Likely causes of audio breakup under load.

[daven]

I'm prepping for a live gig with my old 2009 macbook pro and after 15-20 minutes the audio starts breaking up and I’m trying to determine the cause. I doesn’t happen on my new imac.

I know about the latency buffer. Altering this works at first but then not (which makes me think the issue might be heat related).

I am pushing it pretty hard with multi ableton effects on both playback and live tracks - and all tracks are also recording as I play.

It could be ram - the laptop has 4 GB, the imac 8GB

I’s been suggested a better quality outboard audio interface than my basic Behringer UCA 200 might help.

It shouldn’t be the HDD. The laptop has a newish SDD, the imac still has one of apple’s feeble fusion drives in it.

Or it could just be the laptop isn’t up to it. It gets quite hot and as I say the problem worsens over the minutes while playing and recording.

I’m using Live 9 on the laptop with Yosemite OS because it wont run 10, its too old to run the later OS live 10 requires. The imac is running 10 on Mojave OS, so thats another variable.

Thanks for any advice.

[jestermgee]

Could also be simply the 10 year old machine you have is just not that capable...

Heat can cause components to degrade over time. Heatsink compound on CPU/GPU will dry out and not transfer heat very well causing increase in overheating. Heat sounds like it's possibly the main cause but also, it's an old machine so....

[TLW]

If cpu overheating is potentially the problem Intel’s free Power Gadget might help to diagnose it. It also shows what the cpu is doing in ways the OS utilities don’t.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articl ... wer-gadget