Cherry Audio Forums

Hi there,

I am trying to figure out why my Voltage Modular standalone app is producing crackles and dropouts every now and then. I am running nothing else than the Voltage Modular App and no matter what buffer or sample-rate I set it to or if I enable multi-threading - I get crackles and dropouts.

When I look at my activity monitor, I see that my CPU usage is not even at 14% - so that can't be an issue, or not?

Also I am currently running it through the onboard-audio. Haven't tested it with my Native Instruments interface yet but I was curious if other users here running an Apple M1 machine experienced similar issues?

Hi,

Does this problem happen with any preset? Or just ones that use poly? Or really complex ones? What if you use multi-threading, but reduce the number of threads?

What are your audio settings? What is your playback device?

We're getting closer to releasing an update to Voltage Modular that will have native M1 support, so it would be interesting to see how that affects this issue. Not sure how soon it will be released, we've been busy testing it.

Greg

1. OK this is strange. I just tested all the the factory presets and there was no crackling in the patches I've tested...then I went back to my own presets and no crackling Except for ones that used digital reverb...still testing this one
2. I could not find a difference in behavior between poly/mono presets
3. What I did notice is that it seems to happen when the digital reverb module is being used and set to a big Room value
4. I am going to try out to reduce the number of multi threads and will let you know!
5.
Audio settings:

+ Macbook Air Speakers
+ 44100 Hz
+ 512 Samples

Reverb doesn't seem to be the issue. I did indeed notice some issues with a custom poly patch using 3 oscillators with each a filter, envelope and amp.
I tried reducing the number of threads, but it was still crackling. Then a few moments later, I tried again. CPU is at 15 % and currently there is no crackling...it's like chasing a ghost. Could it be that the CPU is balancing out the threads and while doing so, the audio processing takes a dip in performance until the CPU is "ready" for processing the audio?

Have you tried disabling OpenGL acceleration in the settings?

ColinP wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 7:29 pm Have you tried disabling OpenGL acceleration in the settings?

yes, I tried that as well - no difference!

Hi,

We're releasing version 2.5.3 today, and it includes native M1 support, along with other optimizations. Give that a try!

There's a new, separate installer for the M1 version. Download Voltage Modular.

Greg

More info here: Cherry Audio Releases Voltage Modular 2.5.3, With M1 Native Support

Edited to add: for computers with the M1 chip, be sure to get the new M1 installer from the download page, not the Intel one.

I wanted to follow up with the JUST RELEASED (yay) M1 update 2.5.3:

The crackles are gone!

Everything feels so snappy and responsive. I love it guys!

Apart from the little update dilemma where I accidentally downloaded the intel version (I am sure this will get fixed easily) I am impressed! Big thanks to the team...

Keep on doing that sweet stuff.

Cheers,

Robert

Hi,

That's great news! Thanks for coming back to let us know the update helped.

Greg