jazzeck wrote:Thanks a lot Surf. I will contact OWC, for further details.
Regarding my Mac: It's a MacBook Pro 13' 2012 mid june. 2,5 GHz Intel Core i5, 4GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM
The thing is, it's a bit pricey for me to spend a total of about 140$....
I was just thinking about something. Do you think it's possible to buy only one 8GB block of RAM? That would give me 10 GB of RAM and a possibility to upgrade to 16 GB later on.
Glad to help!
If your MacBook Pro currently has a pair of 2GB memory strips for a total of 4GB, then you could replace only one of the memory strips with an 8GB memory strip, which will make the total memory 10GB, and this will be fine, plus it allows replacing the remaining 2GB original factory memory strip with an 8GB memory strip sometime in the future . . .
THOUGHTS
For reference, this is a screen capture of the Mac OS X 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion) Activity Monitor showing memory usage when Digital Performer 8.01 (MOTU), NOTION 4 (Notion Music), and Reason 6.5 (Propellerhead Software) are running in ReWire 2 (Propellerhead Software) mode with Digital Performer 8.01 acting as the ReWire 2 host controller and NOTION 4 and Reason 6.5 acting as ReWire 2 slaves . . .
[NOTE: The gray matrix with lime green bars on the right side of the screen capture shows the utilization percentage of the 8 cores of the 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, which is approximately 20 percent overall and indicates that the Mac Pro here in the sound isolation studio has plenty of processor "headroom" or "capacity", where in contrast memory utilization is approximately 65 percent, which maps to sufficient "headroom" or "capacity". And as noted in my previous post, my interpretation of this Activity Monitor data is that upgrading the video card will map to the most 'bang for the buck" at present, where after upgrading the memory card the next upgrade will be to add more memory, but at present I think getting a faster video card makes more sense for the Mac Pro here in the sound isolation studio, since it often is the case that everything else in the hardware configuration will be waiting on the video card to do its work, hence when you upgrade the video card, this reduces the "wait time" for the graphic stuff to update and so forth, with the result that while the computer is not faster (since everything except the video card already finished its work), the perception in human time when the video card is upgraded is that the computer is "faster", which works for me, since conceptually I keep the computing stuff separate from the result displaying stuff, which mostly is due to working on computers at a time when there were no displays and programs were coded one line at a time via holes punched in computer cards, which is a bit mind-boggling, but so what, because coding at such a low level is like using an abacus or slide rule, and after a while if you are skilled in visualizing stuff in your mind, you do not need to use a real abacus or slide rule to do rapid arithmetic, since you just imagine yourself moving the beads on the abacus or moving the slide rule to the correct ending location . . . ]
This is the complete project for the Electronic genre song I am developing based on having a bit of FUN with the concept "borrowed" from the web sensation "Harlem Shake" (Baauer) as part of my ongoing effort never to have a truly original idea, and for reference the NOTION 4 score has two instances of MachFive 3 (MOTU), where one is the Mark79 Electric Piano VSTi instrument and is resource heavy (2,532 keygroup samples, which take approximately 15 seconds to load) and the other is an X-Treme FX Siren VSTi instrument (which is not a resource heavy set of sampled sounds); there are two instances of Kontakt 5 (Native Instruments), which are in the medium-to-heavy resource range; and there is one instance of Cyclop (Sugar Bytes), which is a very nice Bass VSTI virtual instrument and is in the medium resource range. In total, it takes approximately 25 seconds to start NOTION 4 and to load all the instruments for this particular score . . .
"Whammy Twist" (DJ Surfwhammy ft. Subsonic Weggee-Z) -- Basic Groove, Psychedelic Dolphins, Sirens, and Electric Kazoo -- MP3 (7MB, 293-kbps, approximately 3 minutes and 8 seconds)
The Reason 6.5 project has a few synthesizer instruments, primarily for doing automated drumming and droning synthesized bass, and there is one Rack Extension. The Digital Performer 8.01 project currently has approximately 25 tracks, which have soundbites recorded from the audio generated by NOTION 4 and Reason 6.5, and the Digital Performer 8.01 project also has a virtual festival of effects plug-ins and signal processors, some of which are resource heavy . . .
However, in the grand scheme of everything, the three projects for this song (Digital Performer 8.01, NOTION 4, and Reason 6.5) are what I classify as being very basic and simple, since there are not a lot of instruments and nothing is particularly complex, which explained another way indicates that the memory usage shown in the screen capture (see above) is a bit minimal . . .
The key difference is that some of the VSTi virtual instruments are "heavy" based on the size of their sampled sound libraries, as is the case with the MachFive 3 Mark79 VSTI virtual instrument, and you can see the amount of utilized memory increasing when the keygroups for the Mark79 Electric Piano are loading, where for reference the Mark79 Electric Piano is one of the elaborate instruments in MachFive 3, and it has special functionality, articulations, and supports scripting, custom events, and so forth and so on via a modified version of the LUA scripting language, which is the case for all the elaborate instruments in MachFive 3 (which at present are the Mark79 Electric Piano, J Bass, Upright Bass, Telematic Guitar, Fazioli F Grand 278 Piano, and Star Drums) . . .
MachFive 3 Scripted Virtual Instruments (MOTU)
Lots of FUN!
