all right, what's with these ASIO drivers?
 

I just got PT9, and I've tried it with three different interfaces so far, with pretty much the same results.

What happens is, the playback goes on for a while, say a minute or two, and then all of a sudden one of two things happens: it either gets "wierd" (distorted, kind of flanger-sounding), or it cuts out entirely.

I tried it with an Mbox-2, and Mbox-3 Mini, and an M-Audio Firewire 410. They all behave the same way.

I tried adjusting the buffer sizes - the larger ones work better, but there is still cutout. I set the "ignore errors" flag, that didn't seem to do much of anything...

After all this experimentation, it seems to me, that the problem is with the Digi ASIO driver. Am I wrong?

Now... I've been using the latest-greatest drivers from the web sites. Should I be doing this, or not? Are there specific versions that are known to work, or is the latest-greatest the one to use? The Mbox-2 and Mbox-3 mini drivers came from the Avid web site, and the Firewire driver came from the M-Audio (now Avid) web site. Doesn't seem to make any difference.

Can someone please point me in the right direction here? There must be something elementary I'm not doing, else why would all these interfaces behave the same way? I should mention, that all three of these interfaces worked fine under M-Powered 7.3 and LE-8.

I did install the drivers first before installing PT-9. The upgrade to 9.0.5 makes matters slightly worse, it certainly doesn't fix anything. Right at the moment I have 9.0.0 on my machine, with vanilla Digi and M-Audio drivers, and cutout is "almost certain" within about 5 minutes.

The machine is a Win-7 64-bit i2630, cpu utilization sitting at around 10% with a full session, memory at around 20% (of 8 gig). I'm pretty sure there's not an issue with the machine, more likely with the audio drivers.

What's your sense on this?

Please post a Sandra report. See the Help Us Help You link at the top of this page for more info. What error messages/codes do you get? Have you performed the recommended systems optimizations? What disk drives in the Sandra report are your audio sessions on? Try to describe more clearly the playback engine and RTAS settings you have tried? What is in the sessions you are trying to play back? any VIs or plugins? all your plugins up to date? Even if the system is not your problem let's get these obvious things out of the way.

Darryl

Re: all right, what's with these ASIO drivers?
 

Man you're not alone - but this is a symptom I was also getting in Reaper and Wavelab7. PT9 just gives the error "ASIO device properties have been changed by the device control panel. ProTools must be restarted for these changes to take effect. Please restart ProTools." It's worse at 96KHz than it is at 44.1KHz.

I think it's a clock issue where W7 is changing the clock rate for some stupid microsoft reason. fyi my DAW is W7 64bit i7 8-core 12GB RAM etc.

This occurs with no VIs or plugins, playback engine set at 7 CPUs and 99% and all buffers etc at default.

This morning I removed and then reset word clock in my mixer (mixer is the clock master) and now (touch wood) Wavelab is behaving better - I got through a 45min mastering test with no ASIO errors.

But PT9 still quits with various errors including:
- PT could not initialise the f/w device...
- PT is unable to reacquire the h/w because it is in use by another application... (it's not btw)
- PT experienced an unknown error and must now exit.... :eek:

Re: all right, what's with these ASIO drivers?
 

Okay, well.... what part of the Sandra report would you like to see?

Here's the overview (there's lots more):


