Newb loves T, has problems setting up MAudio Ozone

[dingus]

Hey all,
I heard about the free trial on the Mackie website and have been trying out Tracktion. It’s a really well-designed program that I’d like to make my main tool for making songs. Unfortunately, I’m having problems with latency/crackling.

I’m periodically getting crackling, but CPU usage never gets above about 25%. The problem is worse with the VSTi’s that I’ve tried (Stringer, rgc soundfont player).

Sometimes, the incoming audio levels also freak out—they’re almost pegged at 0db with almost no signal. When I restart the device, they reset to normal.

I’m using a
* HP laptop: Pentium 4, 2.3 GHz, 512 Meg RAM, Windows XP Pro, SP 2 installed
* Ozone USB audio/midi interface

I’ve reinstalled the Ozone drivers with no difference.

Within Tracktion, I’ve used ASIO and Directsound drivers (no real difference in crackling), and I’ve toggled on and off the realtime priority mode (no change) and asio direct mode (on is better than off better doesn’t completely solve the problem).

I’m able to use the Ozone with Sonar with pretty low latency and no real problems, but I’d rather get it going with Tracktion. My understanding from searching this forum is that I’ve probably got some kind of hardware configuration issue, but I don’t know what else to do.

Any help?
-Dinugs

[IIRs]

SP 2 installed

Brave man! See the other thread..

[dingus]

SP 2 installed

Brave man! See the other thread..

Yeah, that's why I included it in my description. Unfortunately, I don't think its that simple. I just uninstalled SP 2, uninstalled the ozone drivers, restarted, and reinstalled the ozone drivers.

Still the same problems.

Maybe it just needs to have super high latency. That sucks, though.

[Beno]

First Off ASIO should give you the lowest latency. Ozone is USB right? I would guess you're going to want ASIO direct Mode on and then try to see which is better with Real Time on or off. What is the lowest setting you are able to acheive?

And have you tried ASIO in sonar or are you using WDM? Try ASIO in Sonar and see if you get the same results or if you can go to a lower setting than in Tracktion.

Ben

[dingus]

And have you tried ASIO in sonar or are you using WDM? Try ASIO in Sonar and see if you get the same results or if you can go to a lower setting than in Tracktion.

Ben

Thanks Ben.

Aha! I use the WDM drivers in Sonar. The other driver available within sonar is MME. There's no option to use ASIO.

Yes, Ozone is USB (there's the rub.)

The WDM gets down to 10 miliseconds with no ill effects in Sonar.

In Tracktion, when I have it set to the ASIO driver with 11.6 mils, it offers considerable crackeling, and somehow "feels" very slow even though 10 mils feels fine in sonar. (This is especially noticable when doing midi drums.)


thanks again. Nice friendly folks on this forum.

-Dingus

[cellular]

I run an Ozone with Tracktion. I had some trouble at first, after installing a new driver. Apparently, uninstalling an M-Audio driver the usual way is not enough. I went into the registry and removed everything related to the Ozone (there was a lot left after uninstall), and then did a fresh driver install with the newest drivers. Things work better now. However, editing your registry is entirely at your own risk.

[Beno]

Dingus,
So you must be using a Sonar 2 or earlier, right? They added asio for sonar 3 I believe. Do you have any other ASIO compatible hosts on your machine? The reason I am asking is it will help to determine if this is just the best you can do with ASIO and the Ozone on your machine, or if there is something different about how it works in Tracktion.
Ben

[dingus]

Thanks guys (or gals).

Cellular,
that's interesting about the uninstall. I don't know enough about it to go erasing stuff in the registry, though. Also, MAudio hasn't released any new drivers for the ozone for XP. I'm just trying to reinstall the old one.

Ben,
Yeah, I have an older version of Sonar (I'm one of those old fasioned guys that buys software, and I saw no reason to upgrade.)

I don't have any other audio programs on the computer. Maybe the zone is just slow (i.e. noticibly latent). Do many people have these problems with ASIO and USB audio?

Thanks again,
Dingus

[SuperFly76]

...
I don't have any other audio programs on the computer. Maybe the zone is just slow (i.e. noticibly latent). Do many people have these problems with ASIO and USB audio?

Thanks again,
Dingus

Yes,
USB audio is known to have minor performance problems and sometimes major problems when using a laptop. The problem is that most USB ports in laptops are cheap and skim off of the system resources in order to save on form factor and money. This leads to a tug of war contest over your system's memory and the system buss between your usb port trying to transfer audio data and your audio program trying to run at the same time. It can work fine but latency is a bit higher than with a PCI audio card. There are some things you can do to improve things. one is to reinstall your windows XP as a standard pc rather than a ACPI pc which is the default seting. You should also remove all of the extra windows junk that doesn't need to be running at the same time.
I have a M-Audio USB Duo and I have been able to get latency as low as 8ms which is pretty good. I still need to watch my system resources though.

[Beno]

Well here is the thing with USB. The ASIO buffer is not the only buffer involved. There is a USB send and receive buffer as well that are also delaying your audio. This means that even with a low ASIO setting like 10ms, you can still have noticable latency. Compare a 10ms ASIO buffer from a USB device to a PCI device and it will not be nearly the same. I did a test of a bunch of USB and Firewire devices real world latency path (analog in-through DAW-Analog Out) and it for everything, it was always longer than reported by the DAW, sometimes a lot longer. The firewire devices aren't bad, but the USB were almost always not anywhere near what they were reporting, and there isn't much that can be done about it.

Ben

[dingus]

Well here is the thing with USB. The ASIO buffer is not the only buffer involved. There is a USB send and receive buffer as well that are also delaying your audio. This means that even with a low ASIO setting like 10ms, you can still have noticable latency. Compare a 10ms ASIO buffer from a USB device to a PCI device and it will not be nearly the same. I did a test of a bunch of USB and Firewire devices real world latency path (analog in-through DAW-Analog Out) and it for everything, it was always longer than reported by the DAW, sometimes a lot longer. The firewire devices aren't bad, but the USB were almost always not anywhere near what they were reporting, and there isn't much that can be done about it.

Ben

Aha, very enlightening. Thanks Ben.

I'm still not quite sure why this doesn't seem to affect the WDM drivers as much, though.

I have an older tower computer with a decent PCI soundcard (Delta 1010lt) that I was thinking of using to experiment with the world of linux audio. Maybe I'll turn it into a tracktion machine instead!

Peace,
Dingus

[Lunch Money]

I have no solutions for the latency or crackling beyond what you've already tried;

However, for the CPU spikes, it's possible that you're running into "denormal" problems with the Pentium processor. In the settings page, select "add low-level noise to avoid denormalization" and that should clear it up.

Hope you get the latency and crackling sorted!