Coreaudio versus ASIO

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
Post Reply
mdme_sadie
Posts: 27
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 9:40 pm

Coreaudio versus ASIO

Post by mdme_sadie » Tue Sep 11, 2007 8:10 pm

Is it just me, or does CoreAudio suck royally?

I've tried the same firewire audio interface (Alesis Multimix 8 ) with Live on two PC's one a MacPro running both OSX and XP and the other an older slower Dell running only XP. In XP using ASIO i'm able to get lower latency with a larger buffer margin than with OSX and CoreAudio using either PC. What's more there appears to be a discrepancy between the alleged latency and the perceptible latency, on OSX it's really a substantial echo which more or less makes recording anything while monitoring the input absolutely horrible.

Bearing in mind the Mac is a 3ghz Octacore running with one 7200 rpm standard drive and a 10000 wd raptor and plenty of memory is there anything at all that can be done about CoreAudio? Or even better does anyone know of a decent ASIO for firewire driver for OSX? As clearly Apple are no longer interested in getting back in to the studios after their spate of installing Hoovers in their towers.

I'd love to hear all your experiences about this so long as they explicitly agree with me and my views :P No seriously, I'd really love to hear if there's any solution or that I've screwed up some hidden setting and therefore an am ass (but at least an ass that now has a solution).

OvertoneZero
Posts: 1347
Joined: Fri Mar 16, 2007 9:16 pm

Post by OvertoneZero » Tue Sep 11, 2007 9:04 pm

Could be that the OS X drivers for the Alesis suck.. I've seen ASIO consistently reporting lower latencies than CoreAudio on my Macbook Pro.

From what I recall, there is an additional 64 sample buffer required by CoreAudio, but the discepancies I've seen are greater than this would account for. Not sure wassup..

Atomikat
Posts: 968
Joined: Thu Nov 11, 2004 11:46 pm
Location: Elizabeth,NJ,USA and Colombia

Post by Atomikat » Tue Sep 11, 2007 11:10 pm

Alesis multimix 8 sucks, I bought one 2 years ago and had to return it to the store 3 days later...a lot of noise.

mdme_sadie
Posts: 27
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 9:40 pm

Post by mdme_sadie » Tue Sep 11, 2007 11:49 pm

Haven't had any massive noise issues with mine, i get more noise from the cables than from the Alesis.

noisetonepause
Posts: 4938
Joined: Sat Dec 28, 2002 3:38 pm
Location: Sticks and stones

Post by noisetonepause » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:01 am

Don't blame OS X for Alesis's crappy drivers.
Suit #1: I mean, have you got any insight as to why a bright boy like this would jeopardize the lives of millions?
Suit #2: No, sir, he says he does this sort of thing for fun.

Post Reply