Crackling sound with playback on Mac

• Sep 21, 2018 - 15:09

On my iMac Musecore produces crackling noise on playback. Usually the crackling diminishes when repeating the song.
I happens with all files. It is worse when the score is more complex.


Comments

In reply to by Edel Maex

Did you perhaps turn up the volume meanwhile? That would be the main cause of audio distortion. Go back to View / Synthesizer and turn the volume back down. If you need to hear things louder, turn up your overall system or speaker volume, don't use the volume control in MuseScore. It's already set by default to be about as loud as it can be without distorting.

In reply to by Edel Maex

OK, then even though you say it happens with "all scores", it could be that all the scores you create have something in common (other than the fact that they were presumably created by you), so in order to try to diagnose the problem, we'd need you to attach one of the problem scores.

In reply to by Shoichi

I have the same problem on the latest 15-inch MacBook Pro 2018 (Core i7 at 2.6GHz, 16GB of RAM, Radeon Pro 560X) whereas my 13-inch MacBook from 2016 seems to be okay. The crackling sound is quite loud when the dedicated GPU is not active (when I switch apps for example), but it almost disappears when the dedicated GPU is active (it just happens when I switch to another note WHILE playing). I know that the nightly builds activate the dedicated GPU by default but it is quite annoying because there are some layout issues with the nightly builds. I am currently using this soundfont: SGM-v2.01-SMP-Sal-JNv1.3.sf2 .

I just installed OS version Mojave, and have played several scores without any spurious artifacts. But when I installed High Si months ago, there were a couple of good days, too, before the problem recurred. Let's hope ....

I had/have the same problem on my Dell/Linux/Ubuntu.
After reloading file, retrieving old non corrupt file, relaunching muse3, rebooting, changing earbuds/speaker, uninstalling muse3, reloading fresh musescore3...still had problem. Then...
I wrote another four bars X two instruments in another tab (with original scratchy file still open). When I realized the 'scraties' were gone, I tabbed over to the original scratchy composition (still open) and the scratches were totally gone!
In the five or so months of working with Musescore's 2 & 3 I've never had a problem with Muse on Windows. Makes you think.
Ray Stoddard

The playback is really disturbing if there is a certain amount of instruments or more; I cannot say how many.

But, trying to playback the same score with Musescore 2.3.2, and, guess what: no problem at all.

So I think this proves that this is an issue regarding Musescore 3, and not the machines of everybody that's facing the issue.

Tried both with a 2012 Macbook Pro.

In reply to by Steven C Davis

Well, it's partially understood, and there 8was* a fix made that should be in 3.4.2 that should help in general, and reports are that it does for most people. Could still be that a small number of users are on systems with other unique properties (low RAM, slow disk for paging, high CPU usage, etc) and are still seeing some vestiges of this, though. Can you share more about your system details?

Same problem, with early 2016 Macbook 1.1 Ghz m3 8Gb, less powerful but it seems like this a common problem among Macs. maybe there's a capacitor or smth that handles audio output and the registered playback is too much for the mac to handle as instead of one sound, their many sounds, (which is why the problem doesn't occur during website playback) i guess its just bad engineering

The crackling noise appears on all platforms, if you have more than one score open.
Close all the scores you are not using and it goes away.

In reply to by axelfacebook

I use an Apple machine too and have had this problem on score for violin and piano. Every time the piano has the pedal down for more than a beat or two the crackling appears and gets louder until it drowns the music completely. taking the pedal markings away makes the crackling go away completely.

I help myself by saving the file as mp3 and listening to that.

I'm not sure if your problem has been fixed, but I just tried deleting the MuseScore.sf3 soundfont and reinstalling it. My Mac's audio is nice and crisp again!

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