that you can use the PC system. File handling, CPU timesharing of processes, multitasking and user interface are all handled by the OS.

What PC do I need to run Logic Audio? To have Logic Audio running smooth and without problems you first of all need a PC system that is capable of handling the demands this software puts on your system. Emagic, the manufacturer of Logic Audio, recommends at least an Intel Pentium II 300 system, 128 Mega bytes of memory and with a EIDE hard disk of a couple of Giga bytes. This is a minimum setup that I wouldn't recommend. If you want to run Logic Audio on your PC I recommend at least a Pentium III 1GHz with 256 Mb of memory and a minimum of 20 Giga bits for at least a Ultra DMA drive. The more you can afford, the better your system can be. And the more you can do with Logic Audio on your PC. Believe me, Logic Audio is a memory hog; it will take all the RAM it can get. If you are considering doing semi- to professional work with Logic Audio, do invest in one of the fastest systems on the market available. Systems based on an Intel Pentium 4 1.9 GHz, with 512 Mb of RAM and a SCSI or ATA100 hard disk of 40 Gb isn't a luxury, it's a necessity to do lots of tracks of high quality recording.

The CPU Choice The choice of CPU is also important. Due to the fact that Logic Audio needs a CPU with a fast Floating Point Unit(FPU), it is recommended to use a CPU with a good FPU implementation. Up until now Intel Pentium III, Pentium 4, Celeron and AMD Thuderbird seem to have the best implementation of the FPU. The FPU is used by Logic Audio to apply Digital Signal Processing(DSP) on recorded files. On playback of recorded audio it is crucial that the CPU can do DSP as efficiently as possible. The better the implementation of the FPU, the better the real time performance of the system with Logic Audio.

The Mainboard Choice The use of a good mainboard is the most crucial aspect for the performance of your system. Choosing of the 'wrong' mainboard, can lead to unexpected incompatibilities. Before you choose a mainboard, do some research. Ask around what mainboards people use in their system, and how they use it. And what their experiences with that mainboard are. People seem to have bad experiences with mainboards using VIA chips. There are some conflicts with these mainboards, when it comes to using these in your DAW. These problems are mainly because of bugs in some of the mainboard's BIOS; not every BIOS is finetuned for audio. Consider the choice of the mainboard as the most important task. It is the foundation of your system. If you are planning to use a certain audio card in your system, make sure that this audio card, or any device you are going to use, does not have compatibillity problems.

The hard disk system Many people who buy a PC will probably have a system that has a IDE(Interface Digital Environment) or EIDE(Enhanced IDE) hard disk. This is a system protocol that can (theoretically) transfer data at a rate up to 16.6 Mb/s. With the introduction of the Ultra DMA(Ultra Direct Memory Access) or ATA100, a protocol for disks was introduced so that the data transfer rate could be pushed to the (theoretical) limit of 100 Mb/s. On the other side there is another protocol with a much more superior performance: SCSI hard disks. For SCSI there are four types of protocol: the SCSI1, the SCSI2 or FAST SCSI, the Ultra SCSI or Fast-20 SCSI and the Ultra-2 SCSI. The SCSI system the limits vary from 5 to 40 Mb/s, with SCSI1 being the slowest and Ultra-2 SCSI being the fastest. Besides the fact that SCSI systems have a high transfer rate they work differently. They have the advantage over an IDE or UDMA system: they allow multiple SCSI devices to access the data bus of the system. This other approach makes it possible for the system to become very fast. So if you plan to do some serious work, think about getting a SCSI system for Logic AUdio. If you can not afford such a system, my advice would be to go for a fast UDMA drive. You can get great performance with a fast UDMA hard disk.

The sound card For this topic I refer to some manufacturers of sound cards. To start with, there are a lot of links towards sound card manufacturers at The Synthzone . At Creative Labs you will find a collection of the cheapest sound cards; but be warned, these cards don't give you high quality sound. They are just good enough to give you with decent results. Don't expect professional quality with these cards; they are aimed at the consumer market. At Terratec you can get some decent and affordable sound cards. For the good stuff and high end stuff, you could have a look at the cards by Yamaha , Mark of the Unicorn , RME-Audio, Turtle Beach , Event Electronics and Creamware . How to tune up your settings for Logic Audio. To have a system running well with Logic Audio on it, it is recommended that you have considered the following points: 1) Use Windows 98SE as your operating system. Logic Audio may be running on Windows ME, Windows 2000 or Windows XP, but to avoid driver conflicts, I don't recommend using these operating systems. 2) Do not install other programs and drivers than the minimum that you need for your DAW activities. The more programs you install on your system, the more you are looking for conflicts on your system. 3) When setting up the system, work with multiple partitions. Windows 98 allows you to work with large partitions. The disadvantage of this is that if you need to defragment a partition(see 4), it takes long for big partitions. Keep partitions sizeable; 2 GB per partition is more than enough. 4) Defragment the harddisks used for audio recording regularly. Even though the defrag utility will tell you it is not necessary, do it before you are going to do a major recording. Go Back to Yoonchi's Dark Pages The number of hits on this page since December the 4th 1998 is:

This page was last update on March 24th 2002.