Mark W wrote: I have been happily (nearly) Logic for a few years now and have had the G5 for a similar time. Generally I have no problems but do have some issues using plug-ins. I use Eastwest Gold Orchestra & Ivory piano plug-ins samples of which are saved on seperate hard drive (160Gb). I am wondering how many plug-ins/samples i should be able to run. Even when I use a single large samples from ine plug-in (large string ensemble) the sound clicks and cracks. It sounds like a digital error but I'm sure it's not the hard drive. At times this is improved when I try outputting through the Mac's built in audio instead of the soundcard. Is it possible that the soundcard is causing my problems? It not only possible, it´s very likely. The plugin you mention are big RAM/CPU hogs and will give anybody problems unless you have a really fast sound card like RME, Metric H or MOTU. You can get rid of the crackles by changing the buffersize to a higher number like from 128 to 256. This will of course give you a worse latency but it´s better than crackles. The only way to get around this is to record the track with a less CPU hungry plugin, change the sound to Ivory, freeze the track and then work on. In that case you can leave the buffersize and get that very important small latency. As long as you´re not getting the crackles on stuff that you use in realtime, like the guitaramp, you will be fine.