I just went to 512 to test if the problem was effected by sample size as RME asked, but for me 128 or higher has noticeable latency with headphones on and makes the UC useful only for playback and dry recording/monitoring, if this is all I wanted to do I would have had the option of LOTS of other interfaces for less money.

I bought it to use live to make my MBP an effects unit to get me OUT of the studio and bring studio production to a live environment.

512 is not 512. Other interface usually using a big hidden safety buffer which adds more latency. Only a roundtrip test shows the real latency.

Anyway we have countless UC users using it with lower latencies. I can use RME USB interfaces on my iMac 27 and Macbook Pro 17 in Logic with 32 samples. What do use for a Macbook?

best regards
Knut

The current RME USB/FireWire technology uses very small hidden safety buffers. Others use very big hidden buffers to give the same or lower buffer settings, but these safety buffers let users compare different things and result in postings like yours about the Pro quality of RME interfaces.

I think this is a sign that your notebook configuration caused the problems or is simply on the limit. The UC did not change, if it was possible to run stable with 64 it´s not to blame. Even your live setup with 128 samples and only two glitches in 4 hours is a phantastic value for an USB interface with such a small safety buffer. It would be good to look for the source of the dropouts in the Macbook configuration (console protocol?).

This is a late 2010 Macbook Pro 17 with i7 and SSD.

best regards
Knut

What software?

Try to get rid of CPU Speedstep: Download the Coolbook trial and turn the CPU load slider to 9 or 10. Does it help?

Turn off Wifi and Bluetooth and plug off any USB card readers.

Im using ableton

I will try this out but it makes my cpu/fans go mental which is less than ideal for audio

Just to add to the info, Coolbook is not compatible with the i5/i7 Macbook pros.

So far I have not yet achieved stable results for live performance over the past year of testing with multiple audio interfaces (currently Fireface UC)  with my Macbook pro i7 17" (mid2010). It does work great for recording using direct monitoring with Totalmix because I can turn the buffer up to 512-1024 samples.

I did install xCode and installed the processor preference pane so I could disable my 2nd CPU and hyperthreading. I still had audio glitches.

I just re-read the coolbook website and now I understand that it is just the undervolting that is not possible. I will try that out but before I do that....

I am very temped to try out windows 7 through bootcamp. What does forced realtime priority mean? Would it be easy for to share a few links to resources so I can test this out and setup my Windows 7 properly for realtime priority? It'll take a lot work since after setting this up then I'll have to emulate my Mainstage live setup within Ableton Live (and making use of different plug-ins on the PC side of things) but I am willing to try anything at this point to get stable live performance out of my macbook pro.

Thank you for the help Timur,

Todd

Alright, alright, I guess I'll start digging I just know when I used to use windows xp, probably at least 6 years ago, I used to tweak the hell out of it and I figure I should gather all the data before I uninstall and reinstall my win7 license on my macbook pro.

Wish me luck.

Bad luck already Boot camp won't allow me to partition the drive. It says files can't be moved and that I need to back-up the drive, reformat it extended and journaled (It is already) , reload the data onto the drive, and then try again. This is could be an all-nighter

So after more testing Boot camp assistant will NOT create a partition that can be seen when the computer is restarted to install Windows. Seems it is not creating a proper partition because the circle with the diagonal line through it supposed to me there is a file or folder missing that keeps it from booting. Could this be because I am using an external DVD drive? I installed a second SSD in my macbook pro awhile back in place of the dvd drive. I guess I will switch them back out now to see if there is any difference.

Man, I hope thee is a pot of gold at the end of this tunnel

I've got Ableton setup, and all my plug-ins.

I've switched the graphics driver to standard vga, diabled ACPI battery driver, disabled wlan driver

I set Ableton to realtime priority.

One thing I'm not clear on though is do you still need to kill bootcamp.exe for low latency audio?

I just got done rehearsing my set at 64 samples with the Fireface UC with no audio glitches!!! I'm using dummies clips in Live to emulate effects patch changes that I was using in Mainstage. So far it's a pretty close setup to exactly what I was doing on the Apple side of the fence. I hope I'm not jinxing myself talking about it. If this low latency performance continues I will cry tears of joy.

Thanks so much for all these tips Timur, especially the Live/PC suggestion!

-Todd

Ok, I'll it set to Normal priority to see how it fares.

I'm downloading the power profile now. It looks great as a way to disable speedstepping and turbo boost since when don't have bios options to tinker with on our bootcamped macs.

I'm a little confused now on the state of the 2010 macbook pros i7's. The new MBP 2011's are actually quad core i7 but I have the 2010 i7 which is only dual core. Does that mean it's a dual core, has the 'features' of a quad core i7 with the speed-stepping, turbo-mode, etc. , but is not a core2duo?

My Nvidia chip is the GT 330M so I guess I'll just wait and hope they come out with better drivers. The standard vga is not so bad at 1280x1024 resolution.

For anybody that tries the Power profile from Presonus: Make sure to extract the files first before running the script or the profile won't show up under Power Options.

If it helps, Im currently running Ableton Live as a send FX processor for a DJM-800 via either a NI Audio 8 DJ or my RME UFX. The UFX has the obvious benefit I can run it much lower latency.

