Routing all windows audio through ASIO4All (crackling audio caused by network interface)?

[Roman Empire]

Hi:
I had similar issues until I used Voicemeeter.(free mixer with ASIO drivers)

https://www.vb-audio.com/Voicemeeter/index.htm

Cool, then I´m not the only one who found this solution

[planetearth]

Realtek audio chips aren't made for the simultaneous recording and playback of real-time, multi-channel, high-definition audio. They're made for playback of stereo audio or (usually) compressed surround audio. ASIO4All is a "wrapper"; it's not true ASIO, so it doesn't work the same way ASIO does. It simply addresses your audio drivers differently than your on-board audio drivers would do natively.

Any change to Windows 10's drivers or anything else that runs on your system when you're trying to to record could be the final process or application that asks too much from the CPU. And keep in mind that Microsoft has been rolling out huge updates to Windows 7, 8 and 10 over the past few weeks to "fix" problems with Intel CPUs. Because of the way these updates worked, estimates floated from Intel (and others) suggested that you'd see a 5%--or higher--performance hit. That update could have slipped onto your machine during a recent reboot, causing this problem.

Realtek audio and network drivers aren't usually updated as part of Windows Update. You should grab the latest ones from Realtek's site (they just updated their Gigabit Ethernet interface drivers at the end of January, for example).

Steve

Thanks Steve,

But this has got nothing to do with recording - only playback. Drivers for both the audio and network were already attempted switched a million times to both whats available on the manufacturor of the chip and of the motherboards website.
Asio4All is the solution here because the buffers can be set large enough to handle the glitches.
I could go and grab my old EMU 1212M, but being very outdated on the driverside, I´m afraid that easily would just introduce other issues.

My Intel i5 laptop has a Realtek sound chip and 8 GB of RAM. I run as few processes as necessary, yet with 6 Chrome tabs open, and plenty of RAM available, SoundCloud, Spotify and/or YouTube audio streams will start to pop and crackle. It's simply too much.

If you're on Windows 7 or 8, the E-MU ASIO drivers work fine. (I'm using them on my 64-bit, Win7 machine right now, and the drivers can work in Windows 10, too.) And I appreciate that you've danced around enough with the Realtek drivers, but unless you have the ones from the end of January 2018, you still don't have the latest. You might also consider downloading the drivers, completely removing the devices and the drivers (including anything related to the USB ports), cleaning up the Registry, and then re-installing the latest drivers. (Windows will re-install the USB ports when you reboot.) It's possible that some old, corrupt files are still being used.

One other option would be to see what else is using the same IRQ as the sound chip. This isn't as common a problem as it used to be, but I've seen people on various forums mention issues with it.

I doubt a "cryptominer" has installed anything on your machine. You'd see a process running, and it would be consuming a substantial amount of CPU power. The free Malwarebytes software might be able to tell you if something's on your machine, though. (Just don't let it load anything on startup after you install it, or you're defeating the purpose of cleaning out your system.)

Steve

[Roman Empire]

Realtek audio chips aren't made for the simultaneous recording and playback of real-time, multi-channel, high-definition audio. They're made for playback of stereo audio or (usually) compressed surround audio. ASIO4All is a "wrapper"; it's not true ASIO, so it doesn't work the same way ASIO does. It simply addresses your audio drivers differently than your on-board audio drivers would do natively.

Any change to Windows 10's drivers or anything else that runs on your system when you're trying to to record could be the final process or application that asks too much from the CPU. And keep in mind that Microsoft has been rolling out huge updates to Windows 7, 8 and 10 over the past few weeks to "fix" problems with Intel CPUs. Because of the way these updates worked, estimates floated from Intel (and others) suggested that you'd see a 5%--or higher--performance hit. That update could have slipped onto your machine during a recent reboot, causing this problem.

Realtek audio and network drivers aren't usually updated as part of Windows Update. You should grab the latest ones from Realtek's site (they just updated their Gigabit Ethernet interface drivers at the end of January, for example).

