Audio crackling using apple 9 and apogee ensemble

Hi there,

I would suggest you take a look at the prefrences and see what your IO Buffer Size is.

I believe its Logic | Prefrences | Audio

About half way down is a Buffer size drop down menu and you can set your sample size. Try moving it to 64 and 32 to see if that helps.

I am having the same issue in Mainstage and I think I need a new Mac is the bottom line. My iMac is just too slow. Sigh.

Good luck!

6 months ago I bought a brand new Mac Pro, SSD drive, 28 Gb memory and new Ensemble. What followed was 6 months of tech support. Maestro 2 was very flaky and often wouldn't recognize the unit was connected. As well, sound would sporadically be dropped and I'd have to restart the Ensemble. The Ensemble would occasionally crash and have to be restarted holdng down the power button for up to 10 seconds. Once it even crashed my computer. I had a new one sent to me two weeks ago and all the symtoms have repeated on TWO computers!!! I think the Apogee Ensemble is not happy with Mountain Lion. I wish I could send it back and get something else!!!

I have exact the same problem with my Apogee Ensemble. It is great to hear that I am not the only one with this issue. Only way to get it working without dropps was to run Logic on a seperate installation of SnowLeopard on the same SSD. No way to get it working without drops and pops on Mountain Lion. Apogee support could not help at all and is pointing on problems with the OS. I really do not understand how they have tested there drivers by telling they are fully compatible with ML. I thought that a faster new iMAC i7 could probably help to solve this problem, but after reading your post, recognicing that you have this issue on a MAC PRO, I will definitely not upgrade my Hardware.

My hardware configuration is: iMAC i5 (mid 2010) with 16Gbyte Ram, 512 Gbyte SSD, 1 TB HD, Apogee Ensemble, Apogee Duett (exact the same problem btw) , Presonus Fire Tube ( working without any problem btw.) Yamaha CP1 connection via USB-MIDI-Driver. (latest driver version)

Interesting thing is, that if you change the parameter processor threads and working buffers, it seems to change for a while before it comes back after a some minutes. And it does not matter if you change the io-buffer to the next higher amount. On SL it works without problems with io-buffer size 64. On ML it does not work with 256!

The Apogee Ensemble is not fully Mountain Lion compatible. It was confirmed to me over the telephone by Apogee Tech Support. They recommended, as a fix, to install Snow Leopard and haven't replied to any further support requests.

Did they say anything if they were working on a fix for this?

Apogee told me that a developer has to look into my problem. After this short info they do not longer respond to my mails! So I don't think that anyone is really working on a fix. Ensemble is out of production and maybe Logic X will come in the future, so why working on it? . I'am pretty sure that this was the last Apogee Product I've bought!

Same with me - after determining that the Ensemble is NOT compatible with Snow Leopard, I wrote saying I'd like my money back. (Their suggestion had been I install Snow Leopard, but I can't on my mid-2012 Mac Pro.) After that I didn't get a response. Dropped like a hot potato. I even called Customer Satisfaction and was told I'd get a call back from somebody there. Nothing. Luckily the company that sold me the gear took it back (minus 10%) but if they hadn't I most certainly would have reported Apogee to the Better Business Bureau and started a case to get my money back. Ed, I recommed you consider that if you can't return your equipment.

And yeah, last bit of Apogee gear for me as well.

Edit: it's not compatible with Mountain Lion. Fully compatible with Snow Leopard. Sorry about that!

Has anyone got an email from their support where they confirm that the ensemble isn't 100% compatible with ML?

No, what happened was I got a telephone call from Apogee (after writing to them twice) during which time the technician who I'd been dealing with said that as more people are upgrading to ML they are getting more and more calls with problems like mine, and that his recommendation was to downgrade to Snow Leopard for perfect usage. Sadly none of that was put into writing. I briefly considered buying another internal SSD drive and installing SL on it, but it's not technically supported on my model Mac Pro, and it doesn't seem right to have to do that. Last I wrote to Apogee was on January 20th asking for them to return my money, as the Ensemble was wasting too much of my time. I nudged them twice about this email but did not get a response.

If they say the Ensemble is fully compatible with ML they are lying then... I feel like i've been fooled.

still no reaction from Apogee!

but, I tried another thing:

if I connect my early 2011 MacBockPro (i5) with 2,3 GHz and 8Gbyte Ram to the Ensemble (same cable same setup ) and load exactly the same tune with the same setup, it works much much better, even if I change the io-buffer to 128 or 64!! Strange if compared with my iMac (Mid 2010) QuadCore 2,8GHz (i5) with 16 Gbyte RAM. Could it have something to do with the newer processor architecture or so? Processor load is very low in both configurations. However, I presume that neither Appel or Apogee will take this issue

As soon as I get the possibilitiy to test with the brand new iMac I'll let you know what happens.

Where you using ML on the MBP?

Better you say.. no pops/clicks at all or just less?

yep, mountain lion on MBP. Pops and clicks seems like they disapeared, but I still need some time for testing.

I run a middle 2011 mac mini with i7 Core 2 and had no problem sience ML. But i also have a mid 2009 MBP 2,53Ghz Core 2 (with ML) i will do some testing with this one as well.