5 replies to this topic

[malfunct]

I've built this hackintosh box for audio production purposes, mainly.

I've been having audio stuttering/crackling problems on 10.7.2.

This happens in DAW's and audio players. At first I thought it was a bug in TC Electronic drivers but now I think it's something else.

I saw that sometimes right after login the audio programs work, but after some time the crackling begins.  I've noticed that stuttering tends to happen when there is a Page in/out activity in the memory system.

As you know, Lion has one of the stupidest virtual memory schemes in the world, and constantly swaps even when there are gigabytes of available memory.

I've noticed that this doesn't create much of a problem on my macbook pro. But on the hackintosh, it causes serious problems. Even when there is a slight swapping going on, the audio can stutter, crackle and pop like crazy.

I'm now testing my hypothesis, and I think there is a correlation. This happens severely using Live because my project uses a lot of memory, in which case my 6GB system goes above >3GB Active memory, and because of the 0.5GB of Wired and 1.7GB Inactive Memory the system prefers to keep, I can't use my DAW properly. Constant audio problems prevent me from working on any non-trivial project.

Some of the simpler projects I have on Logic work fine. It's when I load the large Ableton Live projects I see this problem. You probably won't see it on simple test projects, I could open a virus ti track and play it live. No problem. When I open a large project, audio starts to crackle and virus goes out of sync. I can't edit anything.

Any suggestions? Can my claim be true? If that's true, this should be a serious problem for many audio pros using Hackintosh. I suspect that this might be due to an unfortunate interaction between the Hackintosh SATA drivers and the kernel. Or maybe disk drives aren't fast enough, you need SSD. Somehow, the kernel seems to suffer latency processing the page faults and loses realtime ability.

What can I do to make CoreAudio regain its real-time behavior? Is the only solution to downgrade to Snow Leopard? Could it be some other reason? How can I find out?

Suggestions most welcome. Please help!

malfunct

PS: The CPU is not maxed out in any project, Live shows about 50% CPU load. The stuttering does happen when I play the test tone in Live. It's interesting how more snappy my other Snow Leopard installation that I use as a rescue system feels. :/

[BALDY_MAN]

you seem to know your stuff from your post but please make a signiture
without seeing your Hackintosh specs knowone can help you

[malfunct]

Well, I've updated my sig.


After the crackling started, when I quit Live, the crackling stops.

Now I can play music on Clementine, Activity Monitor shows 2.1 GB free memory, and only 40 MB swap used. Things are snappy when this is the case. It's when the system is about to go out of free memory that this happens. There wasn't any spike in CPU use.

Another bit of info, I'm using MacPro5,1 identifier.

[malfunct]

I disabled swap. Crackling continues when I use Live. There is lots of Free memory and no page ins/outs at the present. Strange.

What else could it be?

[malfunct]

It could be the single core overloading. System Info shows 8 cores, but I have 4, so I'm going to try turning off hyperthreading next.

http://www.logicproh...php?f=5&t=88835

[theconnactic]

Malfunct, why don't you simply upgrade to Mountain Lion? I also work with multimedia, and most things that work with Lion will work with Mountain Lion too. And, believe me, with far better performance than both Lion and Snow Leopard.

Best regards!

P.S.: And yes, turn off hyperthreading. You don't need these 8 "cores" indeed.