Steve

Thanks Steve,

But this has got nothing to do with recording - only playback. Drivers for both the audio and network were already attempted switched a million times to both whats available on the manufacturor of the chip and of the motherboards website.
Asio4All is the solution here because the buffers can be set large enough to handle the glitches.
I could go and grab my old EMU 1212M, but being very outdated on the driverside, I´m afraid that easily would just introduce other issues.

My Intel i5 laptop has a Realtek sound chip and 8 GB of RAM. I run as few processes as necessary, yet with 6 Chrome tabs open, and plenty of RAM available, SoundCloud, Spotify and/or YouTube audio streams will start to pop and crackle. It's simply too much.

If you're on Windows 7 or 8, the E-MU ASIO drivers work fine. (I'm using them on my 64-bit, Win7 machine right now, and the drivers can work in Windows 10, too.) And I appreciate that you've danced around enough with the Realtek drivers, but unless you have the ones from the end of January 2018, you still don't have the latest. You might also consider downloading the drivers, completely removing the devices and the drivers (including anything related to the USB ports), cleaning up the Registry, and then re-installing the latest drivers. (Windows will re-install the USB ports when you reboot.) It's possible that some old, corrupt files are still being used.

One other option would be to see what else is using the same IRQ as the sound chip. This isn't as common a problem as it used to be, but I've seen people on various forums mention issues with it.

I doubt a "cryptominer" has installed anything on your machine. You'd see a process running, and it would be consuming a substantial amount of CPU power. The free Malwarebytes software might be able to tell you if something's on your machine, though. (Just don't let it load anything on startup after you install it, or you're defeating the purpose of cleaning out your system.)

Steve

Thanks for your reply Steve,

That about cryptominers was a joke, but all is possible of course.
I´ll wait a bit with reinstalling USB ports.. first I´d like to know where you get the drivers from. You´re saying that the latest is from Jan 2018, but according to this page, the latest drivers are from last year:

http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downlo ... Down=false

Am I in the wrong place?

EDIT: The voicemeeter solution didn´t work. Seems always to be a matter of time till the buffers are no longer of a sufficiant size, hence I´ve deleted all USB related stuff from device manager, and hard-rebooted; no way to gently reboot if the system doesn´t know your USB keyboard/mouse anymore. I also disabled a couple of virtual/physical audio devices, such as for my monitor which is one that I bought just a few months ago.. you never know if that could be the one causing it.

Thanks

[planetearth]

Realtek audio chips aren't made for the simultaneous recording and playback of real-time, multi-channel, high-definition audio. They're made for playback of stereo audio or (usually) compressed surround audio. ASIO4All is a "wrapper"; it's not true ASIO, so it doesn't work the same way ASIO does. It simply addresses your audio drivers differently than your on-board audio drivers would do natively.

Any change to Windows 10's drivers or anything else that runs on your system when you're trying to to record could be the final process or application that asks too much from the CPU. And keep in mind that Microsoft has been rolling out huge updates to Windows 7, 8 and 10 over the past few weeks to "fix" problems with Intel CPUs. Because of the way these updates worked, estimates floated from Intel (and others) suggested that you'd see a 5%--or higher--performance hit. That update could have slipped onto your machine during a recent reboot, causing this problem.

Realtek audio and network drivers aren't usually updated as part of Windows Update. You should grab the latest ones from Realtek's site (they just updated their Gigabit Ethernet interface drivers at the end of January, for example).

Steve

Thanks Steve,

But this has got nothing to do with recording - only playback. Drivers for both the audio and network were already attempted switched a million times to both whats available on the manufacturor of the chip and of the motherboards website.
Asio4All is the solution here because the buffers can be set large enough to handle the glitches.
I could go and grab my old EMU 1212M, but being very outdated on the driverside, I´m afraid that easily would just introduce other issues.

