Anyone have tips or advice on Maschine cpu issues?

AxMusic
AxMusic Member Posts: 117 Member
edited July 2022 in Maschine

Recently Maschine has been really struggling on my Mac. I today started a session and had two maschine loops running, and the loops/sounds started crackling. I had to crank the buffer size up to 900 to get the crackling to cease. This causes so much latency. It wasn’t like this before.. any Ideas on the issue any how to fix it would be much appreciated.


My Mac is a 2014 Mac Mini, 8gb of ram.

I also took a screen shot of the activity monitor for reference.

No other apps were open at the time other than Maschine.



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Comments

  • 6xes
    6xes Member Posts: 630 Pro
    edited July 2022

    when doing a check to remedy crackles... theres a couple of things to monitor... one besides the cpu monitorings... is the disk-access monitoring and see if you get spikes in that area

    when its a disk-access issue.. especially in the case where you have your sample on a system drive... which will invariably be swapping memory to disk or vice versa... this might possibly be addressed by having an external drive.

    this ties in with disk interrupts and that sort of thing... but heck im not in the know about such intricacies... only the ways around such problems

    goodluck solving the issues of the crackle!!

  • AxMusic
    AxMusic Member Posts: 117 Member
    edited July 2022

    Thanks for the feedback, I will test again (checking the disk access) and report back.

    I do happen to have an external drive, and have my NI content on that drive and not on the Mac itself.

  • D-One
    D-One Moderator Posts: 2,811 mod
    edited July 2022

    You're only using half your Ram so looking in the "Memory" tab won't provide any useful information; the "CPU"tab is what you should look at first, also double click the CPU Load portion under the list to see how the activity is.

    I suggest you install Stats, it's free and you can check if for some reason (like a ton of dust inside) your computer is getting too hot and thermal throttling, your fan speeds, and other detailed usage stats. Or you can also try Intel Power Gadget.

    I had a very similar mac (MBP, not mini tho) from 2015 with a similar dual-core CPU, those older dual-core models are pretty bad by today's standards. With that said problems should not happen with only "2 loops" playing, so something is very wrong with your computer.

  • AxMusic
    AxMusic Member Posts: 117 Member

    Really?

    I didn’t know these types of macs were so outdated by todays standards. That’s something to keep in mind.

    I took some more screen shots for reference. I will also look into that stats app.

    Again today was a similar issue, had two synth loops running in the audio modual and a drum loop.

    Maschine was crackling/stuttering…and mostly non responsive.

  • ozon
    ozon Member Posts: 1,301 Expert

    What sample rate is set in Maschine 2 and what audio interface are you using?

  • AxMusic
    AxMusic Member Posts: 117 Member

    41000

    and komplete audio 6

  • Kubrak
    Kubrak Member Posts: 2,772 Expert

    NI recomends using 48 kHz, I guess.

  • AxMusic
    AxMusic Member Posts: 117 Member
  • AxMusic
    AxMusic Member Posts: 117 Member

    Just gave 48 kHz a shot, and nothing… still slows down/stutters, and crackles.

  • ozon
    ozon Member Posts: 1,301 Expert

    Since you’re using all NI products with a sensible sampling rate, I’d expect them perform smoothly even on an older Mac Mini.

    Does the Komplete Audio 6 work fine with other music applications?

  • AxMusic
    AxMusic Member Posts: 117 Member

    Yes the interface works fine with Logic Pro when I use it.


    I was wondering on top of this issue, clean my Mac (application) has been sending me messages saying RAM is almost full. I wonder if that is related to this very issue…

    I find that so weird since it will pop up sometimes as soon as I start up the Mac itself.

    At times it will pop up when there are no applications running…

    Does anyone have experiences with the clean my Mac actually slowing down things?

    *I have also scoured over my login items and brought it down to the necessities only.

  • ozon
    ozon Member Posts: 1,301 Expert

    Personally, I think that all these system cleaning apps and extensions are either useless (and therefore a scam) or actually spyware/trojans. In the best case they just use system resources without any actual benefit, IMO.

    I‘d probably try to reinstall the system from scratch and only add those apps and extensions you really need to make music.

  • AxMusic
    AxMusic Member Posts: 117 Member

    What do you mean by reinstalling the system?

    Is that like a factory reset?

    And just for the sake of it…anyone have any information on the new Mac mini? I saw that apple has the M1 chip in it, is that a massive difference cause I see that they still sell the intel version…

  • Kubrak
    Kubrak Member Posts: 2,772 Expert

    M1 is good CPU, better than old Intels.... Would be better wait for comming M2, that has more RAM memory even in basic models. (8 GB of lowest M1 model is way too low IMHO.)

    But, so far not all SW is natively compatible with M1/M2. From NI SW only Kontakt is M1 native compatible, the rest possibly in 3-4 months, if everything goes along the plans.

    IMHO, better to wait, untill all SW you use is AS native compatible and runs without problems.

  • AxMusic
    AxMusic Member Posts: 117 Member

    I see, and as far as M2 goes would NI apps once adapted to M1 need to be made compatible with the M2 version?

    Or is it that once it has native compatibility with M1 it would work with all future “M” installments?

    I was considering getting a 16gb of memory, and not 8 as since the Mac I already have has 8gb and is giving me problems.

    As a consensus do most of you think that’s enough (16gb) RAM for music making? I have seen macs with 32gb of RAM…but would that be overkill?

    Lastly any predictions as to when a potential M2 Mac Mini would be released?

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