So, I have a audio visualization composition that uses the Play Audio File and Send Live Audio nodes and while playing, from time to time, not at any specific regular interval, the audio will pause for a few tens of milliseconds (10? 20? 30?) as if the rest of the composition was catching up with the audio.
Anything in particular I should be looking at to solve this? It happens in the last few versions of Vuo and in macOS 10.11 and 10.12, and the audio interface seems to make no difference (Built-in, RME Fireface UC).
I’d look at trying to make the composition as efficient as possible. Particularly, minimizing the overlap between event streams in the audio and graphics parts of the composition. If there are a bunch of nodes that get executed with every audio event and every video event, maybe they only need to be executed by the video event.
Perhaps building up a replica of the composition from the very basics would help. If you just have Fire on Start -> Play Audio File -> Send Live Audio, the audio plays smoothly, right? As you add in the visualization piece by piece, at what point does the audio start falling behind?
If you still have questions, could you post the composition (or a reduced version of it that exhibits the problem)?
No, I’m not live coding. The impression is not that the audio is falling behind but rather is waiting for something: it doesn’t skip, it waits. Anyway, the circumventing solution is to use an external audio player (like Vox, or iTunes, or…) and connect it to Vuo using Soundflower or Loopback.
But still, I would like the composition to be autonomous (audio player inside the composition). My hunch is that it’s related to parallel processing of the audio with one of the branches that’s less CPU demanding.
@Kewl let me know that the problem occurs in Vuo 1.2.4 but not in Vuo 1.2.5, so apparently it was fixed by some performance improvement or bug fix in Vuo 1.2.5.
@Kewl, sorry, I was unclear. You told me that when you tested recently with Vuo 1.2.5 the problem was no longer happening. I jumped to the conclusion that you’d been using Vuo 1.2.4 earlier. But if not, no need to test with 1.2.4. If you were using 1.2.5 the whole time, maybe the problem was related to CPU usage by other applications.
Nooooo! :p Can you think of anything different between when it works and when it doesn’t? For example, you had more applications running / more CPU load when it didn’t work? Have you tried breaking down the composition into smaller pieces to try to narrow down the problem?