Logic Pro Disk Overload on Mac Mini M2 – Solved

Hi Paul, I hope you can help me solve an issue. I use Logic Pro and my Macbook kept crashing every time it reached a certain point in a song. It said System Overload or Disk Too Slow. I changed the buffer size and a whole a bunch of things in system preferences. After days of going back and forth I decided my 2015 Macbook needed upgrading. I’ve bought a Mac Mini M2 with 16GB of RAM but I’m still having the same problem.

Dom

I received this message from a new client by email and we arranged a time to connect the next day. Once we had the remote desktop connection sorted on his Mac, I asked him to show me the problem occurring in Logic. He opened his most recent Logic Project file and Dom showed me that every time playback reached a certain point in the track, the above error would flash up.

My initial thought was that it might be the connection to his external drive. I tested this by moving his Logic Project to the internal SSD of the Mac Mini and reopening it. We played the song through again, but it didn’t make a difference. The crash still occurred in the same place.

I asked my client how he had moved his apps and files from his old MacBook to his new Mac Mini. He told me he had used the Time-Machine backup method. This gave me another idea. It was likely old Preference files from the MacBook had been copied over to the new Mac Mini and Logic was running in an older mode.

I closed Logic and navigated to the users/client/library/preferences folder. I removed all the Logic .plist files and put them into a temporary folder on the desktop.

When I restarted Logic it was behaving as if it had been freshly installed. I had to do a couple of steps like turning off my client’s unused plugins and switch Logic back to Advanced Mode. Once Logic was ready, we opened the previously unplayable song.

The song now played through without any disk overload messages. The Performance Meter window was now showing minimal activity rather than maxing-out.

The operation had been a success. Dom was now able to take advantage of all the processing power available on his Mac Mini. I finished the session by tidying up the old preference files and deleting them from the desktop.

Dom was kind enough to write me a nice review after our session:

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