2021-04 update: this article was published in early 2013. Fun fact, I still use the same PC I wrote about here (including the NI Komplete 6 audio interface) for my music productions. I’ve added more RAM and lots of additional VSTs and sample libraries. 🙂
I removed some links to software that unfortunately is not available anymore. Even though the article is somewhat older, the trouble-shooting methodology is still valid today.
No articles for a long time – what happened?
Almost 3 months ago I finally bought a new PC system. I also got a bunch of new software like Komplete 8 and Omnisphere. So, there was lots of installing and configuring going on. Templates to build. New sounds to check out.
And I did write a 2000+ word article on how to choose your music PC components. So why isn’t at least that article online yet?
Good question.
I simply couldn’t justify an article about how to choose the best components for your DAW, when my own new system wasn’t working the way it should.
Audio Drop-Outs and System Crashes
See, after the first round of toying with the new system and building various Cubase templates I experienced audio drop-outs and system crashes. Not fun after putting down a large sum of cash with high expectations for a well-performing system.
A single Omnisphere instance sometimes caused crackling and drop-outs. Now Omnisphere is a comparatively resource-hungry beast – that’s part of the reason I didn’t already buy it years ago. It simply would NOT have run on my old, measly single core Athlon PC with 2GB of RAM. But on a quad-core i7 with 16 GB of RAM and some SSD drives there shouldn’t be any issues at all.
At least not with a single instance.
Some googling for a solution led me to the free DPC Latency Checker. (Edit: link removed because the software is not available anymore.) If you are running a Windows system I highly recommend you download this free program. You don’t even need to install it, just run the .exe file and it will show you the latency of your system in real-time.
Here’s what I was seeing on my system right after a fresh boot-up.
While the status message says that the system should be able to handle real-time audio, yellow bars is definitely not what you want to see from the get-go.
Red Alert
And here’s some red spikes after changing presets in Omnisphere:
So with a graphic confirmation of the problems – what to do next?
- Don’t ever change sounds?
- Live with the clicks and drop-outs?
Absolutely NOT.
Install the Latency Monitor program.
This will dig deeper and actually show you the culprits causing the latency issues. In my case I could see that there was something weird going on with the driver of my graphics card.
Fortunately, there was an update available at Nvidia’s website and after installation I suddenly had green bars only. Yippie!
Continued Audio Problems Even After Updates
The Yippie feeling didn’t last long, though. Still red bars galore when changing presets:
Since the main system seemed to be stable and suitable for audio – it was time to tackle the next potential error source.
At that point I assumed that the bottleneck was my old Alesis io2 soundcard. Under Windows XP I was quite happy with it. I didn’t need anything fancier in terms of connections, the sound was more than decent and even the driver performed more than adequate.
Not so in Windows 7. No specific ASIO driver anymore from Alesis and I had to resort to the generic ASIO4All driver, which is almost never the best solution. You definitely need/want a dedicated ASIO driver written for your specific hardware sound card.
Shop Till You Drop – Time for a New Sound Card
With some hope re-gained after the first latency monitor software induced success I figured it doesn’t make sense to buy all that new hardware and software and then skimp around when it comes to the so important audio interface. So after 2 days of researching various options I ordered the NI Komplete Audio 6 interface with the gut feeling that this should solve my problem.
My fantasy was that when the sound card gets delivered I’d plug it in and it would simply work and I’d finally be able to just enjoy and use my new system.
Nice fantasy, huh?
Here’s what really happened.
I installed the dedicated NI ASIO driver, started Cubase and Omnisphere and was greeted by fat red spikes which even made a complete re-boot necessary.
You can imagine how frustrated I was. All the money invested into my new system with all the accumulated software waiting to be used. The time spent reading forum posts and experimenting with system settings, software settings, buffer sizes, etc.
Even trying various esoteric “solutions” like disabling the Windows Aero theme. All to no avail.
And not even the new audio-interface solved my issues. 🙁
The Happy End to My Audio Problems
Just for the sake of testing I borrowed a Firewire sound card from one of my guitar students. I didn’t really expect anything at this point, but fortunately it worked like a charm. No clicks, pops and drop-outs. Even when I changed sounds in the middle of playback with a 150+ track Cubase template open and close to 14 GB of RAM in use all the bars stayed consistently in the green.
