CPU Manager lives in your Mac's menu bar. While you work in Logic, it sends Chrome, Dropbox and the rest of the background crowd to the back of the queue, so your session gets the processor first.
I built it to keep my 2015 iMac making records. If your Mac mostly copes but falls over halfway through a session, it's for you too.
Free for 30 days while it's in beta. For Intel Macs on macOS 10.15 Catalina or later.
Prioritize is off. Chrome, Dropbox, Photos and Slack are competing with Logic Pro for the processor.
System Overload.
The audio engine was not able to process all required data in time. (-10011)
If you make music on a Mac, it has turned up in the middle of your best take at least once, and you've blamed the Mac and started pricing up a new one.
Most of the time the culprit is everything else your Mac is doing. Forty browser tabs, Dropbox syncing a 4GB bounce and Photos scanning your holiday snaps for faces all want the same processor cores as Logic, and macOS gives them an equal say. Logic needs its audio on time, it loses that argument more often than it should, and CPU Manager settles it in your session's favour.
Left-click the menu bar icon for the panel. Right-click it for settings. Everything else happens in the background.
Pick Logic from the Prioritize menu and every other app using your processor steps back. Those apps keep running and wait their turn whenever your Mac is busy. Choose Off and everything goes back to normal. It works the same way for Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Cubase or anything else you record in.
My personal favourite
Right-click Logic in the list and choose Prioritize when open. From then on Logic gets priority whenever it's the app in front, and your Mac goes back to normal the moment you switch away to answer an email.
Keep one setup for mixing, one for tracking and one for writing, each with its own apps to push back and apps to boost, and switch between them from the menu bar.
Even on days you never push an app back, it's worth having CPU Manager open for this.
Activity Monitor only ever shows you this exact second, so whatever happens to spike as you look sits at the top, while the app that's been quietly chewing through your processor all afternoon blends in with everything else. CPU Manager keeps a running average instead. Pick 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes and it ranks your apps by how hard they've actually been working over that stretch, heaviest first, with a pie chart of how your processor time was shared out. Live shows a rolling 20 seconds, for when you want to watch something react as it happens.
It's the quickest way I know to answer “why has my Mac gone slow?” When a session starts dragging, open the panel, click 30M, and the culprit is sitting at the top of the list. Hover over its slice and it splits into its separate processes, which is how you find out it was one Chrome tab all along rather than Chrome as a whole.
You don't have to prioritise anything to use it, either. It's just as good for finding out what to close.
Managing your CPU sounds dramatic. In practice CPU Manager changes one thing: the order in which apps get the processor when your Mac is busy.
Join the free betaCPU Manager can't give your Mac more power than it has. It won't add RAM, fix a failing hard drive or squeeze one enormous plugin onto a core that's already full. If a single reverb is maxing out a core on its own, freeze that track instead.
And if your Mac has run out of puff, I'll tell you to buy a new one. Apple doesn't pay me commission either way.
Same song, same busy Mac, with CPU Manager off and then on. Then I did the whole thing again, to make sure the first result wasn't a fluke.
| CPU Manager off | CPU Manager on | |
|---|---|---|
| First test | 05 | 00 |
| Second test | 02 | 00 |
With CPU Manager off, Logic threw up a System Overload five times in the first test and twice in the second. With CPU Manager prioritising Logic, it didn't happen once in either. Logic got about 7.5% more processor time, taken from the background load, whose share dropped by about 70%.
An extra 7.5% doesn't sound like much, but my session was already running right at the edge, and that was exactly the headroom it was missing.
Between the two tests I discovered my project drive had been crawling along at USB 2 speed because of a dodgy cable, which is why the second test started with fewer overloads. A new cable sorted the drive, but it took CPU Manager to get the overloads down to zero. It's worth checking your own drive cables while you're at it, because mine had been slowing everything down for who knows how long.
This is one Mac and one session under a heavier load than you'd normally have, so on an ordinary day the difference will be smaller. CPU Manager earns its keep the moment something big starts up behind your session. In the heaviest run there was still a little jumpiness right at the end, when Logic already had the whole processor and the Mac simply had nothing more to give, which is the point I made in What it can't do.
A free answer to a $5,000 problem.
Before CPU Manager goes on sale, I want it running on as many different Intel Macs and studio setups as possible. That's where you come in.
Anything else, email jinngenie@mixgenie.co and I'll get back to you.
It won't add power. It decides who gets the power you already have, so the app you're working in stops losing out to things running in the background. On a busy Mac, that can be enough to stop the overloads. On my 2015 iMac it was the difference between five overloads and none (the full test is above).
Yes. CPU Manager isn't a plugin, so it works with any app on your Mac. Pick whichever one you're recording in.
Not in your audio path. The parts of macOS that handle sound, plus your interface's control software, are permanently off limits, and CPU Manager also tries to spot other apps playing or recording sound and leave them alone. If you ever hear something, mark the app Never throttle and tell me, because that's a bug I want to fix.
Video calls and screen recordings are the exception to watch for. CPU Manager's whole job is to slow down whatever's running in the background, and it can't reliably tell a Zoom call or a recording of your session apart from any other background app. If one of those is running while Logic has priority, its sound and picture can both get very glitchy. Before you start, right-click that app in CPU Manager's list and choose Never throttle this app. It'll run at full speed while everything else still steps back.
Sign up with the form above. I pick testers for a good spread of Intel Macs, macOS versions and audio interfaces, then email you the download and your own tester code. The app runs for 30 days from when you first unlock it. Around day 14, and again a few days before the end, it asks you five quick questions the next time you open it. Answering those is the whole price of admission.
The beta copy stops working, and quitting it puts every app back exactly as it was, so nothing is left slowed down. When CPU Manager goes on sale, beta testers hear about it first.
The first release is for Intel Macs, because that's where I've built and tested it. An Apple Silicon version will follow once I've tested it properly on M-series machines.
You could, and if you're the sort of person who closes Chrome before every session, you might not need this at all. The rest of us have forty tabs open, three of them are lyric sheets, and one is a YouTube tutorial paused at the good bit.
It needs neither. CPU Manager never connects to the internet and never asks for your administrator password.