Randomly, when playing in Renoise I get a weird hickup in my M-Audio Fast Track Pro, everything that’s coming out the card sounds like what can only be described as a ring modulation effect.
If I re-init the ASIO driver then it goes away.
I’ve had this happen when just playing a looped pattern over and over while listening / thinking of what to add to the mix etc; nothing running live, no inputs being used etc;
It’s very, very random.
Does anyone ever get this? It’s not the usual pops/cracks when the buffer is too low, this is just a looped pattern playing for 3+ mins all fine and then suddenly the card decides “hey this is boring, let’s put on a ringmod!”
I’ve captured the output from the MASTER track using Channelgrabber during this and the output from Renoise is clean so it’s between the driver and the card, speakers or cans.
Changing buffer to get a higher latency doesn’t seem to have any effect.
And lastly…
Does anybody make a good Audio Interface with stable, well crafted Windows 7 x64 drivers that doesn’t cost the earth? I’m looking at the Saffire 6 USB, or maybe a decent Firewire card.
If you have a PC with PCI slots i would highly recommend to pick up a PCI card instead of USB or FireWire.
Regarding stability, USB and FireWire still remain far behind compared to their PCI brothers.
Yeah, could kick myself, I wanted a nice small PC this time around, sick of huge cases. So bought a mATX case with the Asus P8P67M-PRO board, has the 1x PCI slot between the two PCI-E slots, I’ll try plugging my GPU into the 2nd slot and see if it runs much slower (that port is 8x not 16x) - Also play games on this box and maybe look at a PCI card in the future.
But most of the better ones are way too expensive and some of the others don’t seem to have good drivers for Win7 x64.
I’ve been playing with ASIO4ALL on my Fast Track Pro and so far, that seems to give me better stability than the M-Audio ASIO driver.
Interesting, the problem with this glitch is that I’m sure most people on forums talk about crackles and clicks and that’s probably latency issues.
I haven’t had any issues when gaming / playing vids … everything using directsound seems fine, it’s very, very random. I thought it may have been Firefox, since I often have that open when I use Renoise, and it happened a few times when I alt tabbed to FF, but I couldn’t repeat it at will so it’s probably just a coincidence.
I’m tempted to return the card, it’s under warranty - but because the problem is so infrequent and random, the agents here probably won’t find it and then charge me to sending in a card that’s “not” faulty.
Personally I’m leaning towards it being buggy drivers, but these are the latest and AFAIK the previous ones are identical they just upgraded the installer or something.
I’ve got a M-audio Fast Track Pro too and I used to have random noises/cracks on output, definitely due to driver or hardware issues. One day they just stopped.
Couldn’t find a reason for this to happen, couldn’t find a solution but everything went better than expected.
EDIT: at the time I was using Ableton on Win7 x64. Recently I’ve gotten back to Win7 32 bits and no issues whatsoever. Maybe buggy drivers on 64 bit Windows?
I managed to record the card ‘freaking out’ while playing a 440hz test tone, sounds horrible! But I’ve ruled out ASIO being the problem as it started acting up during a game of STALKER, and that’s Directsound, not ASIO… after closing everything down, fireing up Foobar to play the tone and switching the card off, it was fine and hasn’t done it since except for once or twice.
Waiting to hear from the agents here. So at least I now know it’s not Renoise, ASIO or VSTs.
Also had some random hiss on the pre amps, even when nothing was plugged in, turning them off and then on and re-initializing ASIO. Also starting to think ti’s drivers and hardware.
Well, I got so fed up with the constant distortion and glitches from my M-Audio Fast Track Pro. Reading and researching my issues pinned all this hassle on the card, not my setup and I was able to reproduce some of the problems I had at will. Not to mention the random BSODS when re-initialising ASIO.
So I got a new baby today. The RME Fireface 400, at 1/3 the price, second hand and still under warranty
But I’ve ruled out ASIO being the problem as it started acting up during a game of STALKER, and that’s Directsound, not ASIO… after closing everything down, fireing up Foobar to play the tone and switching the card off, it was fine and hasn’t done it since except for once or twice.