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flaubert

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 16, 2015
485
200
Portland, Oregon
Hi, one of my main uses for my Mac Pro is preparing radio shows, which involves voice announcing between tracks. I've noticed that I occasionally have a defect in my voice recordings: when I play it back I'll sometimes find a place in the recording where a fragment of sound repeats and replaces the original sound for about a second. Here's an example:

What I spoke into the microphone: "This song goes back to 1982, when Joe recorded his first album."

What got recorded: "This song goes back-back-back when Joe recorded his first album."

The problem is pretty intermittent; I recently recorded a podcast submission that was about ten minutes in length, and it happened once.

The software I use to put together my cuts and record my announcing is Amadeus Pro, from Hairersoft.com. I've been using it for probably two decades. I never had the problem up until I switched from a single processor Mac Pro 5,1 that was running Mojave to a dual processor Mac Pro 5,1 running Monterey (under manually configured OpenCore). I thought at first that this was the famous audio stutter problem that is said to be present in Nehalem processors, but when I check I see that my dual processor machine has two six core 2.93 GHz Westmere processors.

Some other random facts about my hardware setup: 16GB ECC ram, AMD Radeon RX560 4GB GPU, booting off a Crucial P1 1TB NVME in a non-switched Riitop PCIE card. My user home directory is on a Micron 960GB SATA SSD formatted as a ZFS filesystem; I used to use ZFS under Mojave as well, though it was an earlier build of openzfsonosx. The A/D is a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 connected into a USB3 card; I think that when I switched to this computer I didn't install the Focusrite software, just relying on native MacOS support for this USB audio device.

My OpenCore is a few versions back (maybe four months out of date?), and I'm a couple versions back on Monterey as well (12.6.5).

As you can see, I'm kind of out over the edge on a lot of dimensions: OpenCore, ZFS, non-recommended NVME product... I would be curious if anyone has seen this kind of problem, and perhaps has recommendations for debugging.

Just writing this out I thought of one thing I can do, which is switch to my admin account (which lives on the boot drive in APFS), turn off ZFS completely by exporting my pools, and then try making a recording under those conditions to see if ZFS is involved in any way. It might not hurt to install the actual Focusrite software as well.
 
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