I was ecstatic. Does that mean that a Firewire card automatically is better than USB? Not necessarily.
I have to confess – I was thinking about either asking my student to sell me his card (which ironically wouldn’t work on his system anymore due to his latest Mac OS update) or ordering another Firewire card after returning my NI Komplete Audio 6.
But I was still in testing mode and wanted to check into this some more. Now I had the thought that maybe there’s something wrong with the USB set-up, which the high latency values of the USBPORT.SYS indicated. Maybe it wasn’t just driver related but more of a global system-issue.
No joking – but when I unplugged my Akai MPD32 controller, suddenly the NI USB card also worked without a glitch. Apparently there wasn’t enough juice running through my USB ports to power all the USB devices sufficiently, causing the errors and drop-outs.
In the end simply using an external wall-wart power supply for my Akai controller solved my issues and I finally have a stable system that is a joy to work with. And I decided to keep the NI Komplete Audio 6 as well because it IS a great sounding audio card.
My First Full Track With My New System
Here’s a track I produced last week for the stock music site AudioJungle. There’s some Omnisphere in addition to various patches from Evolve Mutations and Synergy X, Shreddage guitar, some EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Harp as well as Spitfire Albion.
On my old system I would have needed to resort to various workarounds like freezing tracks and bouncing to audio but on my new system I was able to add various EQ and compression plug-ins and at a latency setting of 132 samples the CPU meter showed a comfortable 30-40% processor load. When I increased the latency setting to 1024 samples that load reading diminished to a low 10-20%.
Summary and Some Quick Tips
Recording music at home is a fairly complex deal. There’s lots of things that can, and most likely will go wrong at some point. Keep that in the back of your mind and when something doesn’t work as expected, try to isolate the issue as much as possible and eliminate the potential points of failure one by one.
- Is it a software setting?
- Is it a hardware setting?
- Cables?
- Soundcard?
- Individual PC components?
- Driver issues?
Windows users: definitely use the free Latency Checker and Latency Monitor
Mac people: sorry, but I don’t know if there’s a comparable tool available – hopefully, you wouldn’t even need it in the first place. 🙂
“Dumb” your system down to the minimal amount of components – see if everything is working as expected then add the next thing. Once your system starts breaking down you have a higher chance of arriving at the correct solution faster with less frustration.
P.S.: I’ll post my lengthy PC components post in a few days. (Editing took me way longer than expected.) Anyways, the post about what you need to watch out for when shopping for an audio production PC is up now.
This is the best article about this issue. Thanks, thanks, 1000 thanks for being so clear.
In fact, I have a similar problem and it is driving me crazy, whilst it is probably an USB issue. Working with Motu 828mkii USB2 and streaming from SSD hard drive.
Only one thing is different from your case: when I run the latency test, I didn’t have any red spike and everything was <500ms.
Hi Enrica,
Thanks so much for the compliments.
I really do appreciate it. 🙂
Yeah, it definitely still could be (just) an USB issue.
It’s really common to blame the sound card, or some driver(s), and such system-wide issues like under-powered USB ports are easily overlooked.
Do you have any issues when there’s nothing else connected?
No USB MIDI controllers, no USB drives, no USB mouse and keyboard?
Experiment with taking everything away and adding one component at a time until the system starts breaking down again.
This approach makes troubleshooting a lot more successful.
Please let me know how it goes, ok?
Take care,
Marko
Wicked tips. I found this article after looking for solutions for the past three weeks. I’m totally going to take this to heart and try it at home. I just offered to DJ for a friend’s birthday party, thinking I’d solved my issues (only in traktor, with a bunch of midi devices connected, my Scarlett 2i4 just cuts right out with a static-sounding pop, preceded by slight crackles, kind of warning of impending doom).
I do use a midi mixer which is a powered USB hub but I’m still having issues. I’ve been blaming my Scarlett for it so far but this may actually be the solution. Thanks for the in depth article!
