Q: Sound stuttering after Mountain Lion install

Apple contacted me from seeing my posts on this thread. They took log files and never replied back. 

I got my money back (and some free movie credits) and rolled back to Lion. There was still crackling on Lion; if you search Google you will see although not as common, there were audio issues on Lion too. And these issues were never resolved, they just moved forward and shipped ML, and audio issues grew!!!  I jumped from SL to ML.

Next I rolled back to SL, rock solid audio again. Never a pop!  Clean efficient OS no with trendy social networking crap or notifications or other baggage. SL was their best piece of work, at least it worked!

Keep posting, if this thread needs to reach 1 million posts then so be it, I won't stop posting, and I won't upgrade until I see they have fixed audio for everyone on L and LM.

Peace.

the same my stutter audio started with lion in my mac pro and macbook pro retina

not ever, but costantly in playback audio..

I jumped from SL to ML too. SL was rock solid, but I do like ML aside from this issue.

The problem seems so random and intermittent. I reset my PRAM 3 times the other day and it seemed to sort things out, certainly no more kernel panics. 3-4 days later and seemingly no issue with tunes playing all day, then suddenly I had a very slight stutter today, then nothing again. I know the  mdworker has issues, I wonder if that has anything to do with this.

I tested using my MBA playing tunes for a day and had no issue, which is why I was starting to thing my iMac may have some hardware issue, although it's totally fine in regards to gereral performance. The more reports I read on here point to it surely being a OS issue, especially if the issue has stuck since Lion as ML is predominately the same OS with additional features.

I would happily install some diagnostic software if Apple would get in touch.

Yes this concerns me greatly. They moved ahead after the Lion issues and now I see on TUAW that there is an OS X 10.9 about.

Seriously?!

Have any of you tried to find this specific thread on here by typing "sound stuttering after" ? There are dozens of them!

This is just madness. How are we supposed to work like this?

Today I got video flickering while playing an AVI file and copying 120 gigs of data to the same drive.

Same problem here on my iMac 27 i7 mid2011. The problem occurs always during video and audio playback no matter what player is used.

I did not find the same problem on my MBA 13 i5 and older MBP 13 also with ML installed, however I do not used them for music or video.

Just had the issue again, here's the console log from the exact time the issue occured - my hunch may be right, the dreaded mdworker seems to have caused this one...

09/11/2012 16:03:55.000 kernel[0]: Sandbox: sandboxd(53177) deny mach-lookup com.apple.coresymbolicationd

09/11/2012 16:06:19.000 kernel[0]: IOAudioStream[0xffffff802ae9ea00]::clipIfNecessary() - Error: attempting to clip to a position more than one buffer ahead of last clip position (46d2,1f0)->(46d3,30c).

09/11/2012 16:06:19.000 kernel[0]: IOAudioStream[0xffffff802ae9ea00]::clipIfNecessary() - adjusting clipped position to (46d3,1f0)

09/11/2012 16:06:19.000 kernel[0]: IOAudioStream[0xffffff802ae9ea00]::clipIfNecessary() - Error: attempting to clip to a position more than one buffer ahead of last clip position (46d4,1b0c)->(46d5,2c74).

09/11/2012 16:06:19.000 kernel[0]: IOAudioStream[0xffffff802ae9ea00]::clipIfNecessary() - adjusting clipped position to (46d5,1b0c)

09/11/2012 16:06:20.839 mdworker[53259]: Unable to talk to lsboxd

09/11/2012 16:06:20.877 mdworker[53260]: Unable to talk to lsboxd

09/11/2012 16:06:20.898 sandboxd[53261]: ([53259]) mdworker(53259) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd

09/11/2012 16:06:20.902 sandboxd[53261]: ([53260]) mdworker(53260) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd

09/11/2012 16:06:21.000 kernel[0]: Sandbox: sandboxd(53261) deny mach-lookup com.apple.coresymbolicationd

I think I have something similar here, too:

but what is "mdworker"?^^

Edit: ok google says "mdworker" is spotlight which is indexing new files…so should I try to turn off spotlight?

