Blame It On El Capitan

[richardfinegold]

I had been venting my frustration elsewhere on the forum about my first download from the eclassical site, the Vanska/Minnesota Sibelius 3,6, and 7. Since the SACD won't be available in the states for a month and since I hadn't tried a high res download in a while, and the price was cheap, I dipped my toe in and got drowned. It took 4 hours, once the download actually finished, to be able to play it.
At first I had some trouble with the site itself, but after a few minutes resolved that. The bulk of the problem was getting my flac converter, a program that I purchased years ago called decibel, to be able to work.
My wife and I have MacBook Pros that date from 2009. After much hectoring by Apple we both loaded El Capitan, after I verified that our lap tops had the requirements to run it. This was the first time that I had tried using my previous downloads from HDTracks and decibel since that fateful day. Essentially, this was the Chinese Water Torture Test. Everything worked slowly and the icon of death would spin forever when I formatted the download, when I tried to open up Decibel, when I tried to drag the downloads into Decibel, and then finally when I tried to get the Computer to recognize the dac to which it was attached so I could play the files...everything took so long that I am marveling at my self control for not hurling the MacBook through the window in frustration.
I am wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience. I wonder if a more recent vintage computer would probably run better, but I hardly use it these days. My work supplies me with a Window 7 that runs the program that I need and I use my ipad for almost everything else.

[BBMmk2]

Spotify Premium for me, chap!

[jayne lee wilson]

I downloaded the Sibelius 3/6/7 in 24-bit to JRiver & Audirvana on a 2014 Macbook Pro running Mavericks, it took 10 minutes or less. The 2015 Macbook Air I use for utility tasks runs on El Capitan (natively) & has no trouble with these things either I'm afraid, sorry rfg...

Upgrading earlier machines can be problematic, of course, even when it seems initially to have gone OK, but even an older 2007 Mac (Tiger, Snow Leopard) downloaded efficiently enough from eClassical to XBMC, the player I used initially in 2011. Not quite so fast back then!
The biggest single influence on my downloading speed & efficiency seems to have been - local internet speed & capacity. After that, the download managers of the sites themselves. Again, sorry Richard, but I always find eClassical to be one of the easiest & quickest.

A few years ago when setting up Computer Audio playback via an outboard DAC I did have a few bad nights for sure, and JRiver itself literally gave me headaches for about a week learning how to download to it, find & use all that comes with it...

Worth it in the end though - short-term discomfort, long-term gain, right? Well, we all hope so...

[richardfinegold]

It could be jane my Internet is awful and it seems to have deteriorated again lately. We downloaded a movie from Apple and it took a very long time, despite the fact that we are supposedly paying the providers highest rate.
Still, my wife and I has hade several programs work poorly using El Capitan on our machines since we loaded it. This very Forum was difficult to access for the first week after the download, one reason that I junked the thing altogether and went to the tablet. However, thanks for the input on using your older machines, it's helpful.
The good news is the Minnesota Orchestra seems to be in fine fettle after their year long walkout. I hope that listening tonight will be more fun now that the oodles of frustration won't be dimming my enjoyment! And the eclassical site does seem easier to naviagate than the only other High Res site that I have experience with, HDTracks

[Dave2002]

After much hectoring by Apple we both loaded El Capitan, after I verified that our lap tops had the requirements to run it.

Sorry - that was a mistake. I always think it's best to do one at a time, in case of problems, which you clearly both encountered.

Everything worked slowly and the icon of death would spin forever when I formatted the download, when I tried to open up Decibel.

Is that essentially one of these? One seems to be a package (paid for) aimed at Macs, the other is a Linux version of what looks like an open source package - but it should run on Macs.

http://sbooth.org/Decibel/

http://decibel.silent-blade.org/

I am marveling at my self control for not hurling the MacBook through the window in frustration.
I am wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience. I wonder if a more recent vintage computer would probably run better, but I hardly use it these days. My work supplies me with a Window 7 that runs the program that I need and I use my ipad for almost everything else.

Sorry to hear about that degree of frustration. I've never got quite that far, though another family member through her wireless mouse at the wall/floor when everything locked up, and apparently it (the mouse) died. Actually it didn't - it recovered later.