Hi Kevin,
isn’t it unfair? All those innocent soundcards getting the blame for the evil, under-powered USB hubs. It just makes me sad. 🙁
Seriously though, I hope that it’ll solve your drop-outs. Please keep me posted and thanks for taking the time to comment.
Take care,
Marko
dope article. unfortunately im having the same issue but with no luck… went to apple store, not a hardware issue, logic by itself will give me clicking cause the core starts maxing out. even with just 1 instance of omnisphere or massive…im so frusterated
Hi Benie,
32bit or 64bit, bridging, buffer size, hard disk speed, sample library storage location… lots of factors that need to work together to get great performance out of your system. I don’t have Logic, but I remember reading that in Logic the workload often doesn’t get distributed across multiple cores, but rather maxes out a single core and therefore causes spikes and annoying drop-outs.
This is a thread from last year, so I don’t know how relevant it still is, but there are some interesting suggestions in there: Logic 9 CPU spikes
Check post #7 with the suggestion to select audio while playing. Apparently this is supposed to spread the load across multiple cores.
Hope this helps,
Marko
I’m also having the same issue too, I got a new computer, I also got NI’s KA6, however my issue is latency, I want to know how did you achieve low latency in order to produce anything with vst plugins? 1.what did you disable in windows in order to help achieve in your comp. See the main culprit on my comp it the “usbportsys” I reconfig my usb set up KA6 a couple of times no success yet.
2. Are you using an internal sound card (PCI Express) or the KA6 interface?
3. what is your set up with the KA6 as of buffers and sample rate I ran mine between 512 to 64 that is the lowest for me, everything in between does not work as well,
right about now it’s very frustrating thinking since I bought a new computer I had high hopes as well, dealing with this latency for 3 months now fair and would like to start making music.
also I found this page from searching on google, nice article, btw. well I would like to see how you manage to make the KA6 to work at low latency. hope to hear from you soon. thank you for taking the time to read request.
Hi Solo,
1) On my system the main culprit was an under-powered USB port. The Komplete 6 sound card + an Akai MPD32 MIDI controller + a wireless USB mouse and keyboard set apparently drained my USB.
So, I ditched the wireless USB mouse and keyboard and I hooked up the MPD32 via a wall-wart power supply.
That seems to take care of (almost) everything.
The only Windows tweaks that I kept are the disabled energy settings as described on this Cubase help page: Optimizing Windows
2) And I disabled the internal main board sound card via my BIOS – so I’m only running the KA6.
3) The sweet-spot on my system seems to be 256 samples for my buffer settings. I could go down to 128 and my CPU would still manage, but I don’t want to run the “risk” of getting those annoying clicks and pops.
256 feels good enough for me when playing stuff in – if I really have an intricate part, then I still have the option of going lower, anyways.
When I’m done with tracking and it’s time for mixing, I crank the buffer up to the highest 1024 setting to squeeze the max out of my i7 CPU for lots of FX power.
Unless I have a video project (where 48 KHz is preferred) I use the standard 44.1 KHz sample rate.
Also, really helpful is a SSD for your samples in combination with a low Kontakt pre-load buffer size.
(Kontakt options –> memory tab: I’ve lowered the setting down to 12 kb and that frees up a lot of RAM)
I hope this helps a bit in getting your system to behave. Getting all the components of a modern DAW to work together nicely can be a nightmare sometimes. But once it works, it’s great fun to (finally) have all those options available.
Let me know how everything works out, ok?
Take care,
Marko
Greetings Marko,
Hey thank you for responding back, yes I’m thinking the main issue could be the
amd quad core processor in my computer bios. I’m trying to figure out how to disable it.
also when it came down to disabling the sound card, you’ve disabled it from the bios instead of being in the windows device manager? is that way better?
well I hope I find the problem and will let you know. thanks again.
You’re welcome.
I don’t know if it makes a difference at all whether you disable via the Bios or the device manager. I’m just used to disabling the internal sound card from the Bios. That’s what I already did 3 music PCs ago. 🙂
Which DAW software are you using? Disabling your multi-core in the Bios sounds rather drastic to me. After all, what’s the point of getting a multi-core, only to then disable it? Maybe there’s some settings in the DAW that can be tweaked to better handle the load across the cores?
