Hello all,



I've discovered this when heard clicks and crackles while browsing the internet and listening to music (be it youtube, AIMP) and while writing some music with Ableton.

I'm 100% sure that it is because of the audio interface (M-Audio Mobile Pre MKII).
to be precise, because of the sound coming from the interface, if there's the interface plugged but no sound, the CPU is okay.
It happens only when there's some music playing, or me playing some instruments in Ableton.


any help would be much appreciated!


ohh yes, in case you need my laptop specs:
ASUS N53SV
processor: Intel i3-2310M 2.10 GHz
RAM: 8Gb
64bit Windows7 OS

 

what sound driver are you running ableton with?

 

Try latency checker and remove peripherals one by one and maybe drivers etc. it worked for me!

Good luck!

 

well, ASIO is the driver, if this is what you're asking.
but my laptop has a realtek driver too.

angie,
so what to do with this latency checker?


when realtek driver is on default there are no problems with CPU. As soon as I start to play a video, or a track via the usb audio interface the CPU goes crazy.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981214
I've came across this. I downloaded the hotfix but it says 'the update is not applicable for you'.
I never did any windows updates because it just kills my system totally and I am forced to restore to an earlier point.

 

start with basics, as daft as it seems, check the usb cable

 

well I use Aimp earlier, but it has CPU problems... when you play music in Aimp CPU goes to 30% ?!?????

So, there is a Classic Winamp Lite on winamp.com. CPU is 0.01 %

 

My NI Traktor Audio 2 spikes too, on all machines. It's a bit annoying, because the CPU cannot put itself into sleep, but those spikes never caused any audio dropout, so I got used to it. *yes*

 

Latency checker is an unintrusive piece of software that verifies if your system is able to treat audio in real time. If you have ten minutes for reading the web page you'll easy understand. Of course it could be a driver issue. Try "ASIO for all".

 

Turn off Wi-Fi and turn off any power saving for a start. Plug the laptop into the AC. When you work with something demanding on CPU always plug it into the AC outlet. One of these, or most probably all to some extent are surely "helping" your audio card to eat up the CPU. If nothing else remember to do this while you're making music, it will surely help.

But it is weird that it only happens when the music is playing. All these "measures" that I mentioned will help, but I doubt it they will help to lower the CPU usage to 10% or something. Wi-Fi and SpeedStep CPU power saving [and running off the battery power] can cause huge DPC latency spikes, but I don't think that's the problem. Maybe your USB port is faulty. Try another one.

With such CPU usage and spiking I don't think latency checker can help him to determine anything. DPC latency checker is for small, occasional CPU spiking... and turning off the Wi-Fi, network card and SpeedStep/CPU power saving usually resolves these.

Oh, you've got a Realtek internal audio card enabled, too? Try to disable it in BIOS or device manager and see if that helps, too. Windows doesn't always like having multiple audio cards.

 

Hi everyone

I had the sam problem in the past. It was also M-Audio interface but Fast Track USB model. I tried everything, really. It seems to be an "IRQ" prolem/conflict (read about it). The only thing what works was just turning off wi-fi while working with sound. The problem is that M-Audio programmers wrote shitty drivers for thier devices (wasn't fixed even after update), that USB card is sharing that IRQ "port" with some other device and it's making a conflict (audio crackles, dropouts). As i know it's impossible to change it manually because system is doing it by default (if You know programming you can re-write drivers). Couple years of suffering and i changed my interface to Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and now there are no problems. So you have a choice: Turn off wi-fi while working and get used to, or sell that shit and buy something else (for Your comfort).

ps. This is happening only on laptops as i know.

Greets, SKP

 

Do you have an ATI grafics card?
If you do read this..
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Oct04/articles/pcnotes.htm

Latency checker causes my system to hang so i used this - dbldawg.exe
However the dev's site is now down (it was here http://www.mark-knutson.com/t3/index.html), but now i think you should find it here http://en.pudn.com/dl.asp?id=1053047
Also with this program you need to set the latency of said ATI card each time you boot.
Probably you could set up a macro or something.. but it didnt annoy me enough to go that far yet!
He did release this: Double Dawg Boot-O-Magic which was $10 but as said his site is now down and ive not found it yet when hunting! (anyone have this laying around?)

