And users now making use of Nvidia Cuda accelerated gpus will probably become more prevalent as AI stem separation/vocal cloning, etc become even more popular.

 

It could be an USB thingy. I'm a ryzen user for a long time now and found that the usb implementation seems to be different to that from intel. My older Icon controllers didn't work at all and the newer ones got a firmware fix. After that I didn't have troubles at all. but that shows the usb implementation in amd chipsets is just not the same as in intel chipsets.
Have Asio4all installed and try to run reaper without the usb interface on onboard audio.
Or have you some other interface? I have several steinberg and behringer usb interfaces that ran fine out of the box.
Possibly maybe there is a firmware update for your interface out there?

It's not a bad idea to buy gaming hardware for audio, but I would go for more convervative manufacturers.
I bought a Lenovo Legion lately and a Lenovo Ideapad both with on-board nvidia gpus (something I don't want to be in my desktops, its AMD only there). both work perfectly fine with steinberg daws, no nvidia issues there.

I can try to run reaper on both, they seem to be similar to your machine.
If you could find me a link to some sort of test-session to have a little load, that would be great.

 

I've tried using both graphics, no difference. Actually runs good on the Nvidia.

 

Well, I turned off the core parking. It seems to have made a considerable difference, the red warning on Reaper hasn't gone off, but it still occasionally freezes a bit when saving or opening a plugin. Could any of this be disk-related, and how would I know?

 

install Diskinfo64, use it to check your drive.
https://crystaldiskinfo.en.uptodown.com/windows


install processexplorer and check your processes to see if something is hogging the cpu cycles

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

recommend you install the entire suite, its free and has a lot of useful tools

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/

go to control panel and examine your system logs (they should be under Event Viewer) under administrative tools
scroll through the logs and look for recurring errors since installing Reaper.

 

Have you tested using other ASIO drivers as @Plendix mentioned (ASIO4ALL, etc) ?

 

make sure software disk encryption is disabled, Windows loves turning that shit on (Windows 11 does that automatically by default I think),

(if you'd really need encryption, then use a modern SSD that supports actual hardware disk encryption which has practically no performance loss)

 

run sysconfig (msconfig) and check what your startup services and programs are.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...ndows-10-a9509199-ae06-ee0d-e351-254b43071034


Disable shit like adobe updates, google updates, anything that doesn't need to run to allow your computer to work faster.

This can also be done by using sysinternals Autoruns program, which can do it muchmore in depth as well as removing links for programs no longer installed in computer.

 

disconnect your ethernet cable and disable your wireless while testing to make sure you don't have a background process using your computer as a bot or proxy.

 

Oh something else you could have a look at: Windows has that little Windows Reliability Monitor.
Sometimes that is handy, but I don't know if its in all windows editions. Go into Control Panel/Security and Maintenance. Under Maintenance click View reliability history. This will bring up the Reliability Monitor. Whatever hickup is happening, it is monitored and saved there.
so have a click at the red xes and view detail. there you will see what components are involved.
if there is a .dll or a .sys involved it might be a driver thing. find the file and find out what it belongs to.

 

The Problem with realtime Audio is the DPC Latency. Use the Latencymon (resplendence.com/latencymon) to check which driver generate the spikes and solve it. I guess it´s the networkdriver if you have a intel card installed. There are several solutions to force the audio-services to other cpu-cores than the network-service (you can do this with the interrupt-affinity Policy Configuration Tool) but the final solution is to use another network card (audio-pc´s mostly has a realtek card installed, check the configuration which the high-end audio-workstations use). BTW: Windows Defender Antivirus must be complete disabled (use Defender Control 2.1) else your audio-workstation never run without spikes. I was in this "optimizing"-loop a few weeks ago and all that optimizing tips arround made it not better. Greets, guru-bug
PS: Attached my CPU Bios-Settings which i found working best after some weeks of testing.

 

Last edited: Dec 31, 2023

Yes, no difference.

 

I ran latencymon but when I did, it was using the integrated sound, not the Focusrite. Is there a way to tell it what audio driver to use?

 

I didn't know about this. Unfortunately, the few things it flagged weren't things that happened when I was working in the DAW.

 

Bit of an update, as I'm slowly getting through most of the helpful suggestions here.

Something occurred to me... given the same problem happened with my last ASUS gaming laptop, I thought a bit more about it. There's a graphics card management program that runs on both machines called Armoury Crate. Last night before my session, I disabled it. I still had one or two little hiccups, but the red warning light didn't go on at all, so I'm wondering if it made a difference. I'm going to keep disabling it before I run the daw.

Did a diagnostic on the HD, that's coming up just fine. I'll report more as I find out stuff and keep checking in with your suggestions.

 

Crystal disk says everything is great. I have process explorer now, but I don't really know what I'm looking for... should I run it as I'm running the daw and if something happens, go and look right away at whether it left an error?

Same with event viewer? Should I use my DAW, and then mark down the exact time I have a hiccup and then go and see if there's something corresponding in the event viewer? Thanks.

 

Start LatencyMon and then work in your Daw ... check under Drivers the highest execution time ... if it looks like below it´s ok ...
If it switches from green to red you know which driver is the problem.

PS: For the background-Tasks use microsoft sysinternals "autoruns" to disable all you don´t need. The autorun-list in the task-manager does´nt show all ...

 

1. Best DAW is one that is OFFLINE without a "virus-scanner".
so my conclusion to your problem is that you run a DAW online with "virus-scanner".
Try to disconnect the ethernet cable to that DAW and see if the problem still exists.
Also remove any "virus-scanner".
And disable HPET in BIOS.
Also... NVIDIA graphic cards suck for a DAW.
Best are AMD.
https://audiosex.pro/threads/best-amd-gpu-for-low-dpc-latency.58184/

 

Last edited: Jan 1, 2024

Could it be that your laptop doesn't like the new versions of Reaper? I remember that on my old desktop Reaper 4 was running great, and Reaper 6 was more glitchy.

You should also run Latencymon while recording in Reaper to catch any DPC spikes. It could be the nVidia driver, or the SSD's... On my Asus laptop the huge spikes are caused by the ACPI process, when it starts charging the battery. Try unplugging the charger to see if this eliminates the drop-outs.

There are also a few optimization processes installed by the MyAsus software, which affect the DPC latency.

 

I've never had this problem with 4 other laptops, all were online and had virus scanners. I'm not in a position to just have an offline-music-only pc.