Hey Marko,
The Daw that I’m using is Mixcraft 6, also when you buy the KA6 there’s Cubase, however I have not used it that much.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing, it’s too Drastic! When I was reading and searching
around the net, then I came across certain music (Audio Interface) forums discussing about turning off processors in order to get low latency.
I have not adjust anything yet, because I’m not too sure what will happen to the computer?
also when you check now “your Computer” the latencymon what are the numbers looking like in the execution column?
well thanks for the reply, Hopefully I’ll find the problem.
Unfortunately I’m not familiar with Mixcraft, so I don’t know how problematic multi-core support is on that DAW. In theory it shouldn’t cause any permanent issues for your computer if you disable your additional cores. You’d simply turn them back on and that should be it. But again, I wouldn’t like that “solution” to begin with – buying a multi-core processor to then disable those multi-cores. Doesn’t sound right, huh?
My highest execution numbers via the latencymon upon starting Cubase with one of my templates initially are at around 0,09 ms and after a few minutes of use increase to around 0,2 ms. Everything staying in the green and the nice additional message that my system appears to be suitable for handling real-time audio and other tasks without drop-outs.
I had not actually monitored my system in quite some time. Recently, I didn’t have too much time for elaborate projects and when I did work on some smaller projects I never taxed my system to the max. Also, since in general my system is stable, I don’t obsess anymore and anxiously wait for clicks and pops to appear. In case I do get drop-outs, I simply deal with it by either slightly increasing the buffer, “printing” to audio to reduce CPU load or simplifying my project. 🙂
As long as the final, rendered wav file turns out alright, I’m not concerned about the rare/occasional drop-out. I just consider it a minor inconvenience and the price for lots of complex parts that need to work together.
planning to buy a new set of studio monitor. But fear that my scarlett 2i2’s gonna continue giving annoying problems, till I found this page. I may have a possible solution now. Tools introduced sounds promising. I’m gonna find a separate powered USB hub and give it a try, besides all mentioned in here.
My problem was that the device like to freeze up in the middle of many things. During playback, during recording. Before I switched to studio one DAW, I had to manually do the plug/unplug trick or use windows sound manager to turn it on/off to restart the device. But outside of S1, still that…
Hi James,
Glad this article has given you some ideas to try. Hopefully, you’ll be able to solve your issues. Best of luck. 🙂
Hi Marko,
Really thanks to this Article, i now managed to buy the USB-powered-hub but i’m curious is that :
1. Program That Running Out on Background make this latency happen ?
(I Use mainly in my PC, and i have a laptop as well)
-PC = Idle, got a lot of red bar. (A Have A TONS of program like game, 3d software, etc.)
-Laptop = Doing a lot of browsing, not doing any audio thing, is all green and sometimes yellow (I’m Not disabling anything, just like a daily-people-use)
2. is it better i figure this out by uninstall many programs (i already disable many networking-related and audio in device manager) or maybe i just need to format-then-reinstall PC ?
3. Is possible that my Spec not strong enough to handle this all ?
Thank You Very much Marko
sorry i got a lot of question, i’m just really frustated when i just bought KA6 yesterday
Hi Andri,
Yes, that’s definitely frustrating, so no apologies needed for asking your questions. I just answered you via e-mail, because it would probably have been too long for this comment section.
Hopefully it’ll give you some ideas to try out. If you have any additional questions, feel free to ask.
Also, I’ll probably write a follow-up post with some troubleshooting strategies for music PC. Based on all the help requests I’ve been getting lately, there seems to be a need for such a guide. I’m really busy at the moment, but hopefully I’ll have a post ready real soon.
Take care,
Marko
Thanks a lot for explaining all the issues and solves in details…
Hi Sourav,
You’re welcome.
Thanks for taking the time to comment – I really do appreciate it.
Oh man, I’ve been struggling with asio drop-out for weeks until I come across your article, thank you so much !! I used LatencyMon and DPC Latency and finally figured out who was the culprit and it was my network driver ! Thanks again and keep up the good work !
Hi Bronsky,
You are very welcome.
