I tried to send the following to Avid Customer Care (case 04013361), but I received a canned answer indicating that they will not answer queries for Pro Tools First and directed me to this forum instead, saying "First forum has moderators and ambassadors who can work with you on the steps to report an unresolved problem". So here goes:
I am the developer of
FlexASIO, an open source universal ASIO driver. I, along with other Pro Tools users, noticed a number of problems that seem to be related to how Pro Tools deals with ASIO drivers, including:
- If the ASIO driver reports a
minimum buffer size that is not a power of two, Pro Tools outputs corrupted audio.
- If the ASIO driver uses a buffer size of
2048 or greater, Pro Tools either hangs at startup (2019.6) or displays a confusing AAE-9173 error on playback (2020.9)
- if the ASIO driver uses a sample type of
ASIOSTInt24LSB (signed integer 24-bit packed), Pro Tools outputs corrupted audio.
- If the ASIO driver uses
different sample types on different channels (e.g. ASIOSTInt16LSB for output channels and ASIOSTFloat32LSB for input channels), Pro Tools crashes or outputs corrupted audio.
I have reproduced all of the above issues on Pro Tools First 2019.6 and 2020.9.
I looked for bugs in the driver (FlexASIO) that could explain the above. I was unable to find any evidence of bugs on my side, especially since other ASIO applications work just fine in these configurations. This leads me to suspect bugs in Pro Tools, hence this report.
If the above driver configurations are not supported then that's fine, but in that case it would be great if a clear error message could be shown to the user so that they know what's wrong, instead of crashing or corrupting the audio buffers.