You could try this but as i say it locked up my system everytime i ran it http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951

Anyway i lower my ATI latency from 255 down to 32 and my system runs smooth as.. it's almost like adding an extra few GB of ram compared to what it was before i discovered it =)

 

thank you all for the answers.

so.. another usb cable; different laptop usb ports; wifi off; laptop always plugged into AC output; uninstalled realtek; reinstalled interface driver - nothing helps


well, as for the crackles and noises I just could not browse the internet while listening to music (better analysing ) but is it okay for the cpu to go crazy like this? I mean, I hope at least for one more year to work with this laptop :D

nVidia GT540 graphics.

and yes, worth mentioning I think.. graphically (CPU Usage History) when it is all the way up, the meter (CPU Usage) shows just 30-40%. So, the meter never goes above 40, only the graphic is weird xD

 

Note that a low PCI latency is not the same as access latency.

"PCI latency refers to the number of cycles that any device can hold an IRQ before it is disconnected as a function of fairness algorithms."
http://www.lostcircuits.com/hdd/hdd5/3.shtml


PCI Latency
http://www.geocities.com/phileosoph...pcilatency.html

PCI Latency Timer Howto
http://www.reric.net/linux/pci_latency.html

PCI Latency Timer (BIOS)
http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx...ar1=0&var2=138
For better PCI performance, a longer latency should be used. Try increasing it to 64 cycles or even 128 cycles. The optimal value for every system is different. You should benchmark your PCI cards' performance after each change to determine the optimal PCI latency time for your system.

Please note that a longer PCI latency isn't necessarily better. A long latency can also reduce performance as the other PCI devices queuing up may be stalled for too long. This is especially true with systems with many PCI devices or PCI devices that continuously write short bursts of data to the PCI bus. Such systems would work better with shorter PCI latencies as they allow rapid access to the PCI bus.

 

I'm gnna go ahead and say it as an Ableton user...I hate when Ableton does this lol...no matter how good your pc is, even if you're running fucking Quad Xeons it's going to somehow scare you like this...but luckily it's easily fixable...

 

my latency is 256, as the interface is of the lowest quality I think (150$)

well.. I did an Ableton test at 80% CPU-load and it's okay.

 

Sounds like there is most likely an issue with the driver if it happens only when your interface is connected. There are several things you can do like verify you are running the current updated driver from m-audio or roll back to a previous driver. A good resource to follow for optimizing WIN7 for pro audio use is an article from NI. I have followed it to a T and my machine runs flawlessly. The biggest improvement came from setting the CPU priority to background services. Since ASIO is considered a background service you will want to make it your CPU's priority. Anyways I hope this article can be of some help.
http://www.native-instruments.com/knowledge/questions/847/Windows+7+Tuning+Tips+for+Audio+Processing

 

I don't really understand what to do with this asio4all. I've installed, but don't know how to put him as a main driver. Would like to try with another driver..

thanks a lot for this great article! going to check some things..

 

WOW)) I thought I'll never solve this issue, but now the CPU works just fine. The irony is that I don't know for sure what was the problem, but I suppose it's because of the driver.
I figured it out how to work with asio4all and unistalled the original version of the driver. Now is this a quality drive?

I've also made some changes to my system parameters, like in the NI article, but I think it was the driver.


Thank you again for your replies. Seems like a friendly community here, and an effective one

Lots of inspiration to all of you!
Eugene.

 

^ told yah...

 

ASIO4ALL is a decent driver but it is a generic solution that emulates ASIO by translating audio signals into WDM calls. Basically you are bypassing window's internal mixer and all the hoops windows puts audio through resulting in an improved latency over using basic stock WDM drivers. Usually using the manufactured ASIO drivers for your interface is recommended. ASIO4ALL was meant to be used with sound cards that do not support ASIO. Drawback to using ASIO4ALL vs. other interface dedicated ASIO drivers is ASIO4ALL utilizes the windows WDM calls which re-samples everything to 48khz (even if it is already in 48khz) then re-samples again to the output sample rate. This makes it impossible to have bit-perfect audio playback. The other issue is that only one application can play audio at a time when ASIO4ALL is in use. No other programs besides the one calling ASIO4ALL can use the sound card. Of course some interface manufacturers make terrible ASIO drivers for their interface and using ASIO4ALL can be a better solution.