My Intel i5 laptop has a Realtek sound chip and 8 GB of RAM. I run as few processes as necessary, yet with 6 Chrome tabs open, and plenty of RAM available, SoundCloud, Spotify and/or YouTube audio streams will start to pop and crackle. It's simply too much.

If you're on Windows 7 or 8, the E-MU ASIO drivers work fine. (I'm using them on my 64-bit, Win7 machine right now, and the drivers can work in Windows 10, too.) And I appreciate that you've danced around enough with the Realtek drivers, but unless you have the ones from the end of January 2018, you still don't have the latest. You might also consider downloading the drivers, completely removing the devices and the drivers (including anything related to the USB ports), cleaning up the Registry, and then re-installing the latest drivers. (Windows will re-install the USB ports when you reboot.) It's possible that some old, corrupt files are still being used.

One other option would be to see what else is using the same IRQ as the sound chip. This isn't as common a problem as it used to be, but I've seen people on various forums mention issues with it.

I doubt a "cryptominer" has installed anything on your machine. You'd see a process running, and it would be consuming a substantial amount of CPU power. The free Malwarebytes software might be able to tell you if something's on your machine, though. (Just don't let it load anything on startup after you install it, or you're defeating the purpose of cleaning out your system.)

Steve

Thanks for your reply Steve,

That about cryptominers was a joke, but all is possible of course.
I´ll wait a bit with reinstalling USB ports.. first I´d like to know where you get the drivers from. You´re saying that the latest is from Jan 2018, but according to this page, the latest drivers are from last year:

http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downlo ... Down=false

Am I in the wrong place?

You may be. They've even updated the PCI GBe (Gigabit Ethernet) drivers since the ones I mentioned; they're all dated March 2 for the Windows 10, 8 and 7 files. The audio codecs are still from last year, however.

http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downlo ... Down=false

I still recommend trying the E-MU drivers (and PatchMix software), and disabling the on-board Realtek audio chip in your system's BIOS--not through Windows' Device Manager. If the pops and click aren't there with the E-MU interface, you'll know where the problem is. And the E-MU interface supplies the real ASIO driver, which would also help here.

Steve

[Roman Empire]

Realtek audio chips aren't made for the simultaneous recording and playback of real-time, multi-channel, high-definition audio. They're made for playback of stereo audio or (usually) compressed surround audio. ASIO4All is a "wrapper"; it's not true ASIO, so it doesn't work the same way ASIO does. It simply addresses your audio drivers differently than your on-board audio drivers would do natively.

Any change to Windows 10's drivers or anything else that runs on your system when you're trying to to record could be the final process or application that asks too much from the CPU. And keep in mind that Microsoft has been rolling out huge updates to Windows 7, 8 and 10 over the past few weeks to "fix" problems with Intel CPUs. Because of the way these updates worked, estimates floated from Intel (and others) suggested that you'd see a 5%--or higher--performance hit. That update could have slipped onto your machine during a recent reboot, causing this problem.

Realtek audio and network drivers aren't usually updated as part of Windows Update. You should grab the latest ones from Realtek's site (they just updated their Gigabit Ethernet interface drivers at the end of January, for example).

Steve

Thanks Steve,

But this has got nothing to do with recording - only playback. Drivers for both the audio and network were already attempted switched a million times to both whats available on the manufacturor of the chip and of the motherboards website.
Asio4All is the solution here because the buffers can be set large enough to handle the glitches.
I could go and grab my old EMU 1212M, but being very outdated on the driverside, I´m afraid that easily would just introduce other issues.

My Intel i5 laptop has a Realtek sound chip and 8 GB of RAM. I run as few processes as necessary, yet with 6 Chrome tabs open, and plenty of RAM available, SoundCloud, Spotify and/or YouTube audio streams will start to pop and crackle. It's simply too much.

