How in the world could this project create a "system overload"? Logic Pro X 10.8.1

Sometimes, the first play through will generate that while Logic "settles in" and then it goes away and doesn't reappear.

Ashermusic said:

Sometimes, the first play through will generate that while Logic "settles in" and then it goes away and doesn't reappear.

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Ahhhh ok - thank you - it has not occurred again after I dismissed the message - just got me thinking that if an M2 Ultra chip can be overloaded by 2 MIDI tracks and a 1 minute video then I give up on Macs lol

"System overload" is a bit misleadingly-named: it just means that Logic was kept waiting for something, and couldn't deliver an audio chunk in real-time... but that can happen for many reasons other than system load.

If it's a one-off then probably nothing to worry about as @Ashermusic says. e.g. Logic lazily-loads plugins by default (and the plugins may in turn lazily-load their own data.) That leaves very little time for them to get ready if Logic only tells them to load when you hit "play". An external drive unmounting/resetting/getting indexed is another fairly common one that won't show up on a CPU monitor.

Although it seems counter-intuitive given the "try increasing buffer size" element in the overload message, on Apple Silicon Logic seems to prefer smaller buffer sizes. Maybe try out buffer sizes of 32 or 64 and work your way up from there until you find the best balance?

aldous said:

"System overload" is a bit misleadingly-named: it just means that Logic was kept waiting for something, and couldn't deliver an audio chunk in real-time... but that can happen for many reasons other than system load.

If it's a one-off then probably nothing to worry about as @Ashermusic says. e.g. Logic lazily-loads plugins by default (and the plugins may in turn lazily-load their own data.) That leaves very little time for them to get ready if Logic only tells them to load when you hit "play". An external drive unmounting/resetting/getting indexed is another fairly common one that won't show up on a CPU monitor.

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charlieclouser said:

Although it seems counter-intuitive given the "try increasing buffer size" element in the overload message, on Apple Silicon Logic seems to prefer smaller buffer sizes. Maybe try out buffer sizes of 32 or 64 and work your way up from there until you find the best balance?

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I will try smaller buffer size and see if the error every appears again

When the error appeared I was perplexed, wondering how in the world such a powerful computer could become bogged down by 2 MIDI tracks

I also posted this issue over on the Logic Pro Help forum and David (the Logic expert who runs the site) theorizes that my video file is too big or Logic is having trouble with the video codec

The video file (a still image with a zoom and some rain effect on it) is a .mov at 1 minute in length with a file size a 4.74GB

I still cannot comprehend how a .mov file (which is the default file from Final Cut Pro) would cause issues within Logic

If it is the file size of 4.74GB then I wonder how professional composers can score an entire film, even one scene at a time, as I am sure those video files are much larger than 4.74GB

An Apple Mac Studio M2 Ultra should not be breaking a sweat on this (in my humble opinion)

That`s a very large file for a 1 minute video. Just finished scoring a documentary on 1 hour, where the file size was around 6gb.

Honestly, unless you have a problem that you can at least semi-reliably replicate, I suggest leaving everything as it was. You had that one playback glitch in one project - which may not have been to do with settings at all - versus against every other time you've successfully played back any other project on that machine. I'm assuming that's a pretty good percentage success rate. Unless you've got a reproducible issue that you can test, changing settings now is like taking a medicine when you're healthy: you're more likely to do harm than good.

stigc56 said:

That`s a very large file for a 1 minute video. Just finished scoring a documentary on 1 hour, where the file size was around 6gb.

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What was the file extension?

4.7GB for a minute is not crazy - if you're working with high quality, high resolution ProRes you will often see data rates like that. Hence why I have 64TB of SSDs in my Mac Pro!

If it is a ProRes file, I VERY much doubt that it's causing your issue. Apple Silicon can handle many simultaneous streams of 4k and even 8k ProRes - it's built into the chip design.

What might be causing the overload is having a MIDI track with an especialy demanding VI plugin selected when you start playback. In Live Mode, Logic puts all plugins associated with the track onto a single CPU core, which can cause overloads.

To check if this is the cause, create a blank audio track and select it before hitting playback. That will allow Logic to distribute the load across more CPU cores.