It is just mind boggling to me that Apple has yet to fix this problem. So many people with this problem, and I'm sure it's affecting people's jobs as it is mine, which is just unacceptable. It's been almost 6 months and this is a serious issue.

Fixing major issues like this should be a priority over a new OS release, IMO.

Same problem here. Unfortunatley, I'm running a new Macbook Pro (non-retina), so I can't "downgrade" to SL (otherwise I'd do it in a heartbeat).

I installed the Macbook Pro update 2.0 last night, but haven't seen any improvement... I was hoping that might address this issue... I was interested to see FrederikY's post, which at least includes a specific reference to audio. Looking around, I found this mentioned on the coreaudio-api mailing list:

"I have never known this log message to be indicative of an IO problem. In fact, it is more likely that the app experiencing the glitch had it's problem first. Then, after the HAL resynchronized as part of recovering from the glitch, it triggered this log message when it resumed calling the kernel trap."

This was in response to a developer who noticed the same error correlated with audio drop-outs in his app. The thread was from 2010, which suggests that it wasn't strictly Lion or ML related... However, I suppose it may be related to a similar underying problem. Dunno.

I emailed my contact guy from when they reached out for the engineers about polling our system for reports 6 weeks ago or so.  He replied that he still didn't have an update.  I'm honestly at the point that I just want them to replace both of my computers.  If they can't make software with their own hardware then that's just bad business and completely unacceptable.  I'm going to give them the chance to capture my two units and supply two new ones with newer hardware that hopefully are supported by their own OS.  If I can't get that, I'm just going to let a judge decide what the best course of action is.  I spoke to one rep on the phone today who was rude as can be and said I could pay them for tech support and trouble shooting my computer.  Even in the face of it being their fault they wanted to extort more money out of me.  Now that is rubbish. 

Guess my post was deleted.  If they spent a fraction of the time fixing bugs as they do moderating the discussions boards and deleting valid posts, I'd be willing to bet many issues would be fixed already. 

This has gone beyond the point of anything reasonable!  I have yet to hear back from my initial problem and I reported that shortly after Mountain Lion became available!

  All I have to do is look at the Feedback on the App store and see all the negative reviews, including more than enough reports of sound problems and Battery problems!

  Why hasn't Apple acknowledged ANYTHING about this?  I'm holding on to a not very stable clone of a Lion install from months back simply because I can listen to iTunes, watch a movie, play Starcraft all without problems!

  I have about 1.5 years left on the Apple Care for my 27" i7 iMac, and I'm considering installing Mountain Lion again just so I can take it to Genius and show them what we are going through!  That and the bleedthrough I get on the lower left hand corner of my screen have made me turn a corner in my Apple support!

  My next machine might simply be a discounted Windows 7 machine by Dell or HP, simply because I know they give support When It Counts!

  Also I've not found anywhere on the App store that could help me get my Money back for my Purchase of Mountain Lion!  Since it Does Not WORK I think I deserve my money back!

  Is this really going to be any better with the new OS X?  or will it run great for the first hour simply because it had a restart?

  I should not have problems with this machine!  An iMac i7 core, 2GB video card, 1 TB hard drive, it should be top of the line, instead i paid for a Mercedes and wound up with a Ford!

Mark, the only good thing I have to say about Apple is they gave me my money back FAST!  Like over the top nicey nicey to me in email (probably cause I yelled so loud here). Just email customer service and say you need to use sound for your work, sound is disfunctional, thus you need money back.

For people in pro audio using a Metric Halo interface; MH came out with a work around driver this week. I made a TM backup of my solid SL system and ventured to ML again using the new driver. The pops went WAY down but still a few. I restarted and it was pop free for the rest of the night. I'll report back after this weekend of recording but it was clean this morning too so fingers crossed.

But this tells me a third party already figured out what Apples problem is and made a fix?  Maybe Apple should be communicating with people!!!

How long did it take to get your money back and how old were the machines? 

Late 2009 iMac. They put thru refund same day I asked, takes a few days to hit account.