I’m currently trying to troubleshoot an issue I’m having with my Allen & Heath Zedi 10fx mixer/soundcard in Renoise 3.4.4 when having chrome open with youtube next to it. The audio can grind to a halt eventually and increasing the buffer settings in the preferences or changing drivers wont fix the problem.
The audio glitches and stutters seem to increase when going through the tabs in the top left of the screen in Renoise when playing back a songfile while having a video playing on mute (just to trigger the glitches, quickly going left and right clicking the tabs).
In the beginning of having bought the soundcard there were hardly any issues, though I’ve had occasional ‘syncing’ problems before with my previous soundcard (focusrite 6i6) where the audio sounded like someone put a bitcrusher on the master when opening chrome while playing back a song. But the instances where this happened were often short lived after refreshing the browser or reopening renoise, re-initializing the soundcard.
I’ve made sure in the properties of the soundcard in windows, programs can’t claim exclusivity to the drivers and have made sure the samplerate & bitrate are the same for all out & inputs. Also I’ve set chrome not to use graphics acceleration for A/B’ing the issue. And the computer is set to be optimized for background processes. No power saving and made sure the usb ports can’t turn off the power.
I’ve tried re-installing the drivers for the soundcard and this hasn’t fixed it either, I did notice in the windows 10 device manager settings that the soundcard device isn’t migrated, which can happen after a windows update. From the events tab;
Device USB\VID_22F0&PID_0016\5&2a52a61d&0&5 was not migrated due to partial or ambiguous match.
Last Device Instance Id: USB\VID_054C&PID_05C4\5&2a52a61d&0&5
Class Guid: {745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da}
Location Path: PCIROOT(0)#PCI(1400)#USBROOT(0)#USB(5)
Migration Rank: 0xF000FFFFFFFF0023
Present: false
Status: 0xC0000719"
Device configured
"
Device USB\VID_22F0&PID_0016\5&2a52a61d&0&5 was configured.
Driver Name: oem98.inf
Class Guid: {38854ce7-739c-402a-921d-23cb8779a771}
Driver Date: 06/25/2019
Driver Version: 4.67.0.38424
Driver Provider: Allen & Heath
Driver Section: _Install_1.NTamd64
Driver Rank: 0xFF0001
Matching Device Id: USB\VID_22F0&PID_0016
Outranked Drivers: usb.inf:USB\COMPOSITE:00FF2003
Device Updated: false
Parent Device: USB\ROOT_HUB30\4&c7e9907&0&0
"
Device started
"
Device USB\VID_22F0&PID_0016\5&2a52a61d&0&5 was started.
Driver Name: oem98.inf
Class Guid: {38854ce7-739c-402a-921d-23cb8779a771}
Service: ZEDiUSBDriver
Lower Filters:
Upper Filters:
"
I’ve contacted Allen & Heath about the above and this is their reaction;
Hello Richard,
Unfortunately this is an issue with Renoise.
It is always best to optimise a computer for audio when using any DAW and this includes shutting down all background apps, power saving and internet access.
This is standard and is outlined here https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207355205-Optimising-Windows-for-Audio
It is actually possible to use some other apps and even internet access with many DAWs and often, people are never aware of the potential problem.
Please go through the optimisation instructions.
Best regards,
Chris Panks.
Allen & Heath Product Support
UK
They haven’t commented on the device drivers not being migrated(yet?) and blame Renoise.
For now I’ll put Renoise in fullscreen mode to get the best results, without any other application running in the background but even then there is an occasional audio hick up. This wasn’t the case when I first installed the new mixer/soundcard.
I hope someone has a tip or any idea what could have caused this and how to get a more stable audio stream!
I have the same problem,different soundcard, i get the bitcrusher thing too.Most of the time it seems to happen when my pc is accessing different drives, the audio will either stutter for a second or two then have the bitcrusher effect or it will cut out.80 percent of the time it happens when renoise is saving a song or it is auto saving a backup.The only way to get rid of it is to restart the soundcard, or as i mostly do, switch the sample rate, then switch it back and its fine again.
Doesn’t make a difference which driver is chosen. For example, even when the cpu in Renoise is at around 37% the audio engine glitches, at the same time looking in the windows taskbar the full cpu percentage of all processes in use is 11% (renoise 7.8% & chrome playing a video 2%). Memory only utilizing 20% of 24gb ram in total and the GPU 4%, in other words the system isn’t pushed that hard and the audio is already breaking up a lot.
Disabling ‘in devices’ when using wasapi drivers doesn’t change the glitching.
It’s weird, I can have plenty of chrome tabs open all playing video’s at the same time and there aren’t any issues. Open up Renoise and one chrome tab playing a video and the audio glitches.
I noticed increasing the buffer size in the wasapi drivers to a very high value like 8192 wil result in a latency of 170.7 ms, it will lessen the amount of stutters (still occasionally), but will heavily impact the framerate in Renoise, normal behavior?