<<< Computer Overview >>>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
< Computer >
Model: Sony VPCF22CFX
Workgroup: WORKGROUP
Host Name: g12global
User: brian
< Processor >
Model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz
Speed: 798MHz
Cores per Processor: 4 Unit(s)
Threads per Core: 2 Unit(s)
Type: Mobile, Quad-Core
Integrated Data Cache: 4x 32kB, Synchronous, Write-Thru, 8-way, 64
byte line size, 2 threads sharing
L2 Cache: 4x 256kB, ECC, Synchronous, ATC, 8-way, 64
byte line size, 2 threads sharing
L3 Cache: 6MB, ECC, Synchronous, ATC, 12-way, Exclusive,
64 byte line size, 16 threads sharing
< Computer >
Mainboard: Sony VAIO
BIOS: AMI (OEM) R1180V3 05/04/2011
Bus(es): PCI PCIe IMB USB FireWire/1394 i2c/SMBus
Multi-Processor (MP) Support: No
Multi-Processor Advanced PIC (:Yes
Total Memory: 8GB DDR3 SO-DIMM
< Chipset >
Model: Sony Core (Sandy Bridge) Mobile DRAM
Controller
Front Side Bus Speed: 100MHz
Total Memory: 8GB DDR3 SO-DIMM
Channels: 2
Memory Bus Speed: 2x 667MHz (1.33GHz)
< Memory Module(s) >
Memory Module: Hynix (Hyundai) HMT351S6BFR8C-H9 4GB DDR3 SO-
DIMM PC3-10700S DDR3-1334 (9-9-9-25 4-34-10-
5)
Memory Module: Hynix (Hyundai) HMT351S6BFR8C-H9 4GB DDR3 SO-
DIMM PC3-10700S DDR3-1334 (9-9-9-25 4-34-10-
5)
< Video System >
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M (96 SM5.0 1.34GHz,
1GB 1.79GHz, PCIe 2.00 x16)
< Graphics Processor >
OpenCL GP Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M (96SP 2C 1.34GHz,
1GB 1.79GHz)
Compute Shader Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M (96SP 1.34GHz, 1GB
1.79GHz)
< Storage Devices >
TOSHIBA MK6461GSY (640.1GB, SA:596GB (C:)
MAT[bleep][bleep][bleep][bleep]ABD-CMB UJ141AF (SATA15:N/A (E:)
< Logical Storage Devices >
System Reserved: 100MB (NTFS)
Hard Disk (C:): 585GB (NTFS) @ TOSHIBA MK6461GSY (640.1GB,
SATA300, 2.5", 7200rpm, 16MB Cache)
Recovery: 12GB (NTFS)
Optical Drive (E:): N/A @ MAT[bleep][bleep][bleep][bleep]ABD-CMB UJ141AF (SATA150, BD-R,
DVD+-RW, CD-RW, 2MB Cache)
< Peripherals >
LPC Hub Controller 1: Sony HM65 LPC Controller
Audio Device: Sony Cougar Point High Definition Audio
Controller
Audio Codec: Realtek Semi High Definition Audio
Audio Device: Sony GF108 High Definition Audio Controller
Audio Codec: nVidia 0014h
Audio Codec: nVidia 0014h
Audio Codec: nVidia 0014h
Disk Controller: Sony Cougar Point Mobile 6 port SATA AHCI
Controller
Disk Controller: Sony PCIe SDXC/MMC Host Controller
USB Controller 1: Sony Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host
Controller #2
USB Controller 2: Sony Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host
Controller #1
USB Controller 3: Sony Renesas Electronics USB 3.0 Host
Controller
FireWire/1394 Controller 1: Sony FireWire Host Controller
SMBus/i2c Controller 1: Intel ICH SMBus
< Printers and Faxes >
Printer: Microsoft XPS Document Writer (600x600,
Colour)
Fax: Microsoft Shared Fax Driver (200x200)
< Network Services >
Network Adapter: Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller (Ethernet)
Network Adapter: Bluetooth Device (Personal Area Network)
(Ethernet)
Wireless Adapter: Atheros AR9287 Wireless Network Adapter
< Operating System >
Windows System: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 6.01.7601
(Service Pack 1)
Platform Compliance: x64
< Windows Experience Index >
Current System: 5.9

Re: all right, what's with these ASIO drivers?
 

I only see a C: drive. Where are you audio sessions stored? If you have those sessions stored on your system drive this is kind of exactly the behavior you can expect. Pro Tools is very I/O latency sensitive and if this has been working reliably before you've been lucky. They need to be on a separate drive, at least 7200 rpm, not a "WDC green drive", ideally SATA/eSATA, but in this case you are going to be stuck with an external USB2 drive - unless the DVD-ROM can be replaced with an internal disk drive. You can read more about (and should yourself) by searching the knowledge base.

