Mac Studio issues, latency

[ironchef_marc]

I recently migrate from my 2008 Power Mac to a Mac Studio. I run most of my samples off SD drives. I also use VEPRO7 triggering some of my samples off a PC although I will be trying to keep everything locally see how that goes but doesn't look to promising at the moment.

After a few months of running it, I'm a bit disappointed. I was expecting a very solid performance and no CPU issues. I find DP sluggish. If I do anything during playback I will get a DP warning (forgot the exact wording but along the lines of "continue playback or stop"). These are very basic sessions, one Kontakt, 4-5 MIDI tracks playing. Not some big orchestral cue with tons of instruments and effects.

One of my pet peeves on my previous system was the timing often felt off. I had to tweak my MIDI timing typically 30-100 ticks or so for everything feel right. I can understand this happening when most of my samples were playing off my remote PC but my MIDI still feels not quite in the pocket for samples I trigger off of my MAC. It's driving me nuts. I was hoping to use 128 buffer setting but I was getting performance issues, now I'm at 512.

On top of all this, I'm getting regular sudden crashes. Every day. I click on something and DP disappears. I don't even get the OS window that the app crashed.

[mikehalloran]

I run most of my samples off SD drives. I also use VEPRO7 triggering some of my samples off a PC

One of the many promises that Apple made with the Mac Pro 7.1 was that hosting through VEPro was no longer necessary. Except for certain GPU intensive tasks, the Studio generally outperforms the MP 7.1.

I suggest that it's time to rethink your external storage.

Internal NVMe 4 x6 storage on the Studio is rated either 4,000BP/s or 7,600BP/s depending on the number of SSDs inside with the .5TB and 1TB having a single and the 8TB having a pair.
.
A "fast" NVMe 3 x4 blade such as the Samsung 970 EVO is rated 2,800BP/s in 4 lane Intel certified Thunderbolt 3 external enclosures. I do not know if any of the newer NVMe 4 x4 blades are actually faster in those same TB3 enclosures but they might be. NVMe 4 x6 blades are backward compatible but the TB3 pipe is limited to 4 Lanes.

The claimed speeds of NVMe 4 x4 and 4 x6 are for PCs with similar busses and no not apply to external storage on a Mac.

TB4 allows multiple TB3 devices to be connected to the same port via a hub or daisy-chain but otherwise is no faster.

[ironchef_marc]

Thanks for chiming in Mike. To be clear my performance issue aren't related to VEPRO7.
I have a 4TB Crucial X8 SSD drive that is super fast.

[HCMarkus]

I"m running a Mac Studio Ultra (DP11.21, macOS 12.61, Kontakt 6 and 7) and it has been excellent. I run everything from within DP. Sample storage is on external drives (NVMe in OWC Envoy Express enclosures). I have had rare "poof - gone" DP crashes when running video in DP, but not often enough to be much of a concern.

Please clarify: Have you tried running DP without VEPro? Just to see if the interaction between DP and VE might be causing your issues?

I have run into a few little things when using my old (from DP9.52 and Mojave) DP template. One bothersome issue was NI Battery refusing to remember where to find samples. This was remedied by removing tracks with Battery, then adding new tracks and instantiating Battery. When I can, I plan on rebuilding my template from scratch within DP11.21.

[mikehalloran]

I have a 4TB Crucial X8 SSD drive that is super fast.

Per Crucial:

X8 SSD can reach up to 1050 MB/s read speeds.

making its max speed is roughly 1/3 that of a Crucial P3 in a certified TB3 4 Lane enclosure (2800–3500 depending upon whom you believe). https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Plus-PCI ... ref=sr_1_4

It's possible that the P3+ is even faster but I've not seen any tests to verify that as its 5,000MB/s rating is for PCIe 4 busses in PCs.
https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Plus-PCI ... ref=sr_1_4

[bayswater]

Marc might not be using the fastest SSD, but is that really likely to be the cause of such basic performance problems noted here? I now have all my sample libraries on Samsung 970 SSDs connected by USB 3, and all audio files on a similar connection. Hardly the fasted connection, or drives, and probably a lot slower than what Marc is using, but I can run a few dozen MIDI to VI tracks with a load of audio tracks and plugins, with no resource warnings, dropouts, barely any register on CPU and Audio performance meters. I don't run at 128 but don't see much need to since MOTU reduced latency in DP at higher buffer settings.

Maybe have a look at the "work" settings, and other similar settings covered in the DP Getting Started manual. These don't often make much difference, but they have in my case, when I was using old hard drives. It's difficult to understand just what these settings do, but playing around with them might help. The other things I've noted that made a difference in the past is setting in some VIs that determine how much sample data is brought into RAM. I'd think with 64G RAM you'd want to max that out.

[James Steele]

Did you do a clean install or use Migration Assistant? It might not be part of the problem, but when I made the move from my MacPro5,1 to my Mac Studio, I installed everything fresh and did not use Migration Assistant just because I'd used Migration Assistant at least a couple times prior in previous migrations.

[bleach30]

You aren’t alone. I’ve similar issues with my M1 and DP. The most irritating is the disappearing act.
My audio interface is the ultra lite avb and I will say timing feels better after updating drivers. So that maybe something to look at. Also make sure you aren’t running dp Native and at the same time trying to use non silicon ready plugins. I have a couple that will load and work for a minute but it’s a garunted crash. I go back and forth between Rosetta and native…sometimes i forget