Cubase struggles on new mac

I have just purchased a new MacBook Pro and installed my copy of cubase essentials 4 on it. I recently recorded a band and it struggled to record 8 tracks simultaneously and kept on dropping out with the message ‘too many tracks recording’.

I’m a bit confused over this because I had no trouble recording 16 simultaneous tracks on my old macbook which has a weaker spec than my new one. I’ve even upgraded the RAM from 4g to 10g.

The spec of my new mac is: 2.5 Ghz Intel Core i5, 10 GB 1600 Mhz DDR3 RAM, 500 GB hard disk running OSX 10.8.5.

The spec of my old mac was: 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1GB 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM, 160 GB hard disk running OSX 10.6.8

Am I missing something?

I’m a bit lost so any advice will be really helpful

Thanks

HDD speed?

Aloha s,

A new MBP with OS 10.8.5 on it? IMHO That’s weird!

A new MBP should ship with OS 10.9 on it.

Perhaps you box was sitting on a shelf since before ‘Mavericks’ shipped.

I’m a bit lost so any advice will be really helpful

1-try raising your buffer size (because you are just doing audio recording)
2-try turning off/on ASIO ‘Guard’. (depending on what state it is in now)

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Thanks for your replies guys.

It is actually a mid 2012 macbook pro after checking, but I remember the guy at Apple telling me that I was buying a macbook pro that was shipped just before they changed to maverick and that it had mountain lion on. It was still brand new with full warrantee etc but I thought this would be a better option for me as I didn’t want to risk some of my current software becoming non compatible if I changed to maverick.

I’ve looked at the system profile and the hard drive is an APPLE HDD HTS545050A7E362 which, after doing a search, seems to be a 5,400rpm drive.

The hard drive on my older mac is an Intel ICH8 M AHCI ST9120822AS which again, after searching, seems to be a 5,400rpm drive also.

I tried every buffer size up to 2048 but still had problems dropping out.

I don’t think I have asio guard on my version of cubase. It is cubase essentials 4.

I just can’t understand how my old macbook that has significantly less ram and the same speed hard drive had no problem recording a full band with a 16 channel interface but now this new mac with improved specs struggled with 8 tracks.

Might be a compatibility issue with the OS version, v4 is a bit long in the tooth, what OS was your old macbook running?

I think it was 10.6.8. (Snow leopard)

Way more compatible with cubase essentials 4.

Looks like a Cubase upgrade is in his future.
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