S1 6.4.4 Tracks being offset during recording.

[phel]

Recently I have encountered problems while recording live performances via USB from a digital console. Some tracks suddenly get offset a little from others mid recording and it doesn't recover until recording is stopped and re-started. The recording may have been running for a long time before the problem occur, or I may have recorded multiple tunes into the same S1 song-file before it suddenly goes wonky. I have tried different buffer and dropout-protection-settings, but that doesn't seem to matter. Generally I use a large buffer (1024 samples) and maximum dropout-protection for audio-recording when there is no overdubbing involved. I have recorded countless hours with this setup in the past (2014-2020) to produce promo-recordings for bands and had no such problems. First time I noticed a problem was in summer 24, but that was with someone else's console with outdated firmware so I didn't take action then. Now I have the same problem with my own updated console.

There are no error messages on either console or computer, nor is there any crackling or other audio-issues with the tracks being recorded.
CPU load is fine
SSD I/O is fine.
S1 keeps recording all channels, but when playing back only a few of the tracks are in time.

Computer:
Macbook Pro mid 2012
i7 2,3GHz CPU
16GB RAM
1TB SSD
MacOS (osX) Catalina (last version supported on this machine)
Studio One 6.6.4 (last for Catalina)

Audio-interface while recording:
Behringer X32 console at 48kHz samplerate via USB (X/USB) set to 32ch in and 32ch out.

Has anyone experienced anything similar?
Suggenstions?

 

[SwitchBack]

Sounds like something doesn't keep up, buffer under/overflow? Have you tried another USB port on your MBP? Check the system report to see which port is shared by the MBP's camera and/or touchpad. You want an internal hub with as little extra load as possible, and no external hubs either. Then check to make sure that the sample rate of all audio related stuff (interface, song, system audio, ...) is the same. Which driver is used by Studio One? Also check Audio/MIDI Setup for unusual things. Which device is clock Master Device?

And of course, did anything change since before things went south? Wonky update?

Oh and one more thing: Try another USB cable. A good cable is way more critical than you might expect.

 

[phel]

Sounds like something doesn't keep up, buffer under/overflow? Have you tried another USB port on your MBP? Check the system report to see which port is shared by the MBP's camera and/or touchpad. You want an internal hub with as little extra load as possible, and no external hubs either. Then check to make sure that the sample rate of all audio related stuff (interface, song, system audio, ...) is the same. Which driver is used by Studio One? Also check Audio/MIDI Setup for unusual things. Which device is clock Master Device?

And of course, did anything change since before things went south? Wonky update?

Oh and one more thing: Try another USB cable. A good cable is way more critical than you might expect.

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

If this is a buffer over/underflow-issue shouldn't the system be able to detect, log and then try to recover so that the tracks end up synchronized again with just a temporary glitch?

There are 2 builtin USB-ports on this MBP both on the same builtin hub only sharing bus with the keyboard according to system-info.

Samplerates are the same all over. Conflicts would cause other artifacts in audio, and be logged.

Will try another cable, but a bad cable would in my experience cause dropouts and other problems that get flagged on console or computer .. or both.

With this version of osX there is no device-specific driver for class-compliant USB-audio-devices, just generic CoreAudio.

I can not identify anything in particular that has changed to cause this issue. The computer has always been dedicated to the DAW and has had updates to OS and other software applied regularly over the many years I've had it. In recent years changes have been few and far between since Apple ended support for this particular hardware 3 years ago.