Using asio drivers I can only use the soundcards control panel setting to increase the buffers to a max of 2048 samples, which results in 42.7 ms latency, which still glitches the audio.
Opening Fl studio next to Chrome playing a video results in similar glitches, every time a glitch happens, the counter of the ‘underruns’ increases. There are options in Fl like ‘mix in buffer switch’ in the audio settings which will ‘process directly in drivers buffer switch’ (whatever that means) and ‘triple buffer’ which ‘process buffer ahead’… enabling these doesn’t get rid of every glitch, but do seem to lessen the underruns.
I don’t think the glitches happen because the cpu is stressed, but because of other system issues I need to pin down.
This weekend I want to try removing the drivers of the usb ports, have to figure out if windows can find them automatically after removal or I have to hunt down the vendors drivers? Then re-install the soundcard drivers and hope this fixes stuff. Really takes the fun out of making music .
After trying a bunch of stuff, trying out different usb ports (didn’t help), checking out microsoft edge instead of chrome (didn’t help), I checked out microsoft taskbar again and noticed something called “system interrupts” every now and then and googled for it.
Someone noted;
"System Interrupts" refers to when a computer must pause while executing a task to process information from hardware devices or other system requests. When you see the "System Interrupts" process in Task Manager, it means that the computer is waiting for instructions or requests from a hardware device or system component and has paused the task it was executing during the waiting period.
"System Interrupts" is a system process that displays the amount of resources consumed by hardware interrupts. This process does not handle any important operating system functions, but it can check if all hardware components are working properly. It is an official part of the Windows operating system and is displayed as a process in Task Manager.
In some cases, "System Interrupts" may slow down your computer because it may consume a lot of CPU resources. This could be caused by hardware problems, such as disk failures or driver issues, or software problems, such as too many background processes or poor system settings.
To resolve this issue, you can try the following steps:
Confirm that your drivers are compatible with your hardware.
Disable any unnecessary background processes or services.
Ensure that your computer is not experiencing any overheating problems.
Check for any damaged or faulty hardware devices.
Reading about overheating and possible hardware failure, I’ve decided to open up my pc case, because besides vacuuming the ventilation sides every few months and installing additional ram years ago, I’ve never checked it out for dust. Turns out it was pretty dusty ;
I don’t have a compressed air device which is recommended for getting rid of dust and did some careful vacuuming, blow-drying(set on cold) and duster cleaning, actually not recommended as this can generate static and possibly hurt the system. I got rid of most of the dirt and thankfully it still boots up.
First tests and it seems to run more stable, where it used to glitch a lot sooner, I need to stress the system and test more, but I think the fan throttling, temperature might have to do with the glitching(?).
Did some more temperature testing using HWINFO64 and when having renoise and chrome next to each other, clicking with the mouse between windows having a track in Renoise and muted video playing at the same time;
I don’t think this is normal right? Googling on a right temperature;
What's the best CPU temp? At idle, you should expect to see temperatures between 35 and 50°C (95-122F). When playing games or running any apps that put a high load on the CPU, you should expect the temperature to rise to 60-85°C (140-185F).11 apr 2024
100 °C is the maximum and you should only reach this under full load. I have ( had, actually i’m getting a new PC now cause of USB issues) an i5 4460 and I rarely had it over 50°C. In your case I would start to look for a new one. Is the fan turning?
I have thought about this as it is getting pretty old, but the thing that has kept me from buying a new one is the prospect of having to re-install and configure all the stuff that is on my harddisks, plugins that songfiles depend on etc. Even though the glitching is now getting out of hand, there still is enough power worthy to try and fix it.
nah, it’s very quiet, bios says 0 rpm and the temperature is stuck at 99 degrees, HWINFO gives a more fluctuating temperature though so I guess the sensors aren’t dead. I have ordered a new fan and will get some thermal paste if that isn’t supplied with the new fan and will see if I can switch the new one on myself. First time doing something like this, but with youtube and tutorials it’ll probably be ok . I must have damaged something when installing the additional ram years ago?
We’ll see if the new fan will get rid of the glitchy audio, if not I’ll be considering a new desktop for sure.
I thought that without a fan the CPU will burn quick, but obviously it throttles and stays at 100°C.
My PC is comparably old and I struggled with USB problems two years ago when I did a fresh install from a live iso image. Now the same thing happened again after wasting 4 days with it. I turned it off and use my laptop now until I have the new one.
As I keep everything quite simple I need maybe 2 hours to get everything running again.
Just installed a new cooler (be quiet 2 pure rock 2) and removed the old cooling paste and replaced it with some corsair paste. Now under a similar load which would previously glitch the audio, the system runs stable and less then half the temperature of before! I.o.w success!
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