---

If you have them on a different drive can you connect that and rerun the Sandra report and also answer the other questions...

What error messages/codes do you get? Have you performed the recommended systems optimizations? Try to describe more clearly the playback engine and RTAS settings you have tried? What is in the sessions you are trying to play back? any VIs or plugins? all your plugins up to date? Even if the system is not your problem let's get these obvious things out of the way.

Darryl

Re: all right, what's with these ASIO drivers?
 

How do you know this is in any way related to the problem already described? Your post will likely be ignored or worse end up triggering an ongoing intertwined conversation with people confused about who is describing what problem.

Please start a new thread describing your problem and provide as much of the information asked in the "help us help you" link above as you can. A Sandra report is really important.

Darryl

Re: all right, what's with these ASIO drivers?
 

I have the audio files (and sessions) on an external USB-3 drive.

You want me to benchmark that, is that what you're saying?

Hi Darryl - I don't get any error messages/codes, except if I make the hardware buffer size REALLY small, then sometimes I get the prototypical "underflow". One symptom which may yield a clue, is that playing an ordinary music CD through the Mbox results in the SAME SYMPTOM - it plays for a while, but eventually it suddenly starts sounding wierd and distorted, kind of flanger-like, and the timing goes off sometimes too. With a buffer size of 512 or 1024, it'll run for maybe two or three minutes before it barfs, and once it barfs the only option is to go into the setup and change something there, which resets the Mbox, and after that everything is fine again.

As far as the recommended optimizations, I did the ones in the PT-9 docs, and I'm not entirely clear on what the rest are. I see detailed instructions for XP but not as many for Win-7 (which is what I'm using). Is there a checklist or bullet list for those?

I have tried "everything", in all combinations. What works best is a larger hardware buffer size of 1024, and 4 processors seems to work better than 8. But it really is random, there's no rhyme or reason to it. The bigger buffers generally last longer, that much is true.

The session worked fine on a PT-7.3, both HD and M-Powered (on a 32-bit XP machine). It has only the digi eq-4 plug-in, no other plugins are running. It doesn't matter whether any are running, or how many, the symptom is still the same.

Everything I'm running now is straight off the PT-9 install disk. I've installed a "minimal system" that way, and still get the symptom.

Re: all right, what's with these ASIO drivers?
 

Hm, well, I may have found at least a part of the problem.

Apparently my super-duper nVidia GT-540 graphics card was trying to shade and make things transparent and in doing so was putting a lot of traffic onto the internal PCIe bus. Setting the graphics card back into non-gaming mode seems to have made things slightly more reliable.

That's odd though, isn't it? The PCIe bus is plenty fast, it should be able to handle a measly audio stream with no problem. Even ten or two dozen of them.

Re: all right, what's with these ASIO drivers?
 

N:

Good catch on the graphics card. Thanks for posting that as a partial (if not substantial) solution.

I looked through the S report - I don't think the graphics card state appears (e.g. 'Gaming Mode')

-D

Re: all right, what's with these ASIO drivers?
 

Not to dog anybody, but...

This forum is littered with graphics card related problems.

Avid very clearly specifies several "known good" video cards, which they have tested and "officially" approved. That doesn't mean that other cards won't work, but you're using them at your own risk.

In their optimizations, Avid specifies that the Windows Aero interface should be turned off. Further, IIRC, they also recommend a "low performance" video card.

So, it should be fairly obvious to anyone who does even the most cursory search that Pro Tools issues are very often, in fact, video card (or related) issuses.

And again, I don't mean to dog you, but a statement like, "The PCIe bus is plenty fast, it should be able to handle a measly audio stream with no problem" is a perfect example of "a little bit of knowledge..." Look up "interrupts"...