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Recording dropouts with 3.5 (maybe plus Catalina)?


spride
Go to solution Solved by Count Dooku,

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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: [soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/simon-pride/vem6-desktop-2020-11-20-221408/s-1RQeK1joGjm[/soundcloud]

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[1] I had reasons, trust me

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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

27323815_ScreenShot2020-11-30at8_20_16PM.thumb.png.12db0036fb7edc5ab5f9056081206a62.png

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There are some great improvements in 3.5.2 (including CPU cycles being released a LOT sooner when switching between patches/different plugins) BUT I had a full machine lockup caused by MainStage in my first gig using 3.5.2. I’d spent about a week testing it upon release and felt comfortable using it at a gig; in the third song, my machine completely locked up and the screen started displaying really weird artifacts and eventually went completely bright red. I had to reboot and then used 3.4.4 for the rest of the gig.

 

I submitted a bug report and the Apple engineer replied to ask for more system diagnostic data. The lockup was apparently caused by something related to Metal but whether it was MS itself or a plugin is unknown. Regardless, I won’t be using 3.5.2 again.

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