Cracks and pops on Mac

pbajzek · Post by **pbajzek** » Fri Dec 30, 2005 6:41 pm

I am not having the severe audio droupouts and crackling reported by many, but I do have occasional crackle problems in Live 5, on my iMac G5 and my G4 PowerBook. Also I have a very serious problem with MIDI controllers causing insane noise in Guitar Rig 2 plugged into Live, which may be related for all I know. So in the interest of community I'm trying the Activity monitor thing. However, I am not sure what I'm supposed to be reporting.

I can see that my Presonus Firebox causes significantly more CPU activity than "no Firewire device" plugged in, and seems to have periodic spikes at regular intervals. Whn I replace the Firebox with my M-Audio Ozonic, Results appear to be about the same, maybe slightly more activity between spikes. But this is very hard to quantify as I'm simply looking at the animated graph.

If there's some more specific reading I can take, please let me know as I would like to be helpful.

henry ford · Post by **henry ford** » Fri Dec 30, 2005 11:09 pm

LOFA wrote: Meanwhile, Henry Ford, brother... Please chill-out! You are a newer name to this forum (from what I can tell) and your lack of patience, in comparison with that of countless others who have experienced very reasonable errors over the several, courteous, might I add, free bug fixes is a little extreme (IMO.)

While I completely understand where you are coming from, and on several occaision have muttered the exact words to myself, how can you ever expect to go to camp Ableton if you curse out Alex?

Hey lofa, I am relatively chilled out - but you have to understand something. well , let me explain. I produce like this: i sit infront of my midi keyboard , with some faderfox lv1s and an lx1 on the keyboard. I tap the pseudo ivories and build on and over each clip. That was the first thing that was wrong with live 5 when i got it , it more often than not saved the each clip a few notes short of the bar. Thus i had to save a longer clip , and re-edit it down to the bar. That was a drag , that was summer , and that meant i was leaning over my equipment all the time and giving myself shoulder ache , aswell as earache and headache. i was plenty patient then , but then....it was summer time and the birds were singing. i waited a long time for a solution , and bit my lip when phrases like 'it works fine on our machines' were being bandied about. then i noticed the midi was off , and now its pitch black outside its freezing , and 5.03 is adding awful noise to my sets. and now phrases like 'well on maudios website it says...' are being bandied about...... i just want what i paid for , its supposed to operate on this soundcard , through this connection , on this OS. and the pops and clicks only appeared since 5.03 on my system. and do not seem to be caused by cpu spikes , as the noise is ongoing and reoccuring on tiny sets , at the same points each time.... its highly frustrating and i havent made anything worthwhile with live in months now (luckily ive had other things to do) .

im tired of excuses , and i dont want to be at that camp if its just full of sychophants

oh , and im also annoyed with the magazines which gave live 5 a seriously premature glowing review. honestly , live 10 will be getting glowing reviews , based on the revolutionary concept of live 1. no matter how unusable it can be on a plethora of peoples setups. Plus , why on earth is live being promoted with maudio if , apparently , maudio is the problem. And why are the ableton programmers discovering these problems as we , the paying public discover them ? i dont expect to be treated with such contempt when im buying a soundcard , and a sequencer - who promote one another and we are to accept that they dont so much as test out theyre compatability before going to market ?

and on another note , i think you are confusing bug fixes with updates. you are MORE than entitled to as many bugfixes as it takes to have your product function as it says on the label , im not ungrateful for free updates if its adding new functionality , but im not about to say thanks 6 months on , for 3 bugfixes which still havent satisfied me. and others. and i just want it to work as it was sold to me. go take the live5 tour. go read the reviews from the summer time. when live5 works with annoying the shit out of me , i can post some helpful stuff. im tired of beta testing

oh , and i dont believe i cursed out alex...

supster · Post by **supster** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 12:46 am

henry ford wrote: why on earth is live being promoted with maudio if , apparently , maudio is the problem.

actually i dont recall anyone ever saying - for sure - that m-audio gear or drivers are "the problem" with the cpu spikes and glitching noises in general

personally, i did post a quick comment that, "if" it turns out to be a problem with m-audio gear, then it might be problematic to get a public admission of that fact from ableton or m-audio .. until they straightened it out and did whatever fixes were necessary.

but - for sure its not just happening with m-audio stuff and if it is it doesnt look like thats the only factor by a long shot. figured id clear that up just in case (in case .. ) some people picked up on what i wrote and ran with it

that wasnt my intention ...
.

henry ford · Post by **henry ford** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 12:57 am

ya , sorry...probably not just an maudio prob. but theres alot of maudio peeps feelin it. and dom made a footnote about the problem , putting it down to firewire interfaces

LOFA · Post by **LOFA** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 5:19 am

henry ford wrote:oh , and i dont believe i cursed out alex...

Wierd. I thought I remmembered you cursing... god I'm such an assh*le sometimes. I'm really sorry about that. Meanwhile, I just thought I would let you know that not only am I jealous of your faderfoxes, but I really feel your pain.

In many ways I wanted to share my appreciation for your being so direct about this problem but I felt it would not be very sychophantic of me. No really! I mean it!

So... it sucks that our software does not enable us to do what we each paid a lot of money for it to do.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna follow that other chap's initiative and do some testing, albeit without an effective baseline or objectives.

All the best, Lofa

EcHo2K · Post by **EcHo2K** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 11:40 am

Hi guys, my first post

i don't have Live5, just Live4 that came with my trigger finger, but i was planning to upgrade, i haven't experienced any clics or pop in about 4 months of using the program except when cpu went over 80% (i'm on an iBook G4 933 with 384MB of ram and OSX 10.4.3) i only used the internal interface, no clicks also with Live5 demo, and for test purposes, no clicks with the cracked one.

what i wanted to suggest is to try to "renice" the live process. OSX is basically a BSD unix, on unix you have an utility called nice to change the priority of a running process, lower numbers higher priority, higher number lower priority, so using the terminal you can try to do something like that:

Code: Select all

EcHo2K:~ EcHo2K$ ps aux | grep Live
EcHo2K    4471   3.4 13.4   219312  52760  ??  S    12:32PM   0:17.49 /Applications/Live 5.0.1 OS X/Live 5.0.1.app/Contents/MacOS/Live -psn_0_31064065
EcHo2K    4478   0.0  0.1    27344    344  p1  R+   12:33PM   0:00.01 grep Live

now we know the PID of Live, it's 4471 (of course it's different each time you run the program, so you have to find out it every time)

now we can try to renice the app and see if it works:

Code: Select all

EcHo2K:~ EcHo2K$ sudo renice -10 4471
Password:
EcHo2K:~ EcHo2K$

i've set the nice priority to -10 for the live process so that it can have more slices of the cpu time.

Please try this old skool unix trick and let me know if it works

it solved some problems with audio on Linux in the days when ALSA wasn't available and the CPU scheduler wasn't realtime, of course you can use lowest number than -10 but if live already hase the lowes number, it'a lready the program with more cpu time

henry ford · Post by **henry ford** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 12:03 am

heres a link to a petition some irate final scratch users have started...

can anyone see the paralells ?

http://www.petitiononline.com/PCMACXP/petition.html

unusable · Post by **unusable** » Wed Jan 04, 2006 10:21 pm

it looks like a rant to me, and definitely not something I would consider official (nor would I sign me name to it).

I also love that if you click on the author "the undersigned", you open a new window that shows 123 signatures AND Final Scratch Ads

Cracks and pops on Mac

re-nice