Interesting... so in your experience it wasn't an issue with the connection.
It's going to be so important to have the right combination of computer/OS and the interface.

This is the biggest reason I will have a dedicated computer for MS. It's not going to be a big deal because I have enough gear to sell... but for those just starting it's a larger up-front investment than slowly buying gear...

I'm thinking to go with a thunderbolt interface for best latency performance but there isn't too much variety out there at this point and prices are high. The Resident Audio units are the lowest prices but have to wonder how good they are. Good thing is I would buy new so if there is an issue I can return it...

It wasn't the connection. But honestly, I never did get to the bottom of it.

I would watch the console window and whenever it happened, a message would popup that said:

MainStage 3: Audio engine overloaded, resetting

It was absolutely maddening. Especially if I was recording a loop and got to listen to the snap crackle and pop loop back at me. There was no real reason to it either. It would happen when running a bunch of effects plugins and a looper. It would happen just noodling on clean Stick with all of the other stuff turned off.

And it wasn't strictly this device. I tried going back to an older MOTU FireWire unit I had (the 828mkii) and it did the same thing. Maybe it's just MOTU drivers? I dunno.

But at this point if I were going to try again, I would definitely commit to a Thunderbolt interface.

There was an software update on MainStage two days ago and I've been running it constantly since and can't crash it! The update seems to have fixed the program from going into that distorted sound with my interface.
- I have kept the program open the whole time but I have closed out the "concert" at some points.
- My computer (late 2012 w/ i7 core, El Capitan) has never been re-started. It's set so it never goes into standby or shut off the monitor.
- I've been running my usual daily programs at the same time (email, chrome, safari, iTunes, etc.)
- I've integrated the SoftStep with MS

It's been two days and no issues so I'm pretty happy about it. In the past the longest I've had it go with no issues was an hour or so and that was without any other programs running. I will keep the system going and see if it will ever crash.


edit: added that I have El Capitan operating system.

Well ... it's been quite a while since the last time I gave it a whirl but after your message I pulled the update, setup a simple patch, and played for a couple of straight hours today. Aside from the fact that it sounded like someone who hadn't practiced in a while, there was no noise or cutouts and my console display stayed clear.

I've been down this road before so I'm not ready to call my problems fixed but certainly it's worth rebuilding up my patches and giving this some serious consideration again.

We'll see. Stay tuned!

Hope springs eternal. I'll find some time this week to have a go at it again myself.


--
ramuji

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk - now Free

okay... in full disclosure I had one issue come up but it was not MainStage! Safari crashed on me... when it finally shut down everything else was okay except for my SoftStep wasn't working. I'm still working on learning the SoftStep and I notice is shuts itself off after a very long time (I notice it not on in the morning, except this morning)... still learning about this... I wonder if some of the SoftStep connectivity gets confused in the Mac and not knowing what it's controlling...

Absolutely no issues with the sound or any other functions in MainStage.

I'm going to keep an eye on everything but at this point I'm building a lot of confidence in a MS live setup. I think if I shut down everything else this would be very close to bullet proof...

I will report back after many more hours (maybe days) of having MS running.

Nix!

So spent about an hour this afternoon playing. I still haven't hooked up any effects at all. Just dry clean Stick. After a while though, I decided to plug Mobius and start doing some looping. Had some fun for about 10 minutes and than .... rrriiiiipppp ... faaaaaarrrrrrt ... all of my old demons returned.

I'll probably investigate further and see if there is any direct link to the looper and my issues. Mobius hasn't been updated and is still 32-bit. I've brought it back to life using "32-Lives" which appears to work well but you never know.

If I recall, I didn't need to have any loops going in the past to start hearing issues so I ruled Mobius out. But maybe just having it plugged in via 32-Lives is enough to cause issues. This is a drag because Mobius is the only looper I've found that will do a huge chunk of what the Echoplex does. Unfortunately he's pretty much disappeared so I'm not holding my breath for an updated version. Mathias Grob has told me he hopes to have a fully functioning Echoplex plugin available some time this year so that might pull me back as well.

Or maybe it's something else entirely. But surely this is the kind of stuff that sends people running back to their hardware rigs (as I've done a couple times and will likely do again).

Oh Bummer!
What computer are you running? (computer, processor, memory, OS)

It's a 2013 Macbook Pro.
2.4 GHz Interl Core i7 with 8GB RAM.

My OS is one back from the current one.

Certainly well more than enough to do what I'm trying to do.

Same here, but in my case it took less than 10 minutes of staring at the screen for the System Overload errors to crop up again.