Logic Pro Help

Since upgrading, the day of a gig [1] to both MainStage 3.5 and Catalina, I find that when I use MS's native Record function, I now have many audio drop-outs in the recording of complex Concerts where previously I had none. Same Concerts, same computer, same lack of external CPU load. The interesting thing is that if instead of using the native Record function I use AudioHijack to grab and save the output, it has no dropouts whatsoever.

To me this points the finger squarely at MainStage. If it were an I/O issue it would affect Audio Hijack too. If it were a CPU issue ditto. It seems prima facie to me that MainStage has gotten less efficient at writing to disk for no apparent reason. Is anyone else seeing this or anything similar?

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017), 48 GB RAM, i5, 1TB SSD
MainStage 3.5 Max CPU 160% (100% == 1 core, and the i5 has 4)
Apple and Arturia AUs.

Here is a SC example: https://soundcloud.com/simon-pride/vem6-desktop-2020-11-20-221408/s-1RQeK1joGjm
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[1] I had reasons, trust me

I experience the same behaviour. Seems not to be related to Catalina but to be a bug in 3.5. A test with 3.4.2 and 3.4.4 under Catalina went without issues.

Woah yes! I was just coming to this forum to post this exact same issue in 3.5... Small recording drop outs in the internal recording which are not present in Audio Hijack recordings. My setup is quite complex, but I run at about 40% CPU and haven't had this problem before.

The gaps can been seen in the attached waveform.

I submitted a bug report to Apple

Is there a place where I can download Mainstage 3.4.4?

Not unless you want to find a cracked copy. Do you have a backup of your system or versions of MainStage?

In moving forward, I strongly recommend that you back up each MainStage update on an external drive.

Yea luckily I had a time machine backup.

Count Dooku wrote:

Yea luckily I had a time machine backup.

Nice! Good to hear that things worked out for you!

I considered it too but as long as I have a workaround with Audio Hijack I am not in a hurry to downgrade. Are we sure any Concerts created in 3.5 will load in 3.4.4?

I believe i saved my patch that was created in 3.4 in 3.5, then was able to open it in 3.4. But not 100%. Sampler doesn’t exist in 3.4 that’s for sure. Although all my esx24 instruments that opened as Sampler instruments in 3.5 still worked back as esx24 instruments in 3.4.

Good to know.

It's also good to see MainStage getting some TLC and attention from Apple after a long span of what felt like stagnation.

I've just seen that 3.5.1 is out. Upgraded and tested again. No more glitches but now the recording is only mono

Thanks for the heads up.

Who tests this stuff?

I too am on 3.5.1 and I confirm it's now mono and I am still hearing (and seeing, when viewing the waveform in Adobe Audition) dropouts. Worst of both worlds.

Did you submit a bug report?

And it seems to be consistently about 23ms

I'm still getting issues recording in 3.5. Anyone else?

I’ve seen numerous reports on Apple’s MainStage forum about these dropout and mono recording bugs.

Count Dooku wrote:

I'm still getting issues recording in 3.5. Anyone else?

Oh, yes. Nothing's changed.