Ableton Forum

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 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).

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..

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.

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

Don't blame OS X for Alesis's crappy drivers.