It could be some other rogue program on your system periodically taking up all CPU.

Hello Messrs. AMS001 and Mossy,

I concur with Mossy's assessment that some program might devour your CPU availabliity. 

Since you are in Mac OS 10.9, you might try opening your Activity Monitor located in the Utilities Folder inside your Applications folder.  This will reveal which program is hogging your CPU.  In the past, I have determined that my Apogee Duet Daemon was consuming gobs of %CPU power for no apparent reason.  All I had to do was to force the Duet Daemon to quit, and my four processors each dropped from almost 100% usage to almost no usage.  Haven't had a problem since.  In fact, I keep the Activity Monitor available in my toolbar, so as to refer to it from time to time.

Food for thought.

Cheers,

Joe

In a separate terminal window, keep TOP running nonstop w/ a 1 second delay and whenever you run into the Pianoteq problem, immediately bring up the top terminal to see what processes is listed at the top.

Actually you don't really need to set the delay to 1 second. (this takes up some CPU by itself) ...you can press space at any time in the top window to have it immediately update.

In a separate terminal window, keep TOP running nonstop w/ a 1 second delay and whenever you run into the Pianoteq problem, immediately bring up the top terminal to see what processes is listed at the top.

I'm concerned the problem is there to begin with......

The situation seems to be that pianoteq maxes out, and the sound stops abruptly then after a few seconds it recovers and comes back on.

The polyphony isn't working hard at the time it maxes out either.....

I'm running a Macbook pro Processor  2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 Memory  4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Software  OS X 10.9.5.

It's crashed randomly three times whilst performing now......

Has anybody else had the same thing happen? Any explanations??

Thanks in advance