I run El Capitan on a machine which is "only" a Core Duo machine, and I can see that it's not as fast as more recent machines, but actually it works pretty well on most things. The only thing which really causes a significant slow down is video editing, which was a real pain with Final Cut Pro X before I discovered proxy video files. Basically that's pushing the machine to its limits - and I had to put 16 Gbytes of memory in to get everything to work well. I'd still like it to be faster, but the memory was cheap compared with buying a new machine.

I haven't installed El Cap on my MBP yet, as I think that could present severe logistic problems with memory - mine only has 250 GBytes. Have you checked out how much spare space you have on your machine? Is it running from a hard drive (probably)? Mine has solid state memory which is faster. Can you run other playsers - for example Audacity - with the download files?

I also felt, and others have reported similar issues, that lots of things slow down for a while after El Cap is installed, and then they speed up. Maybe that was my imagination, but if there are caches to build up that could explain that.

Is there anything else obviously wrong with your OS installation? I found it took ages to get El Cap installed, and running, and I had one false start, but once it was going it was OK. Not worth trying a new installation if it's going OKish, but otherwise it might make sense to do the installation again. See how much spare memory there is when things are running. I think Activity Monitor might give you some clues, or else use the free App Memory Monitor (but another user round here hates that ....). If there is insufficient spare memory or swap space to your disc drive then things will grind almost to a halt which would fit your symptoms.

Good luck with it. I'm assuming you are not expecting lightning fast response, but a few seconds would be reasonable. As I said, I'd like El Cap on my machine to be faster, but it's really nothing like the torture experience you describe. I think your machine should be able to run El Cap well enough, and it should be OK.

[richardfinegold]

Sorry - that was a mistake. I always think it's best to do one at a time, in case of problems, which you clearly both encountered.

Is that essentially one of these? One seems to be a package (paid for) aimed at Macs, the other is a Linux version of what looks like an open source package - but it should run on Macs.

http://sbooth.org/Decibel/

http://decibel.silent-blade.org/

Sorry to hear about that degree of frustration. I've never got quite that far, though another family member through her wireless mouse at the wall/floor when everything locked up, and apparently it (the mouse) died. Actually it didn't - it recovered later.

I run El Capitan on a machine which is "only" a Core Duo machine, and I can see that it's not as fast as more recent machines, but actually it works pretty well on most things. The only thing which really causes a significant slow down is video editing, which was a real pain with Final Cut Pro X before I discovered proxy video files. Basically that's pushing the machine to its limits - and I had to put 16 Gbytes of memory in to get everything to work well. I'd still like it to be faster, but the memory was cheap compared with buying a new machine.

I haven't installed El Cap on my MBP yet, as I think that could present severe logistic problems with memory - mine only has 250 GBytes. Have you checked out how much spare space you have on your machine? Is it running from a hard drive (probably)? Mine has solid state memory which is faster. Can you run other playsers - for example Audacity - with the download files?

I also felt, and others have reported similar issues, that lots of things slow down for a while after El Cap is installed, and then they speed up. Maybe that was my imagination, but if there are caches to build up that could explain that.

Is there anything else obviously wrong with your OS installation? I found it took ages to get El Cap installed, and running, and I had one false start, but once it was going it was OK. Not worth trying a new installation if it's going OKish, but otherwise it might make sense to do the installation again. See how much spare memory there is when things are running. I think Activity Monitor might give you some clues, or else use the free App Memory Monitor (but another user round here hates that ....). If there is insufficient spare memory or swap space to your disc drive then things will grind almost to a halt which would fit your symptoms.

Good luck with it. I'm assuming you are not expecting lightning fast response, but a few seconds would be reasonable. As I said, I'd like El Cap on my machine to be faster, but it's really nothing like the torture experience you describe. I think your machine should be able to run El Cap well enough, and it should be OK.

Indeed, your experience with E.C. seems to mirror those of my wife and I...it would be nice to have the latest Mac to play with to see if the problem is the OS itself, the implementatiojn of it on an older machine, or a poor Internet connection...