Tag: performance

External SSD performance (SATA III) on USB3 ports

In the process of replacing spinning hard drives with SSD on our Macintosh systems.

All of the Macs are “ancient” coming from the spinning drive era.

USB3 disks have been performing at less than 100 MByte/second read and write speeds. Not adequate for doing audio work with many disk files. Overloads occur very easily.

Current tests (Blackmagic Disk Speed Test) on SanDisk Ultra 3D SSDs are very encouraging.

2013 iMac — APFS formatted — unencrypted — write at 320 Mbyte/second, read at 425 Mbyte/second.

2013 iMac — APFS formatted — encrypted — write at 240 Mbyte/second, read at 325 Mbyte/second.

My portable “system” with everything on it is encrypted. I will be using it for my studio work drive. Performance is fine for my purposes. I had moved the working files to a different machine on the network. Network disk performance was just above 100 Mbytes/second. I experienced no problems.

Eventual target is a 2TB NVMe drive on USB 3.1 protocols for the system/portable studio. Working disk will be SATA III drives. In 2TB sizes I am down to about $.10 per gigabyte.

Off-Line “tape” is still 1, 2, and 4TB spinning disks — portable — fast enough for archive — $.025 per gigabyte. Unlikely to get larger spinning disks. That would change the archiving process into a very long and difficult process.

Dates and Times — been a struggle since before time began

Scripting News: Saturday, June 9, 2018

One of the things I’m learning is that there is are problems with date-time values. The question is whether or not the date part of the date-time should have hyphens. The Frontier implementation does not. The XML-RPC spec says not. But ISO 8601 seems to say they must be present. The built-in JavaScript function includes the hyphens. I don’t have any other implementations that I can easily check against, so I don’t know what offers the most interop with other XML-RPCs. For now I’m documenting the issue, and leaving the JavaScript implementation as it is, for now. This means in this area it does not interop with Frontier, in that Frontier will not understand the JavaScript date-time values. Going in the other direction there is no problem, because I’ve included a workaround.

Unreal. Fourteen years ago a standard was published (ISO 8601:2004) which clearly defined how things should be. Problem is that software developers do not spend their lives re-implementing “standard” software for the rest of their lives.

ISO gave us (back in 2004) this format 20180609T221145Z

What the world wants now is this format 2018-06-09T22:11:45+00:00 (we avoid timezone abbreviations and geo-political nonsense)

I retired from the big data world in 2004, so I never would have had cause to change my preferred world – 20180609T221145Z. To tell the truth, since just before 2000-01-01 I actually preferred the “Astronomical (Julian) day number (at noon UTC): 2458279.5” which for my machines this morning worked out to 2458279.03405093.

From the wikipedia we see

November 17, 1858, 00:00:00 UT is the zero of the Modified Julian Day (MJD) equivalent to Julian day 2400000.5[23]

and we all basically know that the VMS clock started there 😉 In earlier times (snicker) I discovered the “bad things” that would happen if one entered a proper geocentric clock offset in a TOPS-10 system — I mean, c’mon, I had it right within 200 yards. All hell broke loose in all time-based things. Wonder why it required an OS rebuild to set/change that value.

As a reminder to anyone who uses a database that I have built — 20180609 — is not a date, nor is 2018060915270001 — but it is a very fast integer index 😉 I can’t insert things in my databases faster than 10,000 per second. I learned the hard way that telescope telemetry databases surely can 😉

Ahhh, dates. I would rather slip the bass DI track by 87 samples so it lines up with the bass amp track these days.

How to move Logic’s additional content to a secondary drive — Logic Pro Music

How to move Logic’s additional content to a secondary drive — Logic Pro Music

One of the strengths of the symlink is that the system treats it as a path to a location. This is why it stays intact even when updating your libraries.

The joys of different file systems.

For the most part the “right” way to deal with the Mac file system(s) is to use aliases. They work like a charm. Except when they don’t.

Symlinks to external drives is a great way to help with massive library locations.

Now if there were enough ports on the laptops. 1TB SSD prices are down low. Mostly depends on the device speeds — USB3 enclosures should allow 100+Mbyte/sec transfers, but it sure is nice to have 300+ MB/sec on an internal SSD. Those orchestral libraries take an eon to load.

I guess for my ideal music machine I want 4TB of superfast SSD, 64GB+ of RAM, 8 cores or more. iMac Pro gets close — could I get rid of the screen and add more storage please?

How to Make Your MIDI Sound Less like MIDI — Pro Audio Files

How to Make Your MIDI Sound Less like MIDI — Pro Audio Files

While virtual instruments and sample libraries have come a long way since the early 1980’s, you might find that the musical ideas that you create using MIDI still sound like, well … MIDI. The dynamics, tone and overall feel of music produced using MIDI tends to be lacking in comparison to music created using more traditional means. Here are some tips if you want to make your music sound less like it was created using a digital protocol, and more like an organic, expressive musical performance.

Always good to know how to help the “cheesy” sounds that MIDI instruments sometimes produce. New things in Logic Pro X allow for articulation to help. Miroslav Philharmonik has some decent articulations as well. Music has to breathe at a natural pace.

The latest MIDI specification includes Polyphonic Expression — new things happen! This should help. Like listening to a Disklavier that uses the “extra” performance information.