If you have a portable Mac that you often use unplugged, you can choose this option to lower down power consumption. The Power menu contains the power and performance related options: Longer battery life. With ongoing support for DirectX and OpenGL, many popular games and game engines are supported within Parallels Desktop.Do you really need the most expensive Mac or PC to handle big track counts and lots of plugins in your home studio?Optimize Your MacBook for Longer Battery Life or Higher Performance. Parallels Desktop even has a virtual machine setting dedicated to gaming to optimize performance. How To Optimize Mac For Gaming When you start thinking how to play games on your Mac and about what you need to do to optimize your Mac so you can get maximum performance out of it, first of all, think about getting more space, freeing up memory, clearing up clutter, turning off unneeded features, and lowering your graphics card requirements.Play your Windows-only game on a Mac using Parallels Desktop.
![]() Optimize Your For Gaming Mac That YouAnd then just this month I doubled it again to 16GB. I immediately doubled it to 8GB. And great tutorials/support.For example – my Mac Mini came with 4GB of RAM 5 years ago. These days, most DAWs can take all the RAM you through at them, giving you more power and quicker response in a dense mix.Since third party memory is both so cheap and easy to install or swap out, this is the obvious place to start.Since I’m a Mac guy, I’ll point you to my favorite place to buy RAM for my Macs and that is OWC (Other World Computing). Replace Your Hard Drives With Solid State DrivesOne of the other more recent upgrades I made was replacing my standard 7200 RPM drives with SSDs (Solid State Drives). The point is to save all your sessions on a separate drive and pull from that when recording and mixing. Keep it clean and separate and you’ll get better performance.Of course, if you (like me) have two internal hard drives in your computer then you don’t need an external drive. Much like studios used to have tape machines and consoles each doing their own thing, you should have a separate hard drive feeding your DAW audio and not combine the two. Do not record to or mix from your internal system drive, the same hard drive that has your operating system and DAW installed on it.Instead, hook up a USB, Firewire, or Thunderbolt drive that is used only for recording to.Why? Because it will free your system drive up to just run the software, plugins, and OS. It’s the only way to justify spending your hard earned money on something.So when it comes to computers for your home studio, I use a simple rule of thumb: always keep your studio computer for at least 5 years.If you are swapping out your computer every 2 or 3 years, you’re losing money. Like anything in life you purchase, your goal should be to get maximum value out of it. Why on earth would you share that with another application if you need it all for your DAW?Just in case it hasn’t sunk in yet, let’s get specific.When recording or mixing you need to close out of the following:Just close out of everything that’s not your DAW and you’ll be in good shape! The 5 Year RuleOne final thought for you my friend. Your computer has a finite amount of power and resources at its disposal. So here goes:If you want your DAW to have as much power as possible, then for goodness sakes, please close all other programs and applications when recording and mixing!This is simple math. I’m sure someone out there reading this needs to hear it. ![]() With Windows 10 I suggest one bypasses W-10 Home. If you’re gonna use a p.c. Windows 10 (yeah well eventually nothing else is going to work thanks to Microsoft). Quite the opposite actually.Everything else? Yes, yes, yes…and more yes.RAM…absolutely. I strongly disagree with buying refurbished systems for recording these days unless the demand on the system will always be low which I doubt it always will.I mean, that’s great about 50 tracks and 250 reverbs and there is allot of knowledgeable wealth in that amazing feat of recording engineering but for me, I have heard the “you don’t need that” phrase so many times and it has never lead me to a frustration free (or even a frustration minimum) experience while writing and recording. Just wasn’t keeping up with DAW demand (Sonar Pro) so I did lay down a wad of cash for a BRAND NEW system. A little research will provide all the answers to that one. External hard drive for mac and windows compatibleA spinner back-up drive for storage of 1 TB or more doesn’t hurt though.Lots of USB 2.0, 3.0,3.1, Firewire 800, Thunderbolt if you can afford the absolutely stupid cost of anything Thunderbolt. Not cheap.)SSD…No question. 32 gigs can be over $500.00. ![]() Fans that you can’t even hear running.20 tracks loaded, 5 Stereo buses, Drum synths, Key synths, All the processing you can shake a duck at (if shaking ducks is your thing) the whole system is air cooled and runs between 28 and 40 Celsius and is using between 5% an 12% of the Core i7.I think I can push past that whole 50/250 thing and yeah, this should last beyond the 5 year mark. (Plus I can power my town during a black-out in another grid) Seriously one doesn’t have to go to this extreme but…don’t skimp on the PSU.Corsair super quiet case with lots of air flow and 120 mil. Way overkill here but I’m willing to pay extra for peace of mind and no weird clicks or buzzes. 2 screens…no issues.2 Samsung EVO SSD’s 250 gigs each and one WD Blue 7200 RPM 1 TB for storage.EVGA 850 Watt, Platinum rated power supply. 3Ghz is becoming the minimum pretty quickly with DAW’s so…there it is.8 gigs(and climbing to between 40 and 64…depending) of dual channel DDR4.NVIDIA GT1030 graphics card that DOESN’T run NVIDIA HD drivers with 2 gigs native RAM and runs on simple MoBo (Aorus in this case) native video drivers. Your PCs, consoles, whatever. Since then, I’ve had it on a UPS, which if you only take away one thing from this post–use a UPS on all electronics you really care about. So, the parts I’ve replaced from that ordeal was the motherboard and power supply. These same concepts can be applied to basically any other workstation-oriented task, such as virtualization, simulation, etc.My rig, which is a multi-purpose “do all the things” machine, is as follows:Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750GB 5400RPMSeasonic G-750 (to be replace with EVGA 750 G2)Windows 7 Ultimate (upgrading to 10 Pro eventually)Thrustmaster Ferrari Alcantara 599XX EVO RimI’ve had to rebuild this a bit once before due to power surges (actually, we got hit by lightning).
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