My ears are ringing from blast of white noise from Logic 9

"If it is so dangerous to use Logic, why don't you stop? Why are people continuing to use a product that appears broken for audio production? If Apple won't fix this, people should vote with their feet and change"

Because I spent 700 dollars on this program which I am stuck with now. I work for minimum wage trying to support my expensive hobby and cant afford to just chop and change.


"What computer are you running and what audio interface?"

I'm not sure if you were directing that at me, but i'm running a 2010 8 core mac pro (westmere) with a DUET interface and Logic Pro.

Wow, add me to the "victims". Had my head blown off while simply recording an audio track. Dangerous, Dangerous stuff. I am now scared to death to put headphones on....it was that serious. Unbelievable that Apple ignores this. Dunno, but I am thoroughly disgusted with what happened yesterday, especially after reading this thread and others that positively identify a serious problem.

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Just wondering if a temporary way of continuing my work without the risque of another deafening noise blast would be to reinstall "7" and use until the problem is fixed? Otherwise, I'm out $5000 worth of equipment and Apple will have put an end to what I consider my "creative" endeavors. Any thoughts on this? Thanks, Dale

Actually it's rather interesting, why it doesn't happen to me. Maybe it's a clue of some sort. Maybe it's because I always pray before I start recording and drink my milk everyday? I also don't use underwear.

Wow! I think I have the answer! You see....I pray also, but only that I don't have to drink milk before I record. Secondly I DO use underwear, but only to wipe down my keys and to absorb the blood running out of my ears when I get the "noise" thing. LOL.....hope u sees this as comic relief....it certainly is meant to be....thanks slideguy.....Dale

I hopefully found the reason for this for me:

I tried to record my band in our rehearsal room for quite a time. Sometimes it worked, but most of the time the recording stopped with that annoying 'disk too slow'-message. This was very frustrating and even more because there was this 'noise blast of death' quite often at the end of such an 'error'-stopped recording. In the end, I always looked into the waveforms for not experiencing this again.

Finally, after trying out several setups/different audio cards, I found out that the reason for these 'disk too slow' errors are - in my case - simply vibrations from the band/soundsystem. Unfortunately, this was not as obvious as it seems as I had already tried out several places where to put my laptop.

So now I heavily dampened the table where my laptop sits on and the problem is gone.

I guess this also explains the white noises. There is a mechanism in any harddrive to prevent it from crashing on the disk's surface. This mechanism moves the writehead to a safety position and will result in a 'disk too slow' message in a recording message as no data can be written any more. Now, right before this mechanism starts 'rescueing', there is a very small amount of time where the write head is in an unsafe oscillating state but still tries to write your audio data on the disk. Because of these oscillations and due to the fact that the writing process cannot be completed, there will be lots of write errors. Finally this will result in that harsh white noise.

If this all is true, I don't know if there is really a way for apple to fix that problem easily. I don't know if this would work but in this case, Logic could listen to the motion sensor of the hd. If this motion sensor throws an exception Logic could throw away all recorded data from that point. I really would not recommend turning off this motion sensor..

On the other hand, you can try moving your HDs to a place where there are no vibrations at all.

I hope this helps.

kapeh, your explanation could make sense, but this problem happens in no-vibrations environments too. Plus, I had this white noise blasts many times and the problem never came out with a 'disk too slow' message.

The oscillation of the write head will not always result in a 'disk too slow' error due to tolerances of the disk. So the HD does not have to rescue the head because there is no danger of crashing it - no 'disk too slow error' will occur. But this must not necessarily mean that the data written is also ok.
But if you can exclude vibrations, even the slightest ones, as a source then my guess may be wrong or just one part. I just want to emphasize this because before I thought that there are no vibrations transmitted to my laptop, too.
In my case that deafening noise blast was in fact 'recorded' to the disk so I never experienced it when playing back any noise-free tracks.

I have not had this white noise problem but found this thread interesting and concerning.

It seems that the one common factor is disk access and problems relating to it. This can of course be due to several different reasons and makes it much harder to pin down the cause.

Disk access is required for sample libraries as well as any recording and bouncing so...

Has anyone experienced an occurrence of the white noise blast at a time when they can be absolutely sure there was no disk activity whatsoever?

Has anyone had this since the 9.1.3 update to Logic?** I was having the issue on my previous version (unfortunately I didn't note the version #) but updated last night and have been ok so far with about an hour of recording four tracks. I made a few environment changes to my iMac between the last sonic assault episode and the 9.1.3 update: defragged using iDefrag, turned off my wireless, and changed my I/O Buffer Size from 64 to 128. iDefrag showed minor fragmentation (< 1% with lots of open space on the relatively new iMac drive), so I'm guessing that wasn't it.

There is no hint in the 9.1.3 release notes about this problem, but so far....so good. So I was wondering what others' experiences have been with 9.1.3. Here's hoping.

**I am running Express, actually, but am posting here because the problem is clearly in both products and this is the best discussion of it.

Message was edited by: EdwardHamlin

Great that you've rid yourself of the sound blasts, but before we start projecting that anything in particular will solve the problem, I want to remind this discussion group that this issue isn't just in Logic. It's also in Final Cut Pro.

Here's another forum/discussion:
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?211337-DEAFENING-bursts-of-static-on-FC P

I've had this problem too, but for me it was the PLAY engine in Logic. I noticed that the blast would only happen when a PLAY instrument was triggered during playback. It even happened when I was adjusting the velocity in the piano roll of a PLAY instrument note. Unfortunately I had to stop using that engine altogether, but I've been white-noise-blast free ever since.

I can't speak to the problems that folks are having with Final Cut, but there's something terribly wrong somewhere.

Mmm, Core Audio problem sounds like it might be along the right track? I've been having the deafening sound whilst previewing noise reduction in Soundtrack Pro 2.2. I've never encountered it in STP 1.3, which I've been using because I don't trust STP 2.2 to not smash my ears and my 100 quid headphones. Sadly stp 1.3 has stopped working properly.
I've not hit the problem in FCP studio 2, but I hardly ever use it. If only Premiere had an audio editor as good as Soundtrack Pro as well.... 😟

OK, I may have figured this out for myself but I don't know if this applies to anybody else. I have the free demo TC Electronic M30 Reverb plugin saved as inserts in a couple of projects. I think that's what's been blasting white noise in my case. It does that if you try to scroll through all the reverb programs on it and maybe it also does it after a certain amount of time in use or something. I may be right out to lunch, and this is not going to help anybody, but are any of you using that free demo TC software plug-in?