Drop-outs really suck – they kill the inspiration, the flow and the fun. When I wrote this article after lots of wasted hours, I thought that hopefully I could make things easier for somebody experiencing similar problems. So, I’m really happy to read that you’ve been able to solve your issues. Thanks for taking the time to leave your comment and letting me know that my article has helped you. I really do get a kick out of reading this. 🙂
Take care,
Marko
Hi! I have the same problem with my NI Komplete Audio 6. The USB driver somehow interferes with wifi/lan. To listen clearly I have to stop all internet connections. It helps, but it is quite unpractical… 🙁
Hey Robin,
I keep my music PC offline all the time, so I don’t have a problem with keeping the wifi/lan switched off. While it doesn’t sound like such a big deal, I can imagine that constantly messing around in the device manager can get on your nerves rather quickly.
Maybe you could look into some of those macro/mouse recorder programs? You could “record” your actions and save them as a macro and put that on your desktop. Then you’d simply have to run that and could enable/disable all your settings quickly. Just an idea to look into.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. 🙂
Take care,
Marko
Thank you for such a detailed report from the frontline. It’s late in 2015, I just encounter some USB related distortion for simple music playback after installing a new USB sound card. At least I know where to start to hunt down the culprit. Oh the joy of desktop home studio lol…
Yeah, nothing like checking drivers, compatibility issues, latency, crackles and pops, right? 😉 However, as annoying as such problems are, once you have your system running, it’s amazing what can be done in a desktop home studio. So, it’ll be worth it.
Good luck as well as a quick, easy solution – and thanks for the comment.
Take care,
Marko
Hi Marko,
I have just read your well done and very nicely detailed article, which confirms my doubts about choosing my portable Daw and getting out of a very entangling and dark (to me) forest of audio interfaces proposals, which I need to choose ONE to match the already pinpointed Asus N752VX-GC133T (or /132T as well, both having Thunderbolt port among up to 3.1usb) -costing a half of a likewise equipped Mac!- to run Cubase Artist 8.5 (and Vst bunch to choose as well).
Now, these doubts, after reading and -as you said- passing hours and days -nights!- and months on the forums, over the tech readings to find-out strong compatibility, I am still like petrified before which one among all interface models could be good/suitable for Windows(10) environment, if there be one!
RME FF802, of course, everybody says, is your best and mor stable choice, but this costs more than the laptop itself…
Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 2nd Gen is usb and seems to still have latency problems…
Focusrite Clarett 8Pro… is Mac oriented, and beta version for Windows is far yet to come to a good conclusion…
Motu 828x, with Thunderbolt, might have substancial trouble on Windows…
Thus… I start to wonder if I’d better put my 30+ shuddering songs back in the drawer(s) and wait until I raise enough money for a Mac -or an RME FF802- for the sake of argument if I could get to this point within… a century…
Any suggestions?
Regards,
Sergio
(Please answer me in copy to my e-mail box)
Hi Sergio,
Thanks for the compliments. I appreciate it.
Here’s my viewpoint of your situation. You have 30+ songs more or less done, waiting to be recorded. That’s the main priority right there. Forget latency, incompatibility, tech spec jungle…
It’s about the songs and the music.
You could wait until you have the money together. By then, things might have changed considerably. You’d have some other hardware components where you wouldn’t know about their compatibility. Maybe some new technological standards that would not have any solid driver solutions, etc…
In the meantime, your songs are collecting dust. 🙁
It’s your artistic responsibility to get them out. So, you’ll have to overcome that “analysis paralysis” that’s so common when losing yourself in online forums and test reviews.
It’s definitely a smart thing to check reviews and research other user’s experience. You don’t just want to walk into some random electronics store to get a regular consumer machine and expect it to work flawlessly for high-end audio.
So, research and educating yourself is good. However, you can’t let it lead to that state you currently seem to be in. There comes a point where you have to draw the line and say, “That’s it, I’ve made my choice.”
See, the truth is you’ll never know for 100%. You could read about a certain configuration and while it works for them, it might not work exactly the same for you. You use another mouse and the driver is not 100% class-compliant, your USB-bus is underpowered due to another USB-MIDI-controller consuming too much power (like in my case, which led to the article) and that perfect system won’t work for you at all.
