Soundflower Crackling OS10.6.8

docsportello's icon

Hello All! I'm having a little trouble with Soundflower's audio quality. When I route the audio of a standalone plugin to Max, or to anywhere else for that matter, Soundflower is plagued with crackles and pops. These start very infrequently, but after a few minutes become totally intolerable. Resetting the buffer size in Soundflower or Max temporarily solves the problem, but soon Soundflower's stream will have again devolved into a sea of artifacts. I use Soundflower version 1.5.2 and Mac OS 10.6.8. I have tried installing Soundflower versions 1.6.6, 1.6.5, and 1.6.4, but the installation has always failed! (even after uninstalling the original 1.5.2.) I've contemplated switching to Jack, but Soundflower just works so well with everything except for those pops and crackles! :( Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've seen a lot of people on these forms and others with similar problems, but haven't found a definite solution. Thanks for your time!

Andro's icon

Do you use an external soundcard or the internal one ?
Have you tried it with a huge buffer size , say 2048 to see if thats the problem ?
Have you tried just making an empty patch with no other objects except the ones you need ?
What version of Max are you using ?
I have OS X 10.6.8 and I've never had a problem sending 16 channels of audio from Ableton live into max for signal processing.
Try using CCleaner to get rid of the old files left from previous installs.

docsportello's icon

Hey! Thanks for your response! My I'm just using the internal soundcard on a 2010 macbook pro. I'm using Max 5.1.7, but the behavior occurs regardless of whether I'm using Max, or Logic, or whatever else... Setting the buffer size to 1024 or 2048 while I'm listening through soundflowerbed produces a constant frightening/deafening barrage of noise at the maximum possible volume... I'll try the ccleaner thing though! Which version of soundflower are you using?
Thanks so much for your help!
-Jesse