Newest MBP, 2.66 mhz i7 processor, 10.6.3, 4 gb ram, Metric Halo 2882 interface, external (known good) firewire drive for audio
In some sets, I am having lots of issues with clicking/crunching artifacts, always at the end of a 2-4-bar phrase. The CPU meter shoots upward 10-20%, clickety-click, and then it's back to normal. Any audio that is present has been properly edited/faded, and the crunch is intermittent. Also, I will sometimes get those sounds when simply clicking the mouse, or starting a clip (that does not contain any bad zero crossings/clicks).
The problem seems to go away if I freeze all of the tracks, but it's not localized to any one plug-in or track. Sometimes freezing just one track will alleviate the problem for a bit, but it always comes back. I'm not seeing any Dropout warnings, and the CPU never goes higher than 35%. Many of my sets use complex routing and thus cannot be easily frozen, and every session climbing from a few hundred megs to multi-gigs due to freeze files is a pain.
I'm mainly mixing outside the box these days, so whereas normally I could just do a non-realtime bounce when finished and forget about this, now I NEED totally pristine playback for 5-8 minutes so I can record my mix in real time. This seems impossible, with many sessions.
As an aside, there seem to be large discrepancies between the Live CPU meter and Activity Monitor's take. When Live is showing 22-35% cpu usage, Activity Monitor shows Live taking up 95-100% of one CPU core.
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I have tried playing sets from the internal drive and another firewire drive, have tried swapping firewire cables, using the internal sound outputs, goosing the buffer, everything. Click-crunch city.
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Any ideas?
Thanks much,
-George in San Francisco