I’ve recently got a Maschine Micro and Addictive Drums having previously started my finger drumming adventure on a Akai Live 2
I’m running Addictive drums on a 2015 Macbook Pro (2.7Ghz Dual-Core Intel Core i5), and it seems to occasionally momentarily lag. the samples take a split second longer to sound than they should, making it sound out of time. I was fairly sure it wasn’t just bad drumming so I set it up on my work computer (2019 Macbook Pro 2.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7) and doesn’t seem to lag there.
Is this to be expected from an older slower computer? Is there anything I can do to reduce lag?
My guess is a 2015 computer can have issues simply because of its age. You have this transition to M1 computers, with software being updated to being compatible with that. If Apple then drops support for OS updates (i think Sonoma is for 2018 Macbooks) you might get glitchy software.
So it’s not the speed per se, more the gap in compatibility that slowly occurs.
That said there are also some reasons these glitches could happen:
Older Intel processors switching from normal mode into “turbo boost” and back causes glitching in real time audio.
Usb power conservation when samples are loaded from an external disk can cause glitching.
Sometimes (mostly on older windows machines) turning wifi off helps.
I don’t have a mac, but probably you can also configure your audio buffer size there? What settings do you have and can you reduce the buffer size? What you describe sounds like latency to me. But an older machine might not handle lower latency without audio dropouts. 2015 is quite dated, but AD2 is also a quite old plugin that used to run well on such machines, I guess.