Garritan CFX on MBP - popping – Finale/Garritan Help Center

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Kenn Hwang Posted July 13, 2017 20:09

I'm running CFX Full on a 2016 Macbook Pro 15 (quad core i7, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD) which should be more than powerful enough to handle standard solo play.

The issue I'm running into is that after 15-20 minutes of play (during which time CFX performs flawlessly), I start getting increasing pops/stutters in the sound, until I quit CFX and restart it. I notice that "RAM Total" does max out at some point and it must start swapping out to the SSD, but the fact that it play fine for 20 minutes suggests it doesn't really need that much RAM.

My main settings are:

Classic (full) mic perspective with close and ambient mics on

Buffer: 128

Sample rate: 44khz

Max engine RAM: 8GB

Inst. Disk pre-caching: 16kB

128-note polyphony

Half pedaling, on, re-pedaling on, reverb off, and close mic EQ on.

I've also tried renicing the CFX process to -20 to give it more CPU priority, but I never see it go past 20% usage in Activity Monitor.

Any suggestions on getting rid of the pops?

6 comments

Date Votes

Syd Baumel Edited September 18, 2017 19:23

Same basic problem here running CFX Lite on a 4 Ghz quad core i7 iMac with 24 Gb RAM, from a 7200 USB 2 external drive. It takes very little time for it to start cracklingand popping as a plugin within Logic Pro 9, but the standalone isn't much better. In Logic, I can see the single core Logic uses for real time play (per instance of a plug in) overloading, as is typical for Logic with any CPU intensive plugin (similar problem with Pianoteq, but not nearly as bad). I don't have that visual clue when using the standalone CFX app, but Activity Monitor shows it down around 10% when it's crackling and popping. Sad.

I should add that when it starts crackling, even increasing the buffer as high as 1024 only temporarilly restores service, as it were (I refuse to set it higher!). Reducing polyphony doesn't help much either. It takes very little pedal and fast, dense playing to provoke the problem. I'm using Core Audio, per Garritan's recommendations.

Irvin Duguid Posted November 19, 2017 11:24

I'm no expert, but in my case CFX would crackle and pop a bit unless I 'activated' the notes again just by running my hands up and down all the keys. This seemed to 'load' the samples again (for lack of a better way of explanation).

But I've had no problems of this nature after moving the samples onto the internal SSD drive.

Hope that helps!

MIKE HALLORAN Posted November 20, 2017 16:48

3 posts, no OS? If High Sierra, that may be the problem.

https://makemusic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115008222427-Using-Aria-player-with-updated-engine-in-iMac

Darcy James Argue Posted January 03, 2021 19:55

I’m also having these pops and crackles after a very short time! 2016 MacBook Pro, 16 GB RAM, 2.9 GHz Core i7, macOS Mojave 10.14.6.

I have the Garritan samples stored on a Samsung PSSDT7, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 device which reads at 1,050 MBs/second, and the drive is not connected to a hub.

I have tried using all different combinations of settings, to no avail. Only quitting and relaunching the app solves the problem, and then only for a very short time.

Sang Kong Posted October 29, 2021 00:04

This is not intuitive, but I've seen success with this by reducing max RAM to 1.25GB, 16kb. Buffer size was at 256 and Sample rate is 44.1. Less seems to work better for fewer pops. This is great sounding library, but I haven't played it in a while due to the pops. Using "worse" settings made it work better. This is with partial pedaling/re-pedalilng on, and 128 polyphony. I still get an occasional pop, but it isn't nearly as often.

Kenn Hwang Posted October 29, 2021 01:54

I've actually upgraded to an M1 Mac since then, but I also discovered your "unintuitive" solution and it works amazingly well. I use 1GB RAM, 16kB precache and 64 buffer and I get zero pops or clicks. Also with partial/half pedaling on and 128 poly!

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