How to optimise your Mac for audio performance

1. Set your audio interface buffer size to suit the task at hand

Recording latency is the time lag between an instrument, microphone or MIDI signal arriving at the input of an audio interface and the resulting sound being heard at the output, and balancing it against stability has always been part and parcel of making music with computers. The user-facing variable that sets that balance is the size of the audio buffer – a reserved memory space in which incoming and outgoing audio data is staged for processing by the DAW running on the host computer.
 
With a small buffer size, the computer processes just a few samples at a time, which results in low latency as those samples are sent to the DAW very quickly, but high CPU overhead and the potential for buffer underruns, manifesting as clicks and pops in the signal. With a larger buffer, more samples are processed at a time, and the computer is given more time to do it, which results in lower CPU overhead and greater stability, but a longer wait for that data to be processed and passed on to the DAW – and thus, higher latency.
 
The clear advice here, then, is to set the buffer as low as it will go before clicks or pops occur when recording (32 or 64 samples, say), then raise it to 512 or 1024 samples for editing, mixing and mastering, when latency is irrelevant but playback stability is mission-critical.

Audient and EVO audio interfaces greatly simplify latency management by not only providing extremely low latency even at moderate buffer sizes, but also featuring direct monitoring. With this activated, the input is split into two parallel signals: one passed straight to the interface’s output for truly latency-free monitoring, the other routed to the DAW track for recording as usual. Direct monitoring is ideal when recording guitar, vocal and other ‘live’ parts, but with the caveat that the monitored signal isn’t processed by any plugins on the DAW track, of course, since it’s bypassing the DAW entirely in order to sidestep the latency that it introduces.

2. Configure Energy Saving and Sleep settings

The last thing you want to happen when you’re deep in the flow of recording is for your Mac to introduce a take-ruining audio dropout or lose connection to your audio interface completely as it throttles the system in the interest of energy-saving, or tries to put itself to sleep. Happily, this one’s a cinch to sort: open the macOS System Settings panel, click the ‘Energy’ tab, then turn ‘Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off’ on and ‘Put hard disks to sleep when possible’ off.

3. Disable background processes and Startup items

Macs are pretty good at keeping themselves running at their best through a variety of behind-the-scenes maintenance routines. However, there are still a few user-adjustable system components that we’d recommend checking in on and tweaking regularly in order to maximise the RAM and CPU time available to your music software and audio interface.
 
First up, go to System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions, and make sure all the apps in both the ‘Open at Login’ and ‘App Background Activity’ panels are actually required, deleting or disabling any that aren’t. Then, disable any cloud syncing and backup applications, such as Dropbox, iCloud and Time Machine, and quit any third-party system maintenance software that might be running. And last but not least, run the First Aid routine in Disk Utility every month or so to ensure that your system drive remains issue-free.

4. Use external storage for sample libraries

It’s now over half a decade since Apple last sold a Mac housing a spinning hard disk and finished transitioning the entire Mac line-up to high-speed SSDs. Even the speediest internal storage can start to strain under the demands put upon it by a massive DAW project, though, so it pays to offload as much of that stress as possible to an external drive.
 
Storing your virtual instrument soundbanks, sample libraries and even active projects on a USB-C or Thunderbolt SSD reduces the read/write load on your Mac’s internal drive, thereby helping to keep your system running as smoothly as possible. Plus, of course, it enables the effortless sharing of sample libraries between multiple Macs – a main Mac Studio and a mobile MacBook Pro, for example – and reduces the anxiety that constantly maintaining the oft-cited 20% free space on your system drive can all too easily induce.

5. Set macOS Mic Mode to ‘Standard’

In response to the inexorable rise of video-conferencing over the last few years, Apple have added system-level microphone input processing to macOS (from macOS 12 Monterey onwards), intended to isolate spoken voice capture from background sounds. It works on both the Mac’s built-in mics and those hooked up to your Audient or EVO audio interface, so unless you actually want to apply its particular equalisation to your recordings (which you almost certainly don’t), you’d best shut it off.
 
With your DAW open, click the orange and white microphone icon in the macOS Menu Bar and set Mic Mode to ‘Standard’ if it isn’t already. Done!

6. Manage resource-heavy plugins with track freeze

Finally, by far the most likely offenders when a productive DAW session is getting bogged down into a laggy, frustrating slog are the plugins running therein. Virtual instruments and effects make fully in-the-box production an empowering reality for musicians at all levels of ability and budget, but you can only fire up so many of them before your Mac hits its signal processing limits and starts to struggle. For that reason, all the major DAWs feature the ability to instantly ‘freeze’ any individual track in place at a click, rendering its processed output as a flat audio file and deactivating all its loaded plugins to free up RAM and CPU cycles. If you need to adjust said effects and/or instruments later, simply unfreeze the track, make your changes, then freeze it again.
 
Track freezing is nothing short of a life-saver when projects start getting busy, so actively incorporating into your workflow is highly recommended. And for assistance in identifying which plugins are causing the greatest drain on resources, open your DAW’s performance meter and bypass plugins one by one to see how much CPU and memory each one is using.