Well I've been running the WDM driver since it came out and wanted to give a few thoughts and maybe get a few responses.
Firstly the addition of this little gem is absolutely wonderful, for the first time it has given me a complete start to finish solution to my audio throughput, thanks:) For me the biggest plus is the minimum amount of latency compared to using virtual cables like asio bridge, this has meant streaming movies without having to output to external DSP/crossovers as I can now do that in MC, so it's saved me a packet. However there a re a few problems which I know that other users have touched upon before.
I get a lot of pops and crackles, sometimes it's a minimum amount, sometimes it is far to distracting to use at all. When I first started using the WDM i was using a low powered atom device and just assumed it wasn't powerful enough. I'd intended on building a new media centre PC for a while so now have a 4 Ghz i5 with 8GB RAM and an SSD with a firewire 800 card driving my Behringer FCA fireface via low latency drivers. IT still doesn't work that well, for a while I thought that i may have and earthing issue or a dreaded pin 1 XLR issue but I haven't.
Obviously I've fiddled about with all the buffer settings and am confident that I have a good handle on the settings that effect this both in MC and my drivers, maybe I've missed something though?
More recently I've become convinced that is is the WDM driver itself, I have MC installed on a laptop as well and this does exactly the same thing as the PC, even If i only have MC output to the onboard sound card. Desperate I reinstalled the asio bridge ap so that i could bypass the WDM driver and talk straight to the MC ASIO driver. This app has a handy monitoring screen that tells you a little about the clock synchronization between devices. Setting the virtual cable under the windows devices to accept a 48khz signal the ASIO bridge reports a solid incoming 48khz signal, the master sample rate reported from MC jumps up and down all over the place though. for the first 15 seconds or so any where from 39khz to 55khz during that time it lost literally thousands of packets of data. when it settles down the sample rate settles to between 46.6 and 48.8 at which point a lock can be made and no more packets are lost, widening the device setting buffer in MC does narrow the waywardness a little but not much.
Here is my hypothesis of what is happening with the WDM driver, it is accepting a sample rate stream much like the ASIO bridge from the system but finds it difficult to lock to the internal MC audio engine because the reported clock that it is trying to lock to is wandering around and the result is dropped packets heard a clicks, pops and slodges.
Matt have you got any thoughts on some of the issues users have had? I know at least one audio driver developer offered help on this forum so I guess you are probably already looking into solutions?
I am showing at the Scalford hall audio show in late March and was hoping to show of MC working as a linear phase cross over running convolution for the filters and the room correction, it's not stable enough at the moment though. I can't run convolution with the WDM at all really. The above description is just using routing and basic filters although it does the same if I switch off everything.
Any help you give would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Stefan
