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[blgentry]

I keep meaning to open a topic on this and I keep telling myself that I'll do it after I have more data. I haven't been listening to music on MC as much recently so haven't had as much  opportunity to collect data (anecdotally).

The new options for Audio > Device Settings > Buffering > Software seem to have helped.  I've tried 250, 500, 750, and 1000 mS.  Each step seems to help more and more.  Though the difference between 750 and 1000 is questionable.  I estimate that I'm now only getting dropouts every 12 to 15 hours of continuous listening.  It's not perfect, but it's sure a lot better than it used to be!

I've backed down to 750 mS of software buffering.  I'd really like to go back to 250 or 500 because the delay in pausing is annoying and makes one think that pressing the button didn't work.  I've had to program myself to wait after pressing the pause button rather than hitting the button again immediately when the sound doesn't stop.  At 1000 mS the effect is really annoying.  At 750, less annoying.  At 250, it's perfect.  Anyway, I'm living with it at 750 mS and it's not a big deal.

App Nap settings don't seem to make a difference, but maybe they do.  It's hard to say without rigorous testing and at this point, it takes so much time and effort that I'm over trying to test it any more.  Don't take this as a negative.  It's just that, for my purposes, I'd rather live with the mild annoyance rather than spend literally a week or more trying to do more testing, spending hours and hours recording my findings in a log.

I'd like to formally thank all of the people that helped on this.  I'm not sure who on the JRiver team did most of the work.  John maybe?  No matter who it was, THANK YOU!  I'd like to formally thank Glynor as well.  I think your research and ideas lead to making this problem better.  I *KNOW* you suggested the bigger software buffers and they definitely help.  THANK YOU!

I have a funny feeling this problem will mostly go away by itself as customers buy more modern Macs.  I'm somewhat convinced that if I bought an SSD main drive for this machine that ALL of my dropouts would disappear.  Glynor has pretty much my exact computer, except his has an SSD drive.  He has zero dropouts.  I have "some".

Anyway, I'm trying to say, in my long winded way, that this problem is officially closed for me personally.

...and thank you all again. 

Brian.

[couchjr]

Brian, thanks to you for all the tenacious testing you've already done. I hate to say it but I still get occasional very brief dropouts and my late 2014 Mac mini has 500GB SSD and max RAM. And I usually use memory play and integer mode. Exasound E-22 DAC with an UpTone Audio Regen immediately preceding. Outboard linear power supply for the mini and Regen with the UpTone fan controller board installed.

I wonder whether ASIO support will help this when it finally arrives (less processing to do).

In any case, I too trust (perhaps naively) that this will eventually just go away, for one reason or another.

Meanwhile, it can be annoying depending on where it occurs (in the finale of Mahler 2, for instance, or Brunhilde's immolation scene . . . . )

Cheers,
Randall

[ronfint]

I am somewhat hesitant to write this post, but I have a computer (mid-2012 retina macbook pro, 16 GB internal memory, El Capitan) on which MC 21.0.08 regularly stalls and reloads its buffer. It is set to memory play, and I've tried all the different buffer settings to no success. In fact, I cannot play through a 45 minute album (24/192) without several episodes of stalling.

I have a Synology NAS which is accessed wirelessly, and at first I thought that this might be the cause of the problem, but (1) the same setup works perfectly on two other macs with El Capitan, and (2) I've since purchased Audirvana for this particular computer and it works flawlessly.

Everything was peachy with MC on this computer before I installed El Capitan. Perhaps that's the problem, but like I said, all works well with MC on my other computers and with other software.

Perhaps the gremlins will eventually go away with future releases of MC and OSX, but until then, I guess I'll be using something else on this computer.

[ronfint]

Well, the gremlins are gone. I waved good bye to them three weeks ago. I'm not sure what I did to frighten them away, though. After trying many different settings, I decided to perform a clean install of El Capitan, and reload all my software from scratch. I prepared a thumb drive as a start up disk and was ready to go, but at the last minute, I decided to give my old setup one last chance.

My dropouts had become pretty intense. In fact, with a 192/24 file, the dropouts began after only a few seconds. The other thing I had done prior to this was to email to John a log file demonstrating the problem. All this activity obviously scared away the gremlins, and MC started working perfectly again. It's been flawless since. I don't know what I did to accomplish this. It's like fixing a tv set by kicking it.

Perhaps John will shed light on the actual problem. I hope so, because as we all know: problems that go away by themselves, return by themselves.