Garageband DOG SLOW....

Hey all, I'm a recent switcher and this is my first Mac (less than 2 weeks old ), and I want to get into playing guitar through Garageband.

The only problem is that to do almost anything in the program (select menu items, click an option in the program, etc), the beachball shows up and it takes an average of like 5 seconds for the choice to take effect.

This is even stranger because this is the "fresh from the factory" install, and worse yet, my computer is one of the new 8 core Mac Pros, already with 6 gigs of RAM (and 4 more on the way.)

System specs show nearly 100% idle time on the CPU, even with several other programs running and I still have over 3.3 gigs of RAM unused. Garageband is using anywhere from .5 to 1.7% of the CPU, but at the moment the beachball is going and the only way to stop it is to close the program entirely.

Any clue why Garageband might be running this slowly? None of my othe apps act this way...

All help is greatly appreciated!

-Bryan

Sorry to reply to this thread so late...

I too am on my first Mac (wow...and I thought I loved my AmigaOne!) -- got the non-pro MacBook right after Christmas.

I just started really seriously using GarageBand a day or two ago on 4gb RAM and I haven't had any slowness, even when multitasking with aMule or Firefox...only thing is sometimes I have to wait a couple of seconds (2 or 3 max) if I switch instruments. Pretty zippy otherwise.

This might sound weird, but do you still have the MS Office demo installed? Seriously, as soon as I booted my MacBook the first time, I uninstalled that thing as if it were a virus. The reason I mention this is because my wife once had a Mac laptop during the days when it used the Motorola 680x0 processor family, and she said that the whole system was butt-slow -- until she uninstalled MS Word. Yes, even when she cold-booted and DIDN'T use Word, the system was at a crawl, but getting rid of Word solved the problem!

hi there,

have you installed any third party Audio Units? soft synths or effects AUs? i have a couple AUs that ive installed that give me the beach ball everytime i click on them (one of them freezes g-band entireley and i have to force quit), but they are pretty CPU intensive. thats all i can think of. or you could try reinstalling g-band.