Ableton Forum

I have a brand new MacBook Pro 13" (Mid 2014, SSD, 16 GB RAM) with Yosemite preinstalled. And I have Echo Audiofire 4 audio interface on Firewire<->Thunderbolt adapter. So it seems to be plenty of resources to work with. But while using Ableton Live 9.1.6 I get audio dropouts (like really tiny ones - they sound like a cracks and noisy hisses, not like pops and cracks I hot with Ableton on my Good'ol Windows machine). The problem exists only when I take a live audio from my external interface, route it through the DAW, add some FXs and send it back out. There seems to be no extra CPU usage or Disk related delays (at least the DAW reports no overloads - CPU meter shows aprox. 5% usage).

Echo gear are said to be Yosemite compatible
Abeleton says their DAW version 9.1.6 is Yosemite compatible
Could it be some CoreAudio synchronization issue?
Has anyone else had a similar issue?

gusc wrote:I have a brand new MacBook Pro 13" (Mid 2014, SSD, 16 GB RAM) with Yosemite preinstalled. And I have Echo Audiofire 4 audio interface on Firewire<->Thunderbolt adapter. So it seems to be plenty of resources to work with. But while using Ableton Live 9.1.6 I get audio dropouts (like really tiny ones - they sound like a cracks and noisy hisses, not like pops and cracks I hot with Ableton on my Good'ol Windows machine). The problem exists only when I take a live audio from my external interface, route it through the DAW, add some FXs and send it back out. There seems to be no extra CPU usage or Disk related delays (at least the DAW reports no overloads - CPU meter shows aprox. 5% usage).

Echo gear are said to be Yosemite compatible
Abeleton says their DAW version 9.1.6 is Yosemite compatible
Could it be some CoreAudio synchronization issue?
Has anyone else had a similar issue?

What are your buffer settings?
Unfortunately audio cards and their drivers can also affect buffer settings and the kind of cracks/hisses you're getting.
If you're monitoring your guitar/bass/drums/vocals etc. through Live you're probably on a really low buffer setting, depending on things like the amount of plug ins you have on other tracks, and the buffer settings you have you can get crackling at low CPU settings, Also, Lives CPU meter is completely unreliable for troubleshooting issues like this, use Activity Monitor (search spotlight if you have never used it), it will tell you what your system resources are like

Yeah, I usually work with 256 sample buffer, and turning it down increases the dropouts, but there are still drop outs at 512 and 1024. Which is kind of weird, as on Windows with ASIO drivers it was working well on my old Core2Duo with 256 sample buffer. I was hoping that my new mac would be able to handle even 64 sample buffers.

As for plugins - I don't have any 3rd party plugins on the live in-out chain, just the built-ins. It has Utility, Compressor, Delay and a Reverb - in that order for live vocals processing.

I'll look into Activity Monitor when I'm back in the studio, but for now (without the external interface connected) it shows that Live uses 17% CPU (while Live reports 8%), and there is an unresponsive Ableton Index process.

the problem is that audio glitches are easy to cause, and are not necessarily directly related to overall CPU resources.

to not glitch, your machine needs to continuously and rapidly process and feed small chunks of audio to your interface. a tiny interruption in that processing is enough to cause a glitch.

many of the setup tips on this page also apply to an audio production machine:

http://figure53.com/notes/2013-10-29-pr ... ubleshoot/

btw, you can safely kill the Ableton Index process using the Activity Monitor. select it and click the cross icon in the toolbar on the top left. try "Quit" first. if that doesn't work do the "Force Quit"...

Good link fishmonkey. IMO Notifications Center is a possible problem and I was going to search on how to disable it myself so awesome.

The other big one is disk spindown, that's a huge one people miss all the time.

fishmonkey wrote:the problem is that audio glitches are easy to cause, and are not necessarily directly related to overall CPU resources.

to not glitch, your machine needs to continuously and rapidly process and feed small chunks of audio to your interface. a tiny interruption in that processing is enough to cause a glitch.

