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Multitrack recording from Roland MX-1 randomly interrupted [SOLVED]


ryx
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Hi everyone, I am a hobbyist music producer and have been working with Logic since 2 or 3 years, solely using virtual instruments. Thanks to Covid and being tired of hanging in front of a screen the whole day, I wanted to try a more traditional way of music making and built a small hardware setup for my production. My gear currently contains of four synths, and two drum machines - so nothing too fancy. My plan was to record the tracks from my Roland MX-1 audio interface into Logic and then do the post processing and mastering there. So far so good.

 

Now generally everything seems to work like a charm, but I have a very strange problem when recording multiple tracks (about 10 Tracks: 5 Mono / 5 Stereo). Within random intervals - usually somewhen between 30 seconds and 5 minutes - my recording is interrupted and a dialog pops up saying that my disk is too slow. I then found the advice in the official Logic Pro docs saying that one should not record to the system drive. Being a battle-tested Apple user I immediately decided to fix the problem by "throwing money at it" and bought an external SSD (Intenso Professional, 500GB). I moved the project files and anything I could find to the SSD drive and tried again. Same problem. (I'll skip the part where I read through the entire internet, checked dozens of forum posts and the Logic Pro docs for like 3 weeks and tested any sane combination of settings).

 

Then I had the idea to set up Garage Band and try to record from there, which turned out to have the same issue. I then tested the recording on my work computer (2018 MBP, i7) but I ran into the same problem. My next suspect was the audio interface and its driver so I decided to download Ableton Live and try the same recording there - because if the interface was the problem it should fail in Ableton Live, too. But in Ableton everything is working without any issues. I can record 10 and more tracks for an hour without any interruption, even while browsing the internet and having other apps open simultaneously.

 

Which then brought me back to my system setup. I am working as a software developer so my natural reaction was to debug the issue with the usual tools (dtrace etc), which turned out to be quite difficult because of SIP on macOS. But the good old activity monitor showed some suspicious reads exactly at that moment when my recording stops. I thought it might have to do with Spotlight and disabled it, but it didn’t change anything. I also used the Instruments app from XCode to debug the file activities, but I am not too used to it and it appeared as if Logic itself was causing the reads. I deactived and uninstalled anything else I can think of, but the problem remains.

 

Long story short: I am totally out of ideas and I seriously don't want to switch to Ableton because I totally enjoy working with Logic Pro. That's why I finally gave up and came here to ask you smart people for help (after lurking around here for years :) ) ... any ideas what I could try next? I am thankful for any hint.

 

Thanks in advance and sorry for the long post,

Rico

Edited by ryx
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Nothing special or fancy. Only the default EQ plugin and a Multimeter on the Master out.

 

Also the CPU and disk usage are close to zero when the interruption occurs so the system doesn’t seem to be under high load. I tried to monitor the active processes using top and ActivityMonitor but there is no notable load at that point.

 

Could there be any path-related setting I might have overseen? Something that causes the write operation to happen on the wrong disk? Even though, as fuzzfilth pointed out, that’s a super fast M2 SSD that should handle much more I/O with ease ..

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First of all, thank you for your suggestions! I did some more tests on a freshly installed MBP 2011 with Logic Pro X 10.4 and a new Logic project which is stored on my external SSD - and I experienced the same issues. Which then leaves the MX-1 or its driver as the only possible root cause (samplerate might be a clue, indeed). Though it still seems weird to me that the MX-1 works in Ableton Live without any issues. On the other hand its not class-compliant, so its behaviour might not be fully deterministic.

 

Another thing I noticed: the HD monitor in Logic is close to zero for most of the time during recording and I see a very uniform I/O activity on the disk. Then, suddenly, there are some heavy spikes and the HD meter in Logic goes way up to the top. This seems to happen randomly during the recording and most of the time the recording halts with the said message.

 

What about creating another Admin account and trying recording there?

If it happens there as well it could be hardware related, like a USB cable or USB hub.

The Admin account was a really clever idea I didn't think of before. Unfortunately also in the new account I ran into the same problem as before. Experimenting with various different/shorter USB cables was also one of the first things I tried.

 

How many tracks are you recording simultaneously? What sample rate?

I am recording 10 tracks simultaneously, I guess the input should be a sample rate of 96 (which is the MX-1's default iirc). Is there a way to see which sample rate I am recording from within Logic?

 

What if you experiment with a different sample rate, or recording less tracks simultaneously, as a test?

Good idea, I'll try that tomorrow and report back here. Thank you!

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  • Solution

I owe you guys a beer or two :) .. You were right about the sample rate. After setting the sample rate on the MX-1 to 44.1kHz, I can easily record 10 tracks for hours without any problem (even on the internal drive of my old 2011 MBP).

 

I also tested if it works the other way round (setting both sample rates to 96kHz) - and in fact it does. So the sample rate of 96kHz as such seems to be no problem for Logic. Instead it appears as if Logic doesn't like an input sample rate that differs from the project sample rate. Not sure if that is expected behaviour, but I found it surprising enough to share it :)

 

Thanks again for your help!

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So the sample rate of 96kHz as such seems to be no problem for Logic. Instead it appears as if Logic doesn't like an input sample rate that differs from the project sample rate. Not sure if that is expected behaviour

Yes it is, the sample rate of your project should always be the same as the sample rate of your audio interface's converters. However what is surprising is that normally, changing the project sample rate should automatically change the sample rate of your audio interface accordingly. So that you can open and close different projects that are using different sample rates without having to constantly worry about changing the sample rate of your audio interface manually.

 

I'm not sure why that is not working on the Roland MX-1.

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