UR44 Audio Dropouts on Mac Studio (M1 Max, Monterey 12.6)

Steinberg Hardware UR Series
1

Any ideas?

I am experiencing millisecond audio dropouts (audible clicks) on audio going into the interface. It happens while software monitoring or recording in Ableton Live (both v10 and v11). The interface is unusable in this state since I can’t even record a minute of audio without a dropout.

-Mac Studio (Apple M1 Max, Monterey 12.6)
-Current driver (3.1.3)
-Increasing/Decreasing buffer size or sample rate doesn’t fix
-Tried different USB 2 and 3 ports/cables
-There is nothing relevant in Console when the dropouts occur
-Audio output is fine, no dropouts, it’s just incoming audio on any input
-System is not under load when the dropouts occur (i.e. it’s not a performance thing)

My intuition leads me to think these are OS interrupts causing the dropouts and the driver isn’t handling it correctly.

I read a little on MacOS deprecating KEXTs, and that 3rd party audio drivers on these current macs are running in user space where audio streams can be interrupted by other processes. I don’t know if that’s the case with Steinberg’s drivers for Mac, but suffice to say, at least on my new Mac Studio, the interface drivers are not working correctly.

Previously using the UR44 with a 2013 Mac Mini (Mavericks) with zero issues. It was always rock solid.

2

Sorry to say, I ended up fixing my problem by purchasing a different budget audio interface. It’s a red one. It’s working perfectly at 32 samples/ 96khz with no dropouts, so the problem has to be with the steinberg drivers.

I mostly blame Apple for this, I know they’ve been dealing developers some bs with all the changes to their architecture. But still, I’ve been waiting around since early 2022 to get some working drivers from Steinberg, so it was time to move on.