Scratchy noises when recording/playing back

I've been having some issues lately when trying to use Logic Pro X. On playback and recording I'm getting a scratchy popping glitchy noise. I have been doing some research on this and trying out what past users have suggested, but the only thing that's stopping it is bumping the buffer size up to 1024. This is fine for playing back, but too laggy for recording. My computer is a bit long in the tooth at this point...not a ton of storage left and it can't hold a battery charge for more than a couple minutes, but I am using it plugged in and I have 12.39 GB free. I also only have 4 MIDI tracks on this song, all pretty basic piano sounds from Arturia with no additional effects. The problem persists even when I mute 2 tracks. I've also tried restarting and running Logic with no other programs.

Does anyone have any other recommendations? I'm not sure why this is eating up so much CPU.

Macbook Air, Mojave 10.14.4 (1.6 GHz Intel Core i5, 4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3)

Logic Pro X version 10.4.7 (just updated to this yesterday, haven't had the issue on this computer before that)

I have 12.39 GB free.

That could be your issue right there. Make some room on your drive or invest in an external hard drive.

Or, to double-check first, click the triangle on the right side of the LCD Display and choose Custom, then double-click the CPU meter to open the CPU/HD window, and see if the Audio or the Disk meters are running high?

I have 12.39 GB free.

That could be your issue right there. Make some room on your drive or invest in an external hard drive.

 

Or, to double-check first, click the triangle on the right side of the LCD Display and choose Custom, then double-click the CPU meter to open the CPU/HD window, and see if the Audio or the Disk meters are running high?

The CPU bar is generally jumping around the vicinity of 1/2 to 2/3, with the occasional spike up to full if I'm on a lower buffer speed. The HD bar underneath doesn't seem to do anything. I'm not sure what that bar even indicates though, just my hard drive usage?

I realize 12 GB isn't a lot, but I would have expected it to be enough to work with given that the project file itself is less than 4 MB...I guess not. How much free space should I be shooting for?

How much free space should I be shooting for?

For any system HD to be working without straining, around 20% free space.

With SSDs you could stretch it to 10%, but not a good idea anyway.

I realize 12 GB isn't a lot, but I would have expected it to be enough to work with given that the project file itself is less than 4 MB...I guess not. How much free space should I be shooting for?

Unfortunately it's not that simple, and hard drives need a lot of extra space for MacOS to page RAM in and out.

Thanks for the answers folks, I’ll see what I can reasonably move over to my external HD.

One last question: is there any downside to moving the midi sounds I’m using to the external HD? Not Logic itself, just some of my patches. I’d prefer to keep them on the computer’s HD, but I’m not sure what else I’ve got that I’ll be able to move.

is there any downside to moving the midi sounds I’m using to the external HD?

I would only do it from the settings of the actual 3rd party plugin. Don't move it manually.

How big is your laptop drive?

How big is your laptop drive?

250 GB. I'm looking right now into what I've got on here that's taking up so much damn space. Probably have a lot of applications I no longer use.

Thanks again, everyone.

is there any downside to moving the midi sounds I’m using to the external HD? Not Logic itself, just some of my patches. I’d prefer to keep them on the computer’s HD, but I’m not sure what else I’ve got that I’ll be able to move.

Short answer: no.

Alright, I'm stumped. I've relocated Logic's sound library over to an external hard drive, deleted Apple Loops (which I've never used), and moved 20GB worth of pictures onto an external hard drive as well. I am now sitting at 130GB of free space on my computer (out of 250).

After doing all this, Logic would not open—every time I launched, it would quickly revert to "not responding" mode and I'd have to force quit. I restarted my computer and finally got it to launch, but the glitchy sounds are still happening on playback. There has been no change whatsoever.

Any other tips?

I don't use monitors, but I've tried it with headphones plugged in directly to the computer (and my interface not connected at all), and also just through the computer's speakers, and it's the same issue.

Like I mentioned, my laptop does have other issues, like a virtually nonexistent battery, so it's not unreasonable for me to start looking at new ones...but it would be nice if I could figure out what's going on here before I jump on that option.

When I bounce the glitchy sounds don't show up. I don't have any other way to record other than with my phone, and I don't think you'd be able to hear what's going on very clearly if I did that, as they are fairly subtle. It sounds like a very light crackling on certain notes, but it's not tied to any particular areas of the song—I could play the same portion back to back and it might not happen in the same spot both times. It also doesn't appear to happen when Logic is working the CPU hardest, at least based on the CPU meter.

Something seems to have gone screwy since I did the update and/or moved the sound library to free up HD space...Logic is taking about a minute and a half to boot up each time now (used to be about 10 seconds), it took way longer than normal to bounce, and I'm getting the spinning colour wheel for just about everything I try do in there.