You might have a (solid) configuration in mind and because of some forum comment now are unsure and second-guessing yourself. The problem is that the dude complaining in the forum about the latency didn’t mention the new resource-intensive game he installed on the same machine.
You (almost) never know the complete picture. And also let’s not forget that sometimes hardware and components could be defective. Especially nasty when the defect is hidden and it’s not an “either/or – it works/it doesn’t work” situation.
So, in a nutshell, there’s the element of chance. Sorry, to be the bringer of bad news. 🙁
However, things are not as bleak as they seem. My suggestion to you is to have your PC system ready and then order your best 2 (or 3) audio soundcards from a shop like Amazon or Thomann.de or some other major retailer with a friendly return policy. Then you’ll have at least a few days for some solid A/B testing where you can decide on which combination works best for your needs.
You might not even notice that extra latency that’s supposedly in the 2nd gen Scarlett. It might not even be there at all for your system. Who knows? And that’s the point. Nobody knows – so you need to test it!
If there should be some issues, you could at least return the audio interface. Hopefully, your other choice(s) would work.
But what if none of them work?
It’s an unlikely scanario, but in case you don’t want to take the risk, you could get a PC system built from some provider specializing in audio systems. The builders (of course) are more expensive than if you’d build the system yourself, but they already tested components and by buying from them
you would have a guaranteed system that you could return in case of it not working. You could consider it like a sort of insurance. And it would still be considerably cheaper than a Mac.
Sergio, I hope this helps and gives you a different perspective. Get started with your songs, I want to hear them 🙂
Take care,
Marko
Great post! Thanks for sharing Marko! Here it is all these years later and people like me are still having the same issues that you mentioned. I have a dream system… all SSD’s, tons of memory, latest everything and running Omnisphere 2 has been a nightmare. I’ve tried so many solutions just as you mentioned in your post and nothing works. Running Omnisphere in my Cubase 8.5 projects causes some of the strangest stuff I’ve ever heard! Other tracks have even started playing out of sync, disjointed and pitch shifted! Lots of crashes too. It works fine in it’s own project but as soon as you do something real world that involves other tracks and plugins the problems begin. It’s really taken the joy out of making music. These days I spend more time fixing things than working on songs.
Hey Michael, sorry to hear about your issues. 🙁 Unfortunately, it seems to come with the territory. As the software tools become more powerful, there’s more and more complexity involved – and more opportunities for things to go wrong. Thinking back to the times of single core PCs with limited RAM, slow drives and constantly having to work-around issues and limitations by using every trick in the book (like freezing plug-ins or rendering to audio) and as you wrote, here we are years later dealing with the same frustrations…
Omnisphere 2 has been behaving really well for me. My nemesis at the moment is some unexplainable Cubase 8.5 instability. However, I “force” myself not too get caught up in the rabbit hole of bug hunting. I just save my projects more often, just to be on the safe side. 😉
Have you contacted Spectrasonics support about your issues? I’ve heard that they are really friendly, helpful and more than competent. Might be worth a shot.
Anyways, hang in there and don’t let the inevitable tech-issues suck out the joy of making music.
Have a great weekend,
Marko
Hey Marko, I think you touched on a really important piece of the puzzle here: Cubase 8.5 instability. There’s some really weird stuff going on in that program. On the one hand it can be stable as a rock with huge projects, on the other hand it often crashes just launching or closing! I’ve also noticed it can be really touchy when it comes to plugins and often does “odd stuff” that I can’t explain.
Omnisphere 2 is so good that it’s worth it to me to do the workarounds you mentioned. In fact, even with the Omnisphere issues I went ahead and bought Keyscape! (Which, for me anyway, has the same issues on my system.) As long as I use them in a project without other plugins I’m golden. So I create a separate project folder just for working on my Spectrasonic tracks and when I’m done I import them back into my main project. It’s a hasssle, but worth it. The joy leaves whenever I try to chase down the bugs and think I can use it without the workaround. It just doesn’t work for me that way, and for now, I guess I just need to accept that.
I have contacted Spectrasonic’s tech support and can verify that they’re fantastic and super helpful. I can’t blame them for not being able to solve every issue as there are so many elements in play… like the instability of Cubase 8.5 and whatever other individual plugins that are in my system that could be part of the problem. Clearly, it’s working fine for you, so really it’s down to all those variables why something works for one person and not another.