If you're on Windows 7 or 8, the E-MU ASIO drivers work fine. (I'm using them on my 64-bit, Win7 machine right now, and the drivers can work in Windows 10, too.) And I appreciate that you've danced around enough with the Realtek drivers, but unless you have the ones from the end of January 2018, you still don't have the latest. You might also consider downloading the drivers, completely removing the devices and the drivers (including anything related to the USB ports), cleaning up the Registry, and then re-installing the latest drivers. (Windows will re-install the USB ports when you reboot.) It's possible that some old, corrupt files are still being used.

One other option would be to see what else is using the same IRQ as the sound chip. This isn't as common a problem as it used to be, but I've seen people on various forums mention issues with it.

I doubt a "cryptominer" has installed anything on your machine. You'd see a process running, and it would be consuming a substantial amount of CPU power. The free Malwarebytes software might be able to tell you if something's on your machine, though. (Just don't let it load anything on startup after you install it, or you're defeating the purpose of cleaning out your system.)

Steve

Thanks for your reply Steve,

That about cryptominers was a joke, but all is possible of course.
I´ll wait a bit with reinstalling USB ports.. first I´d like to know where you get the drivers from. You´re saying that the latest is from Jan 2018, but according to this page, the latest drivers are from last year:

http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downlo ... Down=false

Am I in the wrong place?

You may be. They've even updated the PCI GBe (Gigabit Ethernet) drivers since the ones I mentioned; they're all dated March 2 for the Windows 10, 8 and 7 files. The audio codecs are still from last year, however.

http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downlo ... Down=false

I still recommend trying the E-MU drivers (and PatchMix software), and disabling the on-board Realtek audio chip in your system's BIOS--not through Windows' Device Manager. If the pops and click aren't there with the E-MU interface, you'll know where the problem is. And the E-MU interface supplies the real ASIO driver, which would also help here.

Steve

Thanks Steve, for now I´m trying to see how things go with it after the USB/removal/install trick. It´s now been almost two days, and the hiccups have been very few. I still run through voicemeeter with big buffers on Asio4all, so can´t say how stable it would be using the "normal" way. What matters is that things work though, and if this is still fine after a week I´ll leave it like that and consider the USB drivers the culprit.

[Roman Empire]

Update:

This worked pretty well for a week with just a crackle or two an hour. Yesterday things started freaking out though, so tomorrow I´ll install my old 1212m card - glad it finally gets a better purpose than just being packed away in the closet

[Roman Empire]

Good news first.. Windows immidiately had a driver for EMU-DSP ready when I had it installed, wow.
Weird news: It won´t work without patchmix open, no big deal - prolly always was like that, I just forgot.

Bad news: Problem is back after two days. Tried again sending the outputs to voicemeeter, from there to asio4all, and from there to EMU-DSP.

I´ll try now to install the original EMUDSP ASIO driver and route to those from voicemeeter...

[planetearth]

Good news first.. Windows immidiately had a driver for EMU-DSP ready when I had it installed, wow.
Weird news: It won´t work without patchmix open, no big deal - prolly always was like that, I just forgot.

Bad news: Problem is back after two days. Tried again sending the outputs to voicemeeter, from there to asio4all, and from there to EMU-DSP.

I´ll try now to install the original EMUDSP ASIO driver and route to those from voicemeeter...

Yeah, you need the ASIO driver with the E-MU card. Anything else will cause pops and clicks, unless you run it at very high latency settings.

Steve

[BertKoor]

Bad news: Problem is back after two days.

My guess is there's something taking hostage of the CPU at intervals, interrupting your audio. Can be a network or GPU driver, or a virus scanner, or a badly coded "check for updates" routine of some program you have installed in the past, which might even be partially uninstalled.

If it were my machine, I'd format the disk and install the OS from scratch. Keep it totally default and see how it performs. This should not be happening on any half-decent system.

[Roman Empire]

Good news first.. Windows immidiately had a driver for EMU-DSP ready when I had it installed, wow.
Weird news: It won´t work without patchmix open, no big deal - prolly always was like that, I just forgot.

