Waveform 11 Pro 11.0.26
Ubuntu 19.10 - fully updated
4Gig Ram, Dual Core i5
UPDATE 06/12/20: Same behavior on 11.0.39 with or w/o OpenGL rendering
As noted in my previous post, this little machine is used for it's portability and is a great platform for sketching ideas on the go. I also wanted to see just how well Waveform works on Ubuntu. It works great most of the time and has plenty of horsepower to run all the demos at below 15% cpu.
So here's the issue.
I noticed early on that sometimes WF11 would come up in a state where starting playback on a project like the "Static Observer" demo would breakup continuously. Starting and stopping playback had no effect on the breakup. Resetting the audio engine with the panic button on the transport didn't help either. I should note that the WF11 CPU usage meter is happily in the green at around 10% all the while this is happening.
It's a strange sounding breakup. I have heard plenty of buffer underruns over my years of working with DAW's. I'm familiar with the sound of normal underrun transients and the reasons for them. I've written circular buffer audio code with producer-consumer models like this - albeit much simpler. This sounds more like some buffer pointer is completely out of whack and creating constant errors as opposed to the occasionally partial buffer fill due to a stressed audio engine.
I found after a while that I could switch over to an empty project with the click turned on, play it back for a moment and then return to the demo at which point the audio would play properly. I also found that just clicking the cursor at different points in the demo during playback would fix the audio after one or two clicks USUALLY. Sometimes though, I still have to switch over and play my little "Audio Reset" click project for a moment to fix the problem. On rare occasions even that doesn't work and I have to shutdown WF11 and restart it.
I am not using the 64 bit math option for for mixing and I am not using absurdly small buffers. I have observed this issue using anything from 256 to 1024 sample buffers. I am using 44.1k sampling, but have also observed the issue at 48k. In fact, I have found that switching sample rates seems to induce the issue fairly consistently. Again it is fixed by simply switching to my click track project, playing it for a few seconds and switching back.
Rendering the project to a WAV file, while still in this breakup state, renders normal sounding audio just as it does when there is no breakup going on. So it's certainly limited to realtime playback.
Once the audio has returned to normal playback the breakup does not return and playback continues smoothly even with starting, stopping and editing. I have let the demo loop for hours just to see if the breakup would return. I does not.
Nevertheless I can still fairly easily reproduce the issue by loading up Static Observer, shutting down WF11 and then relaunching it and starting playback on the preloaded Static Observer demo. This is NOT limited to only this demo. I have reproduced the issue on other demos and my own files.
I have observed no audio problems on this machine with any other application from Audacity to VLC to Youtube so I think this is limited to the Waveform 11 engine.
Anyhow, that's my input on this problem. It's not a showstopper for me as I can get around it most of the time and still enjoy WF11 on this machine. I have used WF11 for hours on this machine without any audio issues.
I captured a wave file of the problem, I just can't figure out how to attach it.
BTW...
After years of using other DAW's, mostly the complex and very powerful Samplitude Pro X, Waveform is refreshingly simple and has some really wonderful tools. The theory tools like the pattern generator are fantastic!
Keep up the great work!!! I'm leaning toward Waveform as my main DAW.
