I have been trying for weeks, but I cannot find a procedure to reproduce this error. I seems to strike at random out of the blue:
I work with a pair of Macs, running OSX 6.8
I use the Zoom R16 in Audio Interface mode. It is bundled together with the Mac's main audio output and Soundflower into an aggregate device.
Live Input goes through the Zoom - output is via Line Out (on the Mac Pro) or Headphones output (on the Laptop, plugged into an amp).
Occasionally, one of three corruptions happens:
1) The output signal crackles badly and it sounds distorted
2) The output signal crackles badly, sounds distorted and is delayed by about half a second
3) The output signal sounds fine at first, but there is a crackling and distorted echo with a delay of about half a second.
First, it only seemed to happen at the beginning of a session, when I launch AM. Seeing that I can fix it easily and reliably by momentarily disabling audio processing in AM, I was going to live with it. Yesterday, though, just once, it happened out of the blue while I was playing, and now I am concerned. Does anybody know, or can anybody here make a good guess, what the trigger for this may be?
If your concern is with stability then the number one thing to do is to remove Soundflower from the equation. It was never intended for serious use... the author once told me it was just a hack to get sound from iTunes in to max.msp. nothing more.
I recommend that you use JACK: http://www.jackosx.com/
Overall the best (and recommended) way to get stable audio out of AudioMulch is to use a single pro-grade audio interface. Using separate devices for input and output is asking for trouble (I think I mentioned this before).
You are trying to use a very complicated and (excuse me) hackneyed set up. You have a lot of moving parts. It does not surprise me that you are running in to these kind of problems. You may need to accept that there is a trade-off between stability and doing what you're trying to do in the way that you're doing it.
Of course if you can reproduce the problem then I will be happy to investigate things within AudioMulch, but at this stage it sounds to me like a Soundflower or maybe device aggregation issue.
thank you, Ross, it seems I'll need to make some changes I had already planned sooner rather than later.
Currently I produce on a Mac Pro and perform on an MBP. Since there are slight differences between my two Macs in the way the Audio and MIDI Hardware setup works, I want to migrate all the production work to my Laptop, anyway, so I'll have a single setup which never changes.
Then, I should be able to use a single device for both input and output without affecting my current main workstation setup (which is designed and positioned to work around my physical disability and cannot be easily changed).
I'll try Jack - thank you for the heads-up. It looks quite complicated, though, considering the simple tasks I need it for…
I'll keep you posted on the progress. It won't be for a while. I need to get a large monitor and fast external HD for the Laptop first - which was the plan for later in the year, anyway
Hi again. Would you please be able to clarify whether this "output crackling" issue occurs on both of your computers? Thanks.
sorry, I missed the post.
Yes, it occurs on both my computers, but only _very_ occasionally, and disabling. then immediately enabling audio again _always_ fixes it. I have only noticed it happening twice at times other than initial launch, and I cannot say for certain whether it actually was the latest version. It has been a while ago.