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Comment by blashyrk | Hacker News Reader

I cannot believe that, on macOS, high cpu usage leads to audio buffer underruns and popping, like something from the 90s but on today's premium hardware. It's inexcusable. On a platform that is constantly touted as the best for audio work, DAWs etc no less.

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Wow, I thought I'm the only one as when asked in my Team no one agreed to facing these issues - but I faced it on multiple new Macbook Pros.

I experienced it, but I'm not sure if it relates to high CPU. My guess it's something about kernel locks.

Yeah, the same on m2. And to thing I originally bought this machine with audio work in mind...

I experience this a lot (even up to complete freezes, even of the touchpad feedback, leading to crashes) and am confident that it is at least related to swapping due to memory pressure / RAM usage.

Why they'd let the system become unstable rather than killing some apps that are too much goes beyond my understanding.

I discovered them when running stable diffusion which maxes out my m1max and audio started to stutter a lot despite everything else running fine. I was even thinking to myself how nice it is to be able to tax the machine and this be able to use it.

Yep, it's been like this for.. I don't know how long now. I have "killlall coreaudiod" always ready to be used on my M1 Mac since it's a constant problem.

changing the volume of the sound under high CPU load will also move the balance one side.

I often have to re-center the balance, it's driving me nuts.

I've found this to be useful to solve that problem. https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/

How the hell does something like that even happen lol

increase-left-volume; increase-right-volume;

inside a function that can be preempted

Right but that would only happen if the code literally increased/decreased the channel volume instead of simply setting it to the new value. Either way it's an embarrassing bug to have for something so essential and simple, the kind of bug that reminds me of Linux desktops from 15 years ago or so

Thought the popping was a Rosetta 2 bug as I had only noticed it running x86 software on m2 pro.

Your explanation makes a lot more sense as x86 is probably the only time I’m pushing the cpu usage high enough.

The popping is darn annoying

It precedes the switch to ARM. My 2019 (last Intel generation) MBP also had this issue. And the previous one from 2015 (though that poor thing only had 8GB of RAM).

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