I recently took the plunge and bought the new 2011 MBP17 with 2.3Ghz CPU and immediately noticed that Ableton Live 8 seems to like it rather more than the original i7 thats in my PC. Now part of this cold be that Live (and most of my plugins) simply runs better on OSX 1.6.x than Win7/64, however I doubt that the OS is significant as most processing goes on in DSP code of plugins. Anyway, my new MBP is very respectably holding its own vs a bloomfield i7/930 that has been overclocked to allways run at 4GHz and the PC machine has 1600Mhz memory vs the 1333Mhz memory in the new MBP.

Being a bit puzzled by all this (ie wondering if there was something wrong with my PC) I end up running geekbench on both systems and confirmed that the floating point performance of the 2.3Ghz sandy bridge is in fact noticeably better then my overclocked bloomfield quad core i7.

Certainly everything I have seen so far with this new MBP suggest that these new processors are significantly better for audio processing compared to the previous dual i7 core MBPs.

Yes - the thing gets hot (fans will rev up when running a project with alot of tracks, but thats to be expected when overall CPU use as measured in activity monitor is at 70% or so), no it doesnt freeze or do anything horrible, in fact I have never know ableton Live 8 work as reliably as it has since we have been using the MBP. It also seems to be able to run a 64 track version of the live performance test project at 64 samples (most computers would struggle to run that at any latency) - just left it running for about 30 minutes and all the times we turned it up to check it out - was glitch free.

Nothing special done with the MBP - airport was still active, project running of an external FW800 drive, an external monitor connected (which forces the descrete GPU to be used, which Live also seems to like - gaining about 4-5% cpu uses reduction when the descrete GPU is active).

I dont have a RME UC, instead I have an RME UFX connected to my PC via firewire and to my MBP via USB2 (so I would guess its similar) - if its helpful, happy to run some specific perf tests for you - Have Logic 9, Cubase 6 and Live 8 suite available.

Which express card are you using and if for HDs which HDs?

I have had a few wierd issues with an OWC slim and my 750GB WD scorpio black drive when I was cloning the internal drive (over 400GB of files - Ugh!). Had to use a different esata (sonnet tempo, but cant boot from that) card to do the clone. Anyway - finally got it cloned and installed and got windows 7/64 up and running on the MBP at last - have to say - I dont think Ive seem win7 happier and/or cleaner on a laptop - by far the least OEM junk driver ridden laptop Ive ever installed to get the full hardware functionality available.

The external FW800 I use is nothing special performance wise - just a 640GB WD Passport (one with the LCD on it), so wont aid my performance tests above - wouldnt anyway as the audio files the test project uses are tiny anyway.

I think the perf difference is entirely down to having 4 real FP cores and each core having hugely improved FP performance and a larger cache on this CPU, maybe better memory perf as well.

sorry, i missed this question, can u explain how I do this?

Using both screens.

I will test that out as well. That would be an easy fix to our audio glitches but I bet that it's too good to be true. I had already tried turning off Automatic graphics switches in Systems Prefs.

Out of curiosity what is your goal buffer size? 128 samples? That's what I've setting as my limit because I don't like playing with a delay higher than that.

Thanks for sharing the info. What crazy is when I started getting the strange sounding audio glitches with the IOStream errors my CPU in Mainstage would show 30% as the highest ever.  Yet I would still get these buffer errors. Maybe the Mainstage meter isn't accurate. Although, I have had it happens the first time hit play to record in Ableton Live for only a couple tracks of playback. We are talking next to no CPU usage in this instance.

I'm using the same plugs now for my live setup in Win7 bootcamped and I'm not getting them. I'm using the same hardware so I think it has to be some type of background process or something that happens at rare intervals in OSX to interrupt the audio. If it was my cpu and the plug-ins I'm using then I should get the same errors in Win7 and I don't. 

With this new setup and setlist I got my first show on Wednesday. I feel so much better that I at least have a workaround with windows for now.

So, just using Live with OS X results in the use of the discreet GPU & the small improvement?

This is exactly what Lives does: the GUI slows way down as the app is stressed.

Question:

What info can you share about the following Console error message?
IOAudioStream - Error: attempting to clip to a position more than one buffer ahead of last clip position

These occur whenever a dropout happens. And, to clarify, the problem I have is that I am getting ONE highly noticeable dropout per session, rather than multiple glitches.

Thanks

Hmm, I tried sooperlooper within ableton but it just didnt seem to quite work for me, it wasnt keen on understanding my midi messages and I wondered how well it was going to sync with my loops in ableton even if it did, the forum for it is all but totally dead too. Im interested in finding something better than abletons looper though as it just bounces the layers together so you can only undo the last step which is so lame.

so are you able to run at 64 samples in win7 stably?

is the round trip time longer than within OSX?

@oblique strategies:

Does this happen immediately after powering on/starting the application, or only after a few minutes? I am wondering if perhaps your machine is getting too hot in OSX. In theory on a macbook pro the EFI (apple equivalent of BIOS) takes care of active cooling management regardles of the OS, but I have noticed that cooling management under windows 7/64 seems a better and I think apple have a tendency to be a little too relaxed about when they crank the fans up to deal with CPU temperature rises due to load, or it could be the way that OSX tends to micro-manage power use that simply confuses things slightly whereas windows might micromange the power use a bit less.

I would suggest you try an SMC and NVRAM reset (search apple support for the proceedure for your specific macbook pro - probably same procedure as mine, but cant remember it off hand). How old is you machine? Is it likely the fans and intakes are getting dusty? If it has been used on stage and in clubs alot, then consider that smoke machines and hazers etc tend to leave a slightly sticky residue on everything which tends to trap dust in the air significantly reducing the effectiveness of fans and heatsinks etc.

Just a thought...