1 Topic by pschuegr (edited by pschuegr 2022-09-04 17:58:38)

  • Registered: 2012-06-15
  • Posts: 42

Topic: Strange stuttering issues with RME [UCX II, Babyface Pro], M1 Macbook

I have been noticing a strange issue recently which thus far only materializes on my RME interfaces.  Bitwig (where I see it the most) records CPU usage spikes and the transport runs inconsistently (fast, stop, fast, stop) which I have never seen before on a DAW.  I call it stuttering because of this but from an audio perspective there is no sound while this is happening. 

I had thought this was a Bitwig issue but I have also seen the behavior when using the OS preview to play sound files, so possibly not.  There does not seem to be a correlation with the load on the machine, since it happens frequently when not much is going on.  My best theory is that somehow the audio driver is getting starved for CPU time by another application or driver, but this is a wild guess and does not explain exactly how the transport is being affected.

Here is an example video:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i299el … dQIrj/view

If anybody has any suggestions on how to debug this or figure out what might be causing the CPU spiking, I would appreciate it.

Thank you

__
Macbook Pro (M1 Max)
Monterey 12.4
Latest RME drivers and flash updates as of September 4 2022.

  • Registered: 2012-06-15
  • Posts: 42

Re: Strange stuttering issues with RME [UCX II, Babyface Pro], M1 Macbook

Some more information on this:

1) it seems to be briefly resolved by restarting coreaudiod although I'm not sure that says very much, it's your basic "turn it off and on again"
2) I have noticed in the MacOS error console that the Bitwig is producing a lot of wakeups:

"45001 wakeups over the last 249 seconds (181 wakeups per second average), exceeding limit of 150 wakeups per second over 300 seconds"

I don't know what that means, honestly.  I've reached out to Bitwig as well but nothing they've suggested has helped. 

There are pages and pages of people with audio stuttering issues on the M1 machines, but it's really hard to tell whether they're the same problem or not.  Stuttering is like the headache or cough of the DAW world.

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/132423?page=7
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/677383?page=2