IMac Intel Edirol FA-66 monitoring delay

Question

I read somewhere else through the discussions that Edirol products can have some problems working with GarageBand.
I used it a few times on my iMac Intel with guitar/bass and every time I experienced a monitoring delay after 2-3 mins from instrument selection, in the sense that I hit the strings and hear the sound in the earphones like, 2" later, making it completely useless.
Is there anyone else experiencing the same problem and eventually fix it?
Cheers everybody
iMac Intel   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   iMac Intel

Answer 1

First off Macs have been in recording studios for years. The major problem is hard drive bandwidth. Doesn't matter how fast your machine is if the hard drive is busy doing other task. When you have just one hard drive that is being accessed by the system and all the extras running then ask it to constantly read and write your audio something is going to get caught up in a buffer somewhere.
Now if you don't lock your tracks you are also asking the cpu that is also busy doing other things to render any FX on those tracks on the fly in real time. All the time your recording a new track maybe with different FXs and again filling RAM and hard drive both being used by other things. Now you can cut down on buffer get less latency but also cut down on number of tracks or increase buffer and run the chance of latency.
All it takes is one instant of a data (traffic jam) to start causing some latency and you end up here.
The best things to do is lock tracks and use a second hard drive.