hmmm. perhaps I should move to 10.6.7

Thanks, Ski and Rounik. You guys are great resources. Thanks for your input. M

Here's an example of something I experience with 10.6.6 that never happened with 10.5.8 With a fair amount of frequency, on startup, I'll get a white screen. Nothing else. If I let it hang out there long enough it will become the dreaded mac with question mark. I need to force shutdown, then start up again. Tonight I had two startup failures before I finally got the gray apple and spinner to show up and then start up the computer. Ever heard of that happening?

Oops. Should have mentioned that I've done that. Apologies. I just turned on the machine last night, and it happened again, so I was in mild panic mode when I asked the question, and left off that important detail. But my partner, who works on Macs all day long, every day in, day out, did that for me. We swapped out one of my other internal hard drives, booted from it, etc. And after the "fix" it still happens. And I try to remember to repair permissions every few weeks. So far, it eventually launches and everything is fine once it's up. And most of the time I just put it to sleep instead of shutting all the way down. But it is a little disconcerting when it doesn't start up first time. And this behavior never happened to me on any past Mac operating system...maybe a few times before system 10.0, so this is a totally new behavior after I moved to 10.6.6 I'm leaning toward moving to 10.6.7 to see if this fixes it. Of course, after backing up. I'll let you know and Rounik know how it goes. Thanks again for the support. best, M

I'm told that what we (he) did was zap the PRam, and run Disk Warrior. We also repaired permissions and verified the disk in disk utilities. I haven't tried Onyx. Yes, I installed more RAM when I got the machine. Can't remember what was in the original machine, but now I have 7GB RAM. The RAM was installed right after I got the machine, 4 or 5 years ago. Man, I got an old computer! Amazing it still runs.

I have a client who has done some work on GarageBand and he wants to come into my studio and use it as a base for work in Logic. He'll be coming in to lay some new vocals down, add some more instruments, and refine what he did in GB. I did a little pre-sprucing up of some of the tracks, added some effects, tweaked a few parts, and after working for about an hour, logic kind of freaked out. I seem to remember this happening when I worked on another Garage Band project. First of all, is my memory serving me correctly? Can GB files be buggy in Logic? And secondly, if so, is there anything that can be done to make the transition work a better? Thanks in advance for any help you can offer. P.S. I didn't really crash all the way, logic just started behaving very badly. Playhead wouldn't advance with the playback, didn't seem to respond to key commands, etc. I was able to shut it down using the drop down menu (COMMAND-Q would not work), and rebooted and then was able to work fine. Just wondering if there's anything that will make working with BG files smoother.

Rounik, Think this will help a lot. One more thing in Logic I didn't know existed. Would be cool if you could import Pro Tools sessions this way...can you? I must also confess that I never looked at it in Garage Band. To be honest, I have no idea what version of Garage Band this was created with (guess I'll have to ask). I don't think I've ever even opened Garage Band, and I know nothing about it, except that it's a sort of stripped down version of Logic, right? The project itself isn't very complicated at all, though it's got some weird stuff in it. Like all the tracks had 2 sends on them, but there was nothing on the aux channel strips they were pointing to. (bus 1 and bus 2, respectively), and no signal routed through them. In addition, there were 16 aux tracks, labeled bus 1-16, that you could only see if you clicked on the "all" button in the mix area of the arrange page. (or opening up a separate environment window). i.e. they didn't show up if you were just looking at it with the "arrange" button pressed. Which was what made me wonder if the troubles I was having were GB-to-Logic related. Grateful to you and Gary Hiebner for your help. M

Finally got the opportunity to try this. Wow. This is majorly cool. I think I got a clean copy to start working with. I asked what version of GB was used, haven't heard back yet. Might be a moot point, though, if this clean copy works out as well as it looks like it did. Thanks again, and and thanks to Gary, for the help. best wishes, M

Just offered Gary my thanks on his Hub post. Re: the extra aux channels, just opened Garage Band (first time), made a simple project, saved, it, then brought it into Logic. It appears it's something funky about the way Logic imports GB files. (GB version 3.0.5) It's even worse than the project my client sent me. They are not in the arrange, but if you click the "all" button, there are 64 each of audio channel strips and instrument channel strips, and 12 aux channels, and all the tracks have 2 sends, one for bus 1 and one for bus 2. And, the outputs for the 4 tracks that I had actually set up in Garage band are set to output to bus 11. Crazy.

I was unclear. That's MY version of Garage Band, and I just created a cheap quick something on my end in my version of GB to see if I got the same results when I tried opening it in Logic. When I said "first time," I meant that was the first time I've ever opened Garage Band on my machine, ever. And yep, it was pretty messed up. This is literally the first time I've opened Garage Band, so it's possible that my client has a more current version of GB than I do. Do you think it's worth it for Logic users to keep their GB current? He hasn't got back to me about which version of GB he has, but I'm thinking the way to go is, go ahead and open whatever he gives me in Logic, note which tracks I need, save it, close it, then import the relevant tracks into a new project using this very cool feature, then ditch the rest. Do you concur? I'll download the Logic update now! Thanks for the tip. best, M