Sluggish start of audio playing?

[bemushroomed]

My soundcard is sometimes very slow to start playing an audio file (2-3 seconds before audio starts coming in). It's almost like the card is going to sleep instantly if no audio is present, and then it has to wake up every time there's audio that it needs to process.

This is extremely irritating when you need to preview short audio files, since they're not long enough for the soundcard to "wake up" so you will hear nothing.

It's not a constant problem either, but for the most part it will act like this. Latency in e.g Cubase is good, no problems with that.

Any idea what the reason could be for this?

I'm on PC with a Tascam US-20x20 USB sound interface. I tried another USB port, thought i had solved it (since it worked for a while) but no..

[antic604]

Any idea what the reason could be for this?

That sounds pretty weird. You mention Cubase - does the sound come out of it instantly when you start playing say a virtual instrument (a VST)? Perhaps it's something about your hard drive speed / access time? Also, if you're on a PC laptop make sure you're in high performance mode.

[bemushroomed]

That sounds pretty weird. You mention Cubase - does the sound come out of it instantly when you start playing say a virtual instrument (a VST)? Perhaps it's something about your hard drive speed / access time? Also, if you're on a PC laptop make sure you're in high performance mode.

this is not really a problem in Cubase at all, no problems with VST's or anything. I don't use it to preview files really. It is a problem in SoundForge or in for example VLC player. With VLC player i can solve it with using the "loop" function since eventually the sound will start, but it's quite worthless and irritating to have to use that.. i work a lot with huge libraries of e.g short drum samples so i really need this to work.

I'm on a stationary PC (Windows 10) with really good specs, SSD, 32GB RAM, 1080ti..

Edit: I'll be damned, a new driver was released last month for the sound interface, been many years since they released a new driver.. hope that will solve this.

Edit 2: After restarting it does work, but that could be coincidence, because sometimes it does work.

[bemushroomed]

Nah, the new driver doesnt help. What seems to work is switching the audio device type.. right now the surround variety works, sometimes the Windows Classic Wave Driver works. it's really odd, no consistency in the problem either really.