Glitches when routing audio from Traktor to Ableton

Hi all,

Would somebody be able to help with the following problem: sporadic audible glitches when routing audio from Traktor to Ableton Live to run a VST plugin on the master output.

The context is the following:
I am using Traktor to play music in a club which has a sound limiter.
The sound limiter operates in the vocal range, so in order to come close to the limiter's threshold without crossing it, I am dynamically compressing the vocal range using the TDRNova VST plugin, with Ableton Live 9 as the VST host.

So my setup is: Traktor -> route audio with either Rogue Amoeba Loopback or Jack Audio -> to Ableton Live -> which applies the TDRNova VST plugin -> then outputs the master output on a NI Scratch A6 card.
The whole thing runs on a brand new max'ed out Macbook Pro with a 3.1GHz quad-core Intel core i7 CPU, latest RAM specs etc., Mac OSX High Sierra 10.13.3.

The problem is:
Audible glitches happen randomly, i.e., perhaps once or twice in a 2 hours set, but they are very audible: either stuttering or point blank stopping the audio for an audible fraction of a second.

Has anybody ever managed to use a similar setup of applying VST plugins to Traktor output without any problem?

Some things I've tried are:
- Increasing the size of the audio buffers -> Doesn't help, and furthemore stutters permanently if set to 1024 or above in either Traktor, Live or Jack.
- Comparing Rogue Amoeba Loopback to Jack Audio as virtual interfaces -> Both are yielding the glitches. In the case of Jack I can see the XRuns happening through qjackctl. In Loopback I don't know how to monitor the overruns.
- However, the CPU does not seem overloaded at all, in any of the apps: all the CPU load monitors remain at very low levels in Traktor, Live and Jack.
- I have tried Pedalboard2 instead of Live as the VST host, wondering if that was something about "Live being too heavy", but both VST hosts have the glitches.
- The problem seems to have something to do with the virtual interface:
-- If I run Traktor and Live+TDRNova on two separate computers and route the audio via another sound card, it works fine. So the glitches are not due to the TDRNova filter settings.
-- If I run the audio by patching one output of the sound card to another input of the same card, to route the audio in hardware while running both Traktor and Live+TDRNova on the same computer, then it works fine too, but I get lots of latency, which is annoying when trying to start a track on time.
--> So it must be something related to using a virtual audio interface to link Traktor to Live.
- I have a subjective feeling that this setup used to work, say, 6 months ago, and that some MacOSX update broke it. But I cannot really prove it so it might just be subjective. But I wonder if something in coreaudio might be the limitation, since both Loopback and Jack somehow rely on coreaudio.
- I have tried trivial things such as switching off the wifi and such, but it didn't help.
- All my NI drivers are up-to-date with latest versions. The NI Audio 6 is probably a couple of years old.
- I have replaced all USB cables and tried to wiggle them, it doesn't seem to ba a connection problem, and the glitches happen the same with another NI sound card I have (Audio 8).
So I am now running out of ideas...

Would anybody have any other idea of what to try to make this work?
Has anybody observed the same issues?
Is it reasonable to hope to be able to run Traktor and Live+some VST plugins on the same Mac, has anybody managed that without any problem?
What could be a bottleneck if not the CPU?

Many thanks in advance,
- Sacha, Cambridge, UK

 

Hi! I have the same goal. Have accomplished it?
Have tried loop back features of audio interfaces?

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