OK, I get how this process of buffer switching works, at least in ASIO, I have done some software development in that field. And I understand that OSX is a wee bit different system as Win. But why the system that is blazing fast has these issues? One thing I was having a thought of is how to increase CoreAudio or Live priority, so that process scheduler can give it more CPU time? Just a guess, but maybe that can help.

Machinesworking wrote:Good link fishmonkey. IMO Notifications Center is a possible problem and I was going to search on how to disable it myself so awesome.

Hmm, I'll try Notification center, but the issue in QLab was, correct me if I'm wrong, that there can be an accidental notification popping up on your VJ show.

Machinesworking wrote:The other big one is disk spindown, that's a huge one people miss all the time.

Does the "disk spindown" really affect Flash SSD?

gusc wrote: OK, I get how this process of buffer switching works, at least in ASIO, I have done some software development in that field. And I understand that OSX is a wee bit different system as Win. But why the system that is blazing fast has these issues? One thing I was having a thought of is how to increase CoreAudio or Live priority, so that process scheduler can give it more CPU time? Just a guess, but maybe that can help.

the issue is that OS X and Windows are multitasking operating systems, not real-time operating systems. this means that there is never any certainty that even a high priority process will get the resources it needs. high priority is nothing more than a big hint to the operating system; it doesn't come with guarantees.

a common cause of glitches is other processes (often hardware drivers) interrupting the system for too long. this is what the various DPC latency checker utilities on Windows are used to diagnose.

gusc wrote:Does the "disk spindown" really affect Flash SSD?

No. SSDs don't spin.


+ bump
*bookmark*

gusc wrote:and there is an unresponsive Ableton Index process.

Why is the Ableton Indexer shown as "Not Responding" in the Activity Monitor of Mac OS X 10.9 "Mavericks"? | Ableton

Not really happy with the link to all the Terminal commands - dude doesn't even mention how to re-enable stuff…

steko wrote:

gusc wrote:and there is an unresponsive Ableton Index process.

Why is the Ableton Indexer shown as "Not Responding" in the Activity Monitor of Mac OS X 10.9 "Mavericks"? | Ableton

Not really happy with the link to all the Terminal commands - dude doesn't even mention how to re-enable stuff…

almost everything turned off by those Terminal commands can be turned back on through the System Preferences though. and if you aren't comfortable with Terminal most of that stuff can be done without Terminal. it's just neater and easier to be able to prep a machine before a show by running a list of Terminal commands.

Sure it's cool - just worried about noobs messing around...

So I monitored my set with Acitivity Monitor and it shows that Live is using 45% CPU (not 12% as Live reports itself) and coreaudiod uses 3%, but overall CPU load is just 30%. It looks quite normal for me, or am I wrong?

Could this be what fishmonkey said, that the audio interface driver is interrupting the system for too long? Could this be a driver related problem?

gusc wrote:So I monitored my set with Acitivity Monitor and it shows that Live is using 45% CPU (not 12% as Live reports itself) and coreaudiod uses 3%, but overall CPU load is just 30%. It looks quite normal for me, or am I wrong?

Could this be what fishmonkey said, that the audio interface driver is interrupting the system for too long? Could this be a driver related problem?

Yes, IMO trusted audio cards are:
MOTU
RME
Prosonus
Focusrite
Avalon


Echo, Tascam M-Audio etc. are hit and miss.
BTW http://echoaudio.com is about the biggest steaming pile of shit of a website I've seen in a while.
If it's any indication of how they write their drivers I would sell the card to someone you hate.

i wouldn't say Motus are trusted audio cards, since they admitted having unsolved problems regarding glitches on Mavericks. i Still didn't test on Yosemite to check if it's solved, as i've been told by them.

Machinesworking wrote: Echo, Tascam M-Audio etc. are hit and miss.
BTW http://echoaudio.com is about the biggest steaming pile of shit of a website I've seen in a while.
If it's any indication of how they write their drivers I would sell the card to someone you hate.

The sad thing is that Echo was the best budget card and drivers I owned while using Windows (compared to shitty M-Audio and Edirol drivers).
Now I'll have to sell my Echo and my liver to get RME - which, to be honest, I've wanted for years