audio dropouts and voices being cut

Hello , i have a 2019 macbook pro, 8gb ddr3 ram, quad core intel core i5 at 2.4ghz, and an internal hard drive with 500 gb. I have recently purchased Komplete ultimate, and have all the libraries downloaded and content location on an external SSD (Samsung t7) and it seems when I load some libraries, for example the granduer or alicias keys, if I play some heavy chords, with a lot of voices, the audio cuts out of a second, and the voices get cut as well as my disk percentage will spike and turn red. The SSD is currently formatted as ExFat. If I reformat, as APFS should this troubleshoot this issue?

Also, larger libraries such as stradivari violin take forever to load all samples (in the purge thingy- it takes a long time for all the samples to load and turn from yellow indicator to white- what is the solution to this?- batch resaving?)

Thanks,

Nathan

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Jojo123

Absolutely do not use ExFat. You're going to have to reformat it and It's prefereable to go with APFS.

Its more than likely the wrong format is causing you issues but also theres other factors I'd be looking at. You need to consider:

keep plenty of free space available on your system drive. The more the better, for its used to unpack in the installation process whether you install to an external drive or not.
I keep at least 30% free on external drives (SSDs)
Your RAM is pretty minimal and loading large libraries are likely to cause bottlenecks

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Jojo123

Absolutely do not use ExFat. You're going to have to reformat it and It's prefereable to go with APFS.

Its more than likely the wrong format is causing you issues but also theres other factors I'd be looking at. You need to consider:

keep plenty of free space available on your system drive. The more the better, for its used to unpack in the installation process whether you install to an external drive or not.
I keep at least 30% free on external drives (SSDs)
Your RAM is pretty minimal and loading large libraries are likely to cause bottlenecks

nathan.17_

Thanks for such a quick resposne! Im going to try reformatting, if im still having issues would you recommend upgrading hardware?

Jojo123

Id say yes definitely try the reformatting first because you're going to need to do that anyway.

What DAW?

Strad Violin, Cello etc are pretty resource intensive depending on the settings you choose. Your specs are a tad minimal and you're going to have to compromise, like freezing tracks etc, to pull on bigger libraries. Also, theres going to be a heap of swapping out to your internal drive causing a lot of write cycles to SSD when theres not enough RAM.

If you're in Logic have it show the performance meter which shows you threads and disk activity. Also bring up MAC OS Activity Monitor which gives you a lot of info on what stress your system is under.

nathan.17_

Hey Jojo123, I reformatted the t7 to apfs as well as cleared up some space on the disk and drive and it seems to be smooth sailing for now. I do recognize my ram size is minimal and will be looking to upgrade my hardware very soon. Thank you for the response and help!

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