Troubleshooting drop-outs (link inside)

[Michael Tippach]

I found this little utility potentially very useful for anyone suffering from audio drop outs:

www.thesycon.com/deu/latency_check.shtml

It allows one to pinpoint the culprit - as far as poorly written device drivers - responsible for low latency audio stream interruptions.

[dsphead]

thankz Michael,

again!!!! ;D

[rchrdrtnr]

First of all, thank you so much for this program. I emailed you a few days ago, but thanks to this little program you posted in this thread I found the trouble, so no need for you to reply. It turns out that my Realtek drivers were causing the dropouts - when I disable them, Sibelius sounds great through ASIO4ALL. I have a question. If I leave the realtek drivers disabled, will all my other sound applications work fine through ASIO4ALL? Thanks.

admin said:

I found this little utility potentially very useful for anyone suffering from audio drop outs:

www.thesycon.com/deu/latency_check.shtml

It allows one to pinpoint the culprit - as far as poorly written device drivers - responsible for low latency audio stream interruptions.

[wesm913]

Hi,

I've been grappling with audio dropouts for some time when using Adobe Audition with my Henry USB-AES Matchbox. The Matchbox is designed to interface my radio station's digital audio console (which uses AES plugs) to my computer - via USB. The Henry requires no special drivers or other software.

I've tried all of Adobe's suggestions to troubleshoot this problem, which have helped to reduce the number of dropouts - but having not removed them completely yet.

Currently I have ASIO4ALL set to a maximum buffer size of 2048 samples with Kernel Buffers set to 4. Whenever I use ASIO4ALL, I make sure to disable my on-board soundcard (Creative) to prevent any possible hardware/software conflicts from occuring.

My question is: would it be possible to increase the buffer size beyond 2048? And if so, would this make my problem go away? I've also heard that change my computer's optimization to Background Services is useful.

My computer uses a Pentium 4 CPU (3.00 Ghz) with 2.5 GB of RAM and only 8 GB of Free Space available (out of 74.5 GB Total).

Any suggestions would be much appreciated! Thank you.

[wesm913]

In addition to my previous post, I should have added that I did run the DPC Latency Checker - and during the entire 30 minutes I test recorded with the Latency Checker, the program always indicated that my machine should be able to handle real-time streaming of audio and/or video data without drop-outs.

So I'm still not sure what is causing audio to occasionally drop-out when recording into Audition from the Henry device. Could it perhaps be related to the fact that my computer only has USB 1.1 ? If so, is there a way to upgrade USB to 2.0?

[ryan]

yes that could be it if your device is usb 2 then there is not enough bandwidth to run it

you could add a usb 2 pci card if this is a desktop, if its a laptop your probably hosed i would think

[NuclearDog]

Oh. My. God. Thank you so much!

I purchased an M-Audio Fasttrack USB and have been experience audio dropouts since I got it. I'm using the ASIO4ALL drivers. (Which I NEED to use as they also allow me to pipe audio into Reason.) One run of DPC Latency Checker solved the problem I've been struggling to solve for months. It was the POS driver for my Broadcom wireless card.

Cheers,
ND

[Ian Pollard]

Hi Guys, and especially the last post!

I have an M-Audio Fastrack USB and using asio4all so I can use more than one sound card to record. I've been suffering intermittant beeping on separate tracks using Audition 3 and more relevantly, after about 18 minutes it just stops recording, but the cursor keeps moving. is this what everyone is calling "drop off"?

in more detail, the wave box disappears (not recording any more) but the cursor keeps moving (making me think it's not audition, but the soundcard/drivers)?

any help would be ace!

Ian

[gorch]

Just checked my notebook and see that the Standard-PCI-to-USB-Controller seems to causing the problems. Switching it off moves the latency into green territory.

Well I have the sound device and Zoom H2 connected to USB 2.0 ports that are certainly not working anymore when disabling the controller.

Might there be a chance to go for a USB PC-Card adapter in exchange? The PC-Card driver seems not to have any noticeable effect on the latency so far.

[postman]

Thank you so much, Michael. That tool was huge in helping me find the problem (like the person above it was a Realtek driver: realtek pcie gbe family controller).

You rock!