Hi everyone, I am a hobbyist music producer and have been working with Logic since 2 or 3 years, solely using virtual instruments. Thanks to Covid and being tired of hanging in front of a screen the whole day, I wanted to try a more traditional way of music making and built a small hardware setup for my production. My gear currently contains of four synths, and two drum machines - so nothing too fancy. My plan was to record the tracks from my Roland MX-1 audio interface into Logic and then do the post processing and mastering there. So far so good.
Now generally everything seems to work like a charm, but I have a very strange problem when recording multiple tracks (about 10 Tracks: 5 Mono / 5 Stereo). Within random intervals - usually somewhen between 30 seconds and 5 minutes - my recording is interrupted and a dialog pops up saying that my disk is too slow. I then found the advice in the official Logic Pro docs saying that one should not record to the system drive. Being a battle-tested Apple user I immediately decided to fix the problem by "throwing money at it" and bought an external SSD (Intenso Professional, 500GB). I moved the project files and anything I could find to the SSD drive and tried again. Same problem. (I'll skip the part where I read through the entire internet, checked dozens of forum posts and the Logic Pro docs for like 3 weeks and tested any sane combination of settings).
Then I had the idea to set up Garage Band and try to record from there, which turned out to have the same issue. I then tested the recording on my work computer (2018 MBP, i7) but I ran into the same problem. My next suspect was the audio interface and its driver so I decided to download Ableton Live and try the same recording there - because if the interface was the problem it should fail in Ableton Live, too. But in Ableton everything is working without any issues. I can record 10 and more tracks for an hour without any interruption, even while browsing the internet and having other apps open simultaneously.
Which then brought me back to my system setup. I am working as a software developer so my natural reaction was to debug the issue with the usual tools (dtrace etc), which turned out to be quite difficult because of SIP on macOS. But the good old activity monitor showed some suspicious reads exactly at that moment when my recording stops. I thought it might have to do with Spotlight and disabled it, but it didn’t change anything. I also used the Instruments app from XCode to debug the file activities, but I am not too used to it and it appeared as if Logic itself was causing the reads. I deactived and uninstalled anything else I can think of, but the problem remains.
Long story short: I am totally out of ideas and I seriously don't want to switch to Ableton because I totally enjoy working with Logic Pro. That's why I finally gave up and came here to ask you smart people for help (after lurking around here for years ) ... any ideas what I could try next? I am thankful for any hint.
Thanks in advance and sorry for the long post,
Rico