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Sound stuttering after Mountain Lion install

Dear community,


after having installed OSX Mountain Lion my sound startet stuttering whenever there is rapid movement on my screen.

This includes e.g. window movement, scrolling through image loaded websites or video playback (flash player, quicktime).

A restart didn't help. I'm using stereo output, not digital.


I have connected a second monitor but the problem persists after disconnecting it. Movement on the second monitor also causes the sound to stutter.

My GPU Diode temperature is at 85°C (there is some bug that keeps the GPU under load while a second monitor is connected AFAIK), but I guess it was the same under Snow Leopard.


In Snow Leopard the sound output was always perfect even under heavy load or heavy HDD I/O.


Any ideas?

iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Jul 28, 2012 5:48 AM

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Posted on Jul 28, 2012 3:22 PM

I am also having this issue as well.


I opened Activity Monitor and noticed that during the stuttering, coreaudiod jumps in CPU usage, often past 5%. I have also noticed graphics lag when this occurs if I'm doing something like watching full-screen video or gaming.


I'm currently experiencing this on mid 2011 iMac 27" as well as a 24" iMac 2009 model I use at work.

1,223 replies

Oct 29, 2012 5:08 AM in response to Pink Mink

my audio popping crackle starting in my 3 mac, macbook pro 2009, mac pro dual quad mid 2010 and macbook pro retina 15" all starting with osx lion and it's present in mountain lion..it's a sort of latency in audio playback when skip or stop audio playback in safari on youtube or all digital music player (beatport,traxsouce,trakitdow) preview , itunes when listen music when skip start stop music and in professional audio software ableton live logic, also when start stop playback or load plug-in in playback...very frustrating for me becuse i use my mac for making music..

Oct 29, 2012 6:13 AM in response to i.campbell

i.campbell wrote:


Carlo,


Let me repost one of my last messages:


Ok boys and girls. If you're still running Mountain Lion and you can easily reproduce the fault, and you have a passing familiarity with the Terminal application, then there is some really useful data you can gather for the Apple engineers...


$ sudo latency -p 97 -st 2000 -it 2000 \

-l ~/Desktop/latency_YYYYMMDDTHHMM.log


That command will monitor scheduling and interrupt latency and log the statistics to the file named at the end of the command. Because the command requires admin privileges to run, it's prefixed with "sudo"; that just means you'll be prompted to enter your password before the command can be executed.


Running this in the Terminal window for 10 to 15 minutes will generate a very large file, around 39 MB (3.4MB zipped), so don't run it for too long. Ideally, only run it for five minutes while you attempt to coax your OS into having a "funny turn." You can stop the monitor at any time by returning focus to the Terminal window and holding down Ctrl+C. Don't forget to right click on the log file and compress it.


If you think you have something viable, pipe up here and make that obvious. I'm pretty sure that the agents monitoring the channel will be in touch, provided that what you say you have seems useful to them and that they can reach you by phone. (Happened to me tonight).


But... only do this if you're comfortable, confident and competent at doing so. I'm only passing on what I think is constructive information, but I'm not prepared to get into a long-winded hand-holding session over it. You guys using the musical instruments will probably be the biggest source of help, with gamers also being able to provoke the Cougar on demand.


Edit: I'm gonna quit ma b!tchin' now and hope there's a fix. They're now clearly aware that a problem does exist, so let's help them find it.


So, what was it you just said? What was so insulting about that post?


My friend, that had better be your last comment on the issue!


I have now created a log file, while the sound stuttering happend...

To who can i send the log-file now?

Oct 29, 2012 4:13 PM in response to tttxx

I can tell you that the "fix" for me was installing a fan control (istat menus) so that I can keep the chips from overheating. Once I get to 70C GPU everything bogs down and stutters. I'm betting the latency issue is caused from heat. What is causing the heat is another thing entirely - the fan control is just a bandaid.

Oct 29, 2012 4:42 PM in response to Pink Mink

I agree. I have the issue on 2 systems. 27" iMac that was my general work horse and there the sound would break up randomly, even sometimes right after logon, the other is my media center mac mini, where the video freezes very occasionally. The iMac has been sent to Cork and onto who knows where for eveluation, and I'm awaiting a replacment, the mac mini I can live with for now, at least the sound on that one is ok.


Whilst waiting for my iMac to come back, I am on a new 13" MBP (not the retina) and that works fine.

Oct 30, 2012 6:21 AM in response to FrederikY

It's great that many of you are trying to find solutions with third-party software that's installed on your Mac. However, the problem exists on the basic operating system without any third-party applications installed. So there again, the focus still needs to be on Apple to fully fix this issue. Maybe now that Forestall is gone apple engineers will be more at ease. Or, Craig Federighi will now screw iOS up just like mountain goat. I'm hoping yesterday's shakeup will yield more quality software from apple and this will get fixed. If not, apple hardware still resells well.

Oct 30, 2012 7:43 AM in response to MoogNinja

Moog, your comment is spot on. What I loved about Steve was his ability to motivate, but also strike fear into those to do their job well. If you couldn't do it well, then they would find someone who could.


Apple has a horizontal organizational structure so everyone works in parallel. At least thats what they think. The teams need a better heirarchy to organize things.


Has anyone heard anything more if you were one of those who submitted the capture information for Apple when they contacted us? I haven't after 3 weeks.

Sound stuttering after Mountain Lion install

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