[raif]

I am running itunes on a mac, where I store all of my music.

For some reason the sound will stop outputing through my m-audio transit after some specific amount of time if I have it set to 16/44.1. I have to reset the computer to get it working again. If I leave it at 24/96 there usually isn't any problems.

I don't mind setting the m-audio(and consequently the mac default sound output) to 24/96 but something wodgy said has me wondering.

With that setting I would assume that itunes decodes/outputs the music as 16/44.1 which is then resampled to 24/96 by my m-audio transit, through to the Benchmark Dac-1 which then upsamples again. That can't be good in an audiophile sense.

Does anyone have any experience here with the mac and would know specific information on what is going on with itunes vs soundcard output? Now that I broke the bank on a new pair of headphones, I feel I should be feeding them with the optimal quality possible.

Anybody got any suggestions?

 

[blessingx]

Have you tried the various 'legacy' (or called something similar for buffer, I believe) settings? If I remember correctly when I first got my AP USB I had to work a bit with it in OS X.

 

[raif]

do you mean latency?

I haven't tried that no.

So higher latency if I want to use 16/44.1?

 

[Wodgy]

You may want to ask M-Audio tech support about this. It seems like more than one person would be having the same problem you're having.

Turning the latency up will have no impact on sound quality, so it doesn't hurt to try that either.

 

[Demolition]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wodgy You may want to ask M-Audio tech support about this. It seems like more than one person would be having the same problem you're having.

Yes, more than one person is having this issue. In fact, quite a few people are suffering from it to some degree, ranging from unexpected cessation of function (what raif is experiencing) and problems with sleep/wake, to crashing and freezing. See here for an example. There are other complaints scattered throughout various Mac-oriented forums.

Anyway, it's a known issue. M-Audio is supposed to be working on new drivers to correct these problems, and for compatibility with Mac OS X 10.3.3 (even though 10.3.4 is already out). From all accounts, they're not in much of a hurry. That's par for the course with M-Audio, though. They're well-known slackers when it comes to releasing new drivers.

D.

 

[raif]

thanks for the replies. I tried with each latency setting and each crashed.

I have disabled sleep and shutting of hard disks, but it still crashes after some amount of time.

I am rather annoyed with m-audio. I returned the audiophile firewire for these types of problems. Oh well, I need an optical out so I will just put up with this for the time being.

 

[Wodgy]

Have you tried the suggestion in the article Demolition linked to? You should. Basically it substitutes the M-Audio drivers with the ones provided by Apple, and built into OS X which should hopefully work better. All you need from the M-Audio drivers is the firmware loader; the hardware itself needs this to initialize. Demolition's article describes this. (I think it's cool that you can separate the firmware loader from the actual drivers on OS X; I don't think you can do the same in Windows.)

 

[raif]

COOL!!!

I will give that a try. I didn't even notice the link the first time or I read through his post(I had to learn flash and fix our virtual tour program all in one week so my eyes are dead tired)

Thanks for the help, I will report back with results.


ALSO, what are peoples thoughts on the double resample issue. As I said before, the m-audio is rock solid when set to 24/96. Do you folks know if itunes decodes itself to 16/44.1 and then the output is resampled again by the m-audio card before outputing? Just curious because of the weird "upsamples to 110khz" thing the DAC1 does, I don't want to much resampling before the DAC1 does its thing.