Bad news: Problem is back after two days. Tried again sending the outputs to voicemeeter, from there to asio4all, and from there to EMU-DSP.

I´ll try now to install the original EMUDSP ASIO driver and route to those from voicemeeter...

Yeah, you need the ASIO driver with the E-MU card. Anything else will cause pops and clicks, unless you run it at very high latency settings.

Steve

And for some reason that´s the only thing thats perfectly quiet when I use it as output in voicemeeter.. I tested that the asio driver works by using tobybears minihost, this is not my DAW remember, and I there I had sound coming out...

[Roman Empire]

Bad news: Problem is back after two days.

My guess is there's something taking hostage of the CPU at intervals, interrupting your audio. Can be a network or GPU driver, or a virus scanner, or a badly coded "check for updates" routine of some program you have installed in the past, which might even be partially uninstalled.

If it were my machine, I'd format the disk and install the OS from scratch. Keep it totally default and see how it performs. This should not be happening on any half-decent system.

I guess I´ll need to try getting rid of drivers and components for the hardware reported by latencymon to cause issues with latency. The USB port and the network.
As earlier mentioned, I deleted the USB components from device manager, and bought a new network card but still continues to face the issue.
There´s prolly a way to get them out of the system on a deeper level.

There´ll be tons of things to install again if I do a clean install, so I think it´s still easier to keep on fiddling, but thanks!

EDIT: And for software that could cause this, I already tried terminating my comodo antivirus/firewall etc. package.
I just had a crash after using an ASIO plugin for Winamp, routing it to the ASIO of the Emu1212.
Now after rebooting, I´ve managed to route voicemeeter to asio4all where I put the buffer size to its max, again routed to Emu1212. Let´s see how that goes.

[Shockwave77598]

I remember a "wierd" crackling audio problem. Guy's gear was fine, but everytime his lady came in, it sounded like gremlins mating in the speakers. He had replaced everything, from wires to the pricey external sound adapter. He was close to calling an exorcist for the lady.

Then I realized she had an iphone with her. Simply making her leave the iphone outside the room fixed the problem.

[Roman Empire]

I remember a "wierd" crackling audio problem. Guy's gear was fine, but everytime his lady came in, it sounded like gremlins mating in the speakers. He had replaced everything, from wires to the pricey external sound adapter. He was close to calling an exorcist for the lady.

Then I realized she had an iphone with her. Simply making her leave the iphone outside the room fixed the problem.

Hahaha, good story! I wish it was that simple here.. now I´m struggling with that it´s the driver "portcls.sys" causing the pops, according to latencymon.
All I could find about fixes told me to disable power related things for the network card, which I did and also find similar settings for the USB ports - just in case. Issue remains, however.
And just wanna add that there´s absolutely no power saving stuff enabled in the system - everything runs at its best.
Summary: After some hours or days, crackling audio when network is active, also with locally stored files, and even when playing sound from my usb turntable. Turned off onboard network and audio cards, installed new network card and my old EMU 1212m, but problem remains.
Routing the sound from windows to voicemeeter to 1212ms asio driver with max latency setting did not help either.

[BushmasterM4]

Ive built many daw rigs and I always disable the Network cards when recording and mixing. I also find that any firewall will cause the same issues. I always disable firewalls when recording and mixing. If you need to get online, then just enable the firewall and network card/chip when you need to. I also always disable on board sound chips via the bias settings. I always use my audio interfaces for any sounds needs.

[Roman Empire]

Ive built many daw rigs and I always disable the Network cards when recording and mixing. I also find that any firewall will cause the same issues. I always disable firewalls when recording and mixing. If you need to get online, then just enable the firewall and network card/chip when you need to. I also always disable on board sound chips via the bias settings. I always use my audio interfaces for any sounds needs.

These are also the things I´d do if it was a DAW, but as initially mentioned; it´s not. Onboard LAN and audio facilities indeed are disabled.