New Mac mini 2018 Woes!! Logic Pro X issues

James, this is from another thread.

Posted by mikkelbh:

I just realized that it might be an issue related to the display resolution.

I have my Mac Mini hooked up to a Samsung 4k display.

I tried hooking up my old 1080p-display yesterday, and the CPU-load in Logic instantly dropped almost 50%! I spent a few hours working on the 1080-display, and had no CPU issues whatsoever.

I tried hooking up the 4k display again, and the CPU-load went back to spiking and overload messages.

Tried hooking the 4k display up on both HDMI and DP, but with no noticeable difference.

Seems like the issue might be related to screen resolution, then..

And this from Hugh Kremer:

Screen resolution is definitely an issue. When I talked to Apple about

my overload and spiking problems the tech recommended an external GPU if

I’m running 4K, which I am. However, I learned through this or another

forum that if you run your 4K at one of the two native resolutions,

highest or 1920, it will greatly decrease the cpu demands. Do you know

what resolution your 4K was at? I can’t work at 1920, so I have my 32”

4K at the highest resolution. Things are small, but manageable.

Thank you for the warning James

So sorry to hear of your problems, totally unacceptable.

I think I am going for a 2 year old MacPro, with no adaptors and Ele Capitan, tried and tested.

I really hope you get things sorted, please keep us posted.

A lot of the (audio) issues with the newer Macs (not just the MacMini) are due to the T2 chip that is on the board. This is especially so if you have a USB audio interface.

A couple of things to try to at least alleviate the situation are:

Switching off "Set Time and Date Automatically" and uncheck "Location Sync" in the Timezone tab.

You could also try turning off your WiFi connection when using Logic to see if that helps.

It is a firmware issue with these new T2 equipped MAcs and what I've writen above may help you a bit. Until the issues get addressed in firmware they won't stop happening.

Hope some of this helps.

The problem seems related to the T2 chip overloading the USB2.0 bus. I found the following on Apple Insider.

"Unchecking the time sync only reduces the dropouts. You need to also uncheck the location sync in the Time Zone tab, but even then you're only reducing the dropouts. Any time the T2 chip tries to sync, it will overload the USB2.0 bus, causing dropouts. There is no way any musician should go on stage with a 2018 [Mac] and a USB2.0 audio interface directly connected to it. The only solutions are 1) Get a Thunderbolt or USB3.0 audio interface, or 2) Use a Certified Thunderbolt 3 powered hub (not a bus-powered or cheap non-certified hub) - Cable Matters has a solution for $169 on Amazon, but most of those hubs are at least $200-300. Using a certified TB3 hub creates a separate external USB2.0 bus, in which you can run your USB2.0 audio interface. The cheap hubs do not work because they don't run on the TB3 bus, and therefore they don't create their own separate USB2.0 bus, which means you're going to get dropouts."

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/02/19/pro-audio-glitch-with-t2-equipped-macs-connected-to-usb-20-connections

So, it seems there is a workaround.

Cannot test it myself since my computer doesn't have the T2 ship.

Hope that helps,

WD

It looks like it is related to the Time Daemon (timed process) pausing/unpausing Core Audio at some frequency. Some users report that killing the Time Daemon solve the problem. This may explain why unchecking time sync reduce the dropouts. How this is related to the T2 chip, I don't understand yet.

You can kill (Quit) the timed process in Activity Monitor for users who know what I'm talking about. Please report back here of the results. Be aware that you have to kill it again when you restart the OS.

Hope that helps,

WD