• Registered: 2013-05-02
  • Posts: 4

Topic: FF400 audio dropouts in Mountain Lion 10.8.3

Hi guys here's a weird one for you.

I have partitioned my drive and run 2 separate OS. Snow Leopard 10.6.8 on one and Mountain Lion 10.8.3 on the other.
I run Logic 9.1.8 in 32bit on both partitions.
The FF400 works absolutely fine with Snow Leopard. Driver 3.0.6 firmware 1.71

On the other hand I get audio drop outs when I'm in Mountain Lion 10.8.3.
I noticed them while recording with my bandmates, the dropouts affect all tracks being recorded and are clearly audible and visible on the wave form.

The intervals are regular and each drop out occurs every min then 2mins then back to every min.
I was running Driver 3.14 with firmware 1.71, so downgraded back to Driver 3.06 to see if it'd fix the problem and I still have the same issue.

To test the dropouts I set up a project to simply run a test oscillator in Logic through FF400 output 3&4 and record it back into input 1&2.

I use the exact same project in both OS so I can't understand why there are dropouts in one and not the other.

To run the test I disconnected every other external drives/interfaces using USB and/or Firewire.

Please Help...

MacPro 3,1 2 x 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
RAM 6GB
Graphics ATI Radeon HD2600XT
RME FF400
Logic 9.1.8

2 Reply by MC

  • MC
  • MC
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  • From: Germany/Thailand
  • Registered: 2007-04-06
  • Posts: 24,861

Re: FF400 audio dropouts in Mountain Lion 10.8.3

The usual stuff...network, wireless...

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

MC's Website

  • Registered: 2013-05-02
  • Posts: 4

Re: FF400 audio dropouts in Mountain Lion 10.8.3

Hi Matthias,

Thank you for your reply,

my wireless is always off but what did you mean by network? Should disable my network connection?

Thank you.

4 Reply by MC

  • MC
  • MC
  • Administrator
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  • From: Germany/Thailand
  • Registered: 2007-04-06
  • Posts: 24,861

Re: FF400 audio dropouts in Mountain Lion 10.8.3

Start the Activity monitor and see if any thread raises its ugly head in the time intervals that you noticed.

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

MC's Website

  • Registered: 2013-05-02
  • Posts: 4

Re: FF400 audio dropouts in Mountain Lion 10.8.3

There is a mds thread that keeps appearing and jumps to 100% CPU processing when I hear the audio drops...
It looks like it's the spotlight indexing function might be causing the problem, I'm gonna investigate and report back.

6 Reply by chieflogic (edited by chieflogic 2013-05-02 15:02:09)

  • Registered: 2013-05-02
  • Posts: 4

Re: FF400 audio dropouts in Mountain Lion 10.8.3

SOLVED!!!!

Thanks Matthias!

The mds process was the culprit, had to go to System Preferences/Spotlight/Privacy and ad all my drives to prevent Spotlight from indexing while I am recording with Logic (Full descritpion here). It's a bit of a pain really but if it solves the problem then I'm happy enough.
If you happen to have a better solution that would let me index and record at the same time please let me know.