[Solved] Mac: Audio recording drops out every few seconds

I've spent the last two days recording my first podcast episode. And as always, it didn't go as smoothly as I thought it would. After the first shot, I wondered why every 4 to 5 seconds a second was suddenly missing from the shot.

The second wasn't silence or noise, but just like "cut away". Of course, you can't really record a podcast this way, so I started troubleshooting.

The solution for people who don't want to read for a long time: I ended up having to disable some programs that were allowed to run in the background under System Preferences → General → Login Items.

If you're interested in how I found out, read on.

Changing audio apps didn't work

The first thing I tried was how different apps behaved. The first app I wanted to work with was Hindenburg - a really simple and easy to use app for iPad and Mac that allows multitrack recording and has a lot of good presets and features that podcasters are happy to have.

The dropouts in the recording were unfortunately present in Hindenburg, which is why I then included it Garage band and tried Audacity. But there were mistakes here too. With Audacity, in addition to the dropouts, there were even "hangs" where parts of the recording were repeated in rapid succession. It sounded like I was stuttering every few seconds.

So it was clear to me that the problems did not originate with Hindenburg himself, but rather were a problem with my macOS installation.

Creating a new user

My next step in investigating the cause of the audio dropouts was to create a new user on macOS. With this I then started Garageband and made a test recording.

The result: no dropouts. That meant something was installed in my user account that was causing the problems.

Check background objects

Small “auxiliary programs” are installed with many programs, which run in the background and wait for any events. For example, Microsoft installs an app that checks whether there are any updates for Microsoft software. Chrome also installs a background process and so accumulates a lot over time, which starts up with every system start and then constantly works in the background.

The programs that run in the background can be found under System settings → General → Login items under the “Allow in background” area. Next to the name of the program is a slide switch that can be set to "on" or "off".

I went through this list and disabled everything that I didn't think was necessary. For example, I also had processes like "chmod", "Christoph Sinai", "Helper Tool" and similar, which I could not assign to any app. I deactivated everything and then restarted the Mac so that the processes were really turned off.

Problem solved: background app interferes with recording

My next test showed that my suspicions were correct. The recording went without dropouts or hangs - no more problems.

One of these programs probably kept the system or the SSD so busy every few seconds that it could no longer take care of writing the audio files away. This caused the jumps in the recording that made every recording unusable.

If you have similar troubles with audio recordings, please leave me a comment here. Maybe we can find a solution to your problems together.

Jen Kleinholz( Founder & Sir Apfelot )

Jens has been running the blog since 2012. He appears as Sir Apfelot for his readers and helps them with problems of a technical nature. In his free time he drives electric unicycles, takes photos (preferably with his iPhone, of course), climbs around in the Hessian mountains or hikes with the family. His articles deal with Apple products, news from the world of drones or solutions for current bugs.