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[Bobo4567]

Hello again,

I use MC 16 / 17 on my WIN 7 Laptop  with a Native Instruments Audio 2 DJ Sound Card. The two channels are linked with two zones. I use ASIO (latest 3.0.0 Driver).

While playing music I hear some short drop outs, round about every 30 - 60 seconds. It's annoying ...

Output mode settings:
- Output Mode: ASIO
- "Use large hardware buffers" is checked / on
- Buffering is about 3 seconds

Settings:
- Prebuffering: 6 seconds

Any good ideas or experiences?

thanks
Markus

[Matt]

Could you explain why your are using two linked zones?

Are the pauses gone if you play to a single zone?

[Bobo4567]

Hi Matt,

the two zones are not linked (I hope ... ;-) . I use MC in seminars and trainings - one stereo channel goes to the speaker for the audience, the other channel to a headphone.

The dropouts occur even if i only use one channel / zone and there's nothing playing on the other zone.

Cheers
Markus

[Matt]

It's unlikely that Media Center is failing to keep the card's buffer full, so my guess is that this is a lower level hardware thing.  Switching USB ports might help.

Can you manually configure the hardware buffer size in the card's control panel?  You might try making it a larger value if possible.

The 'Use large hardware buffers' option tries to do this automatically, but perhaps there's an issue with that card?

[Bobo4567]

Hallo Matt,

thanks for the hint - it works good now!

Native Instruments has a good Control Panel for settings and diagnostics (Version 3.0x) .
Default Process Buffer after upgrading the ASIO driver was 256 samples and is 1024 now. Of course this rises output latency but this is ok.

Bye
Markus

[Matt]

Default Process Buffer after upgrading the ASIO driver was 256 samples and is 1024 now. Of course this rises output latency but this is ok.

Glad to hear you got it working!

Latency isn't really important for audio playback.  It makes no difference to the sound.  Latency only really matters for recording or real-time synthesizing.  

Latency does make DSP changes take a little longer to take effect, but 256 vs 1024 is a 17ms difference at 44.1 kHz which is irrelevant.

I'm a little puzzled that the 'Use large hardware buffers' thing wasn't changing the card's setting automatically.  Maybe setting hardware buffer sizes just isn't supported by some drivers.