Comment by qppo
6 years ago
How old is your Mac? That issue sounds very strange to me.
CoreAudio is far and away the most impressive and powerful audio API across the board. It's ridiculous how much you can do with it and the abstractions it provides.
It's also been better, faster, and supported lower latency than Windows up until WASAPI came around - you needed to use ASIO on Windows for years. Even today you can't programmatically change the sample rate of a device on Windows, which means that engines like RtAudio have to do resampling under the hood to support basic functionality that's been in CoreAudio.
The only problem with it is that the documentation has evaporated. Which admittedly is a big one.
> How old is your Mac? That issue sounds very strange to me.
New MBP 16". Apparently it's a problem with the T2 security chip and affects almost all external USB 2.0/3.0 audio devices. Just do a google search for audio drop outs and T2. All digital audio goes through the T2 chip which seems to add latency and these drop outs. I think the only solution at the moment is to use a USB-C native device (but I haven't tested this). If you already have substantial hardware like I do, Catalina is basically unusable (and no fix in sight from Apple...).
fwiw I don't think any audio manufacturer (hardware or software) has advised it "ok" to use Catalina, and OS upgrades have been a problem for as long as I've used professional audio tools.
I understand with brand new machines it's a problem, but buying less-than battle tested hardware/software has always been problematic. If you already have substantial hardware, you probably shouldn't be buying a brand new machine and expecting it to just work after a major OS upgrade.
I shouldn't expect a widely used standard (USB Audio) to work after upgrading my hardware? All the Windows and Linux machines I've had have no problem with USB audio and I don't expect they ever will.
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