Crash with Marian ASIO driver, Windows XP32

Help, Support & Bugs
1

Hi everyone,

in order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the beginning of my tracker ›career‹ (I was introduced to FT2 in 1996), and to support this wonderful project, I became a registered RNS user yesterday.

I installed v3.1.0 on my freshly re-set-up dedicated audio computer, a trusty XP 32bit machine with a Marian Trace Alpha audio interface.

The problem: the instant I switch from ›DirectSound‹ to ›ASIO‹ in the prefs, RNS crashes, i.e. it simply quits with no further comments. I can restart it with no problems (settings aren’t saved), call up the prefs menu again, and repeat…

The problem is perfectly reproducible on my specific machine. I tried several changes to my system configuration; no difference; it persists in the exact same way I described. I have not found a single factor (hard- or software-related) that, when changed, changed anyhting about the problem.

»do you have ASIO problems in other software on your machine?« I have not come across an audio application that has had any ASIO-related trouble. In all other applications I’ve tried, I can switch between DirectSound and ASIO with no problems.

»do you have the same problem in other RNS versions?« I uninstalled 3.1.0 and tried using 3.0.1. Exact same thing.

»how do RNS + ASIO work for you on other machines?« Ironically, ASIO in RNS works flawlessly on my other computer, a profane HP laptop using its cheap internal sound card with ASIO4ALL.

Log file: http://www.pastebin.com/raw/CbansyFK

Any hints are appreciated! I’m optimistic, as always, but needless to say the current state of things is disappointing, with ASIO support being the main technical (and, as someone who also sequences external MIDI hardware with RNS: musical!) benefit of upgrading to the registered version.

thanks

– Nils

2

PS: same symptom (with different setup) is described here: https://forum.renoise.com/t/windows-10-renoise-asio4all-64bit-crashes-a-lot/45391

3

Hello. According to the log it uses a pretty seldom sample format, one that Renoise does not support. But that does not really explain the crash. Unfortunately there’s else not much info in the log about the crash, so this unfortunately will be hard to fix “remotely”. Only thing we could do here is askingmarian for a test unit, so we could test this here.

Are you using the latest version of the driver already (see http://www.marian.de/downloads)??)

As a workaround you could try using ASIO4All on that machine too and selecting the Marian card’s channels in ASIO4All’s setup panel. Have you already tried if that works?

4

thanks for your reply! Your edit to the subject line suggests you’re considering this particular ASIO driver a key factor in this problem. Yes, I do have the latest Marian drivers.

What I can do is try ASIO4ALL, as you suggest. I also have an old EMU 0404 lying around. I could try uninstalling the Marian and try the 0404 instead to triangulate the cause of the problem.

update:

just installed ASIO4ALL as an additional ASIO driver. In other applications, I now have two ASIO choices. They’re listed as

  • ASIO Trace Alpha and

  • ASIO4ALL,

and they both work fine.

In RNS though, there’s still only one option (besides DirectSound), and it still is merely called “ASIO”. The crashing problem persists.

5

Hello. According to the log it uses a pretty seldom sample format, one that Renoise does not support. But that does not really explain the crash. Unfortunately there’s else not much info in the log about the crash, so this unfortunately will be hard to fix “remotely”. Only thing we could do here is askingmarian for a test unit, so we could test this here.

Re: Sample Format… in the Marian’s ASIO control panel that I can access from other applications, there’s an option called “emulate 32-bit integer sample format for incompatible ASIO applications”. Does this have to do with the sample format you’re talking about? You’re right though: enabling it doesn’t change anything about the problem.

In case you want to contact Marian, their developers can be reached thus:

I’ll try to contact their support as well, but with the problem pertaining only to RNS so far, it was a given I asked here first.