Forcing myself “not too get caught up in the rabbit hole of bug hunting” as you say, is probably the best advice I could get. That’s really what ruins DAW life. It’s one thing to try to track down a problem but entirely another to have that swallow up your life!
Anyway, take care and thanks again for the blog!
Thank you for your info. Here is the new URL for the Latency Checker: (edit: link removed because it became unavailable)
I’ve just updated the article and replaced the link. Thank you so much for taking the time to share. 🙂
Very nice article, helping and somewhat entertaining 😉
Finding the Latency Checker and Latency Monitor tools here helped me a lot on finding my latency problems. It might help other peolpe so here’s my situation:
Desktop-PC – AMD FX8320 (8x 3.5GhZ), 16 Gbyte RAM, Geforce GT630, Tascam US-2×2 (USB 2.0), Samsung SSD – Reaper as DAW, many Plugins and virtual Instruments. Everything running not excellent but okay with Win 7 Home Premium.
And than it was time to update/upgrade:
I got myself a 4K display and a cheap GT1030 GFX card since the GT630 could not handle 4K@60Hz. And while i was installing the new hardware i thought i’d give it a try and updated to Win 10.
After that i haven’t had a lot of time to make music at home, so i ended up watching some movies with the updated system for a few month. When i turned Reaper DAW back on i stumbled across a lot of crackling and droputs. Even with just one track and one synth.
After reading this fine article here i download the two tools and checked for drivers causing this. That was mainly the GFX card driver. Uninstalled it, got a newer Version, installed it. Saidly that didn’t change anything. Next thing on the list was the usbhost.sys (or similar – don’t remember) but i din’t find any solution of aht to do with that.
I did a fresh install of Windows 10, some drivers, no Tascam-Interface connected, no DAW, no additional software, just plain clean Windows. LatencyMon still gave me bad results.
I really thought about buying a new pc, but i could’nt really believe that my system should be to slow for some recording.
Today i ended up reinstalling Windows 7 Home Premium. After all updates and drivers werd installed everything on LatencyMon was green. After installing all my additional Software, DAW, VSTi, Drivers and so on , again LatenyMon show me green only. And everything works like a charme.
So yeah, downgrading to Win 7 did the trick for me, and maybe others.
Best regards
Ralf
USB is polled, it fakes interrupts. A USB device simply can not signal the pc it needs service, the USB driver polls it and asks on a regular schedule if it needs service. I know from whence i speak, i have written entire USB stacks from scratch without an OS available to lean on.
Firewire is a true interrupt driven interface. When it needs attention form the driver it can signal via an interrupt that it needs attention “right now” not when the os/driver gets around to it.
The minute I saw you were using windows and usb I shook my head, its gonna be “ify”….
I’m not a bit surprised by your results with firewire tho
So am I correct in saying that the DPC latency checker is incompatible with windows 10 (it’s not listed on their site) and version I had bundled with my controllers drivers doesn’t seem to work! Have go freezing issues in Deckadance (Stanton) – the controller ASIO drivers install successfully and are ok for a while, but with intermittent 1s silences, then eventually the audio cuts out, the track freezes and are only resumed when I go into settings and point it back towards the ASIO device (drops out).
Has anyone had experience of this as an alternative: http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
Hi Adam,
Unfortunately, the DPC latency checker doesn’t seem to work with Windows 10. 🙁 It does run on my system, but the results seem to be off and are not to be trusted or relied on. It’s really a pity because it was a great quick diagnostic tool back in the days.
I did recommend the latencymon in my article. It helped me to pinpoint my issues and locate the culprit(s). So, for me, it did the trick, but I haven’t used it in quite some time because I didn’t have too many issues with my system since then. It ain’t perfect (which system is?), but I’ve somewhat moved away from mega-templates with hundreds of tracks towards a more modular approach using track templates and loading stuff only when I need it. This apparently has reduced the overhead quite significantly.
Anyways, I hope you’ll be able to fix your issues. Drop-outs are annoying and kill the flow. 🙁
All the best,
Marko