The Bottom Line on Stuttering

solovox · Post by **solovox** » Sat Feb 22, 2003 9:07 pm

Alright folks, we're gonna figure this out once and for all.

Ableton has said that they've had complaints about stuttering and audio dropouts. They've pointed to a possible problem with USB breakout boxes, like the M-Audio Quattro (which I use).

We've gone round and round talking about CPU power, RAM, disk drives...and I've done everything I can. But still I get the ocassional sputter or heinous skipping. So...is this the fault of USB? I know my laptop is pretty unimpresive:

PIII 500 mhz
256 RAM
12 GB harddrive
USB 1.0

but as long as I keep the reverb off, I'm fine with my CPU drain. At some point, however, I will go to a new scene, perhaps one with longer loops than the rest, and it's sputter-central.

I've defragmented, optimized, and blessed everything in the laptop. Is this a USB shortcoming? What's the scoop people?

Solovox

http://www.ampcast.com/solovox

FORMAT · Post by **FORMAT** » Mon Feb 24, 2003 11:03 am

I'm pretty sure this problem is related to the inadequacies of the USB protocol for digital audio. Throughput in general is pretty weak as opposed to PCMCIA and Firewire, and I've heard many people complain about their USB boxes (eg. Emagic Emi) particularly with PC laptops. Still, I've seen many enthusastic reports about the device you are using, so it could indeed be a config prob - maybe try the device on a friend's laptop to check if he's got the same problems?

solovox · Post by **solovox** » Mon Feb 24, 2003 8:23 pm

Thanks...I'll give that a try. For the record, I'm using a miniscule PIII 500 mhz with 256 ram. It only skips ocassionally, however. But I'll upgrade the laptop before I switch to Firewire, just to be sure.

spyder · Post by **spyder** » Tue Feb 25, 2003 6:44 pm

have you installed the latest beta driver for the quattro?

http://www.midiman.net/support/drivers/ ... c5Beta.EXE

solovox · Post by **solovox** » Tue Feb 25, 2003 8:11 pm

Yes, I have. But thanks for the effort. I'm assuming that a faster computer, and perhaps firewire are in my future.

homerjsim · Post by **homerjsim** » Wed Feb 26, 2003 2:48 am

Hi
I've had the stuttering too, on a 450 mHz Windows 98 machine - anytime the CPU got up to even 45% it was likely. It just felt CPU-related to me so I never tried running anything other than my EMI 2|6, but I finally checked it out with the internal sound and viola - not stuttering, even up to 80-90% on the CPU.

So... I'm sure it's a USB thing (it's amazing they squeeze as much through that little bandwidth as they do - I knew it was just too good to be true

For now I live with a little more signal-to-noise. I'd put my EMI up on Ebay except I still use it for recording audio in.

Brian

P.S. BTW it was interesting to note from the performance test results that Windows 2000 or XP don't seem to buy you any better performance on similar machines...

muser · Post by **muser** » Wed Feb 26, 2003 4:03 am

FWIW, I've had nightmare problems with USB audio. I used an Egosys Waveterminal U2A (USB 1.0) audio interface for a long time, and with 3 different Macs I've owned. It brought all of them to their knees. Then I tried my buddy's MOTU 828 (btw this was all in OS9) while I was mixing one of my project's in DP3 and not only was the CPU load halved (!) but all stuttering was gone. I never used it with Live though. From my own experiences and the many stories on the web I've seen, I think USB 1.0 audio is bad news.

Stubby · Post by **Stubby** » Wed Feb 26, 2003 8:33 pm

Usualy
Sucks
Bigtime

Novacosmic · Post by **Novacosmic** » Wed Feb 26, 2003 10:52 pm

http://www.m-audio.net/support/driversearch.php

New beta driver for OS X for USB Quattro
This is over a month old, but it was news to me, so I thought I'd post it. Anyone notice performance improvements with it?

Alex Reynolds · Post by **Alex Reynolds** » Wed Feb 26, 2003 11:04 pm

Ever since using 10.2, my Event EZBus (which uses a built-in CoreAudio driver) has been purring quietly over USB.

Well-written drivers may help your situation.

When recording with a separate application, I find increasing the sample size helps to eliminate pops and stuttering.

-Alex

muser · Post by **muser** » Thu Feb 27, 2003 12:04 am

Alex Reynolds wrote:my Event EZBus (which uses a built-in CoreAudio driver) has been purring quietly over USB.

Well-written drivers definitely make a night-and-day difference.

Sorry for straying a bit off topic, but I'm impressed you're not having any problems with the EZBus because my Waveterminal U2A had a built-in Coreaudio driver (just plug and play in OSX) that still had noises and stuttering.

I'm also curious if you've managed to use it to control Live as a control surface, since to my knowledge this still isn't possible because there isn't an OSX editor even though there's been a PC one for a long time. Thanks

Alex Reynolds · Post by **Alex Reynolds** » Thu Feb 27, 2003 2:31 am

I plug in a Doepfer Pocket Dial through one of the EZBus' MIDI in ports, and assign its dials to common objects (send level dials, volume faders, etc.) to use this as a control surface.

The EZBus does not have a profile for Live, to my knowledge, nor for Reason.

-Alex

tribalogical · Post by **tribalogical** » Fri Feb 28, 2003 4:51 pm

I dunno... I think everyone who says USB for audio isn't the #1 best solution is right... and yet, I've got nothing but joy using my Tascam US-428...

That said, I don't push it that hard (how can you with only two outs?), and for composing, it's great... the 4 inputs are enough for tracking vocals, a couple of mics on guitars, etc...

It's no mean-machine, but gets the job done, and I don't experience stutters, or dropouts, etc... I get those more from CPU overload than the audio interface....

just another perspective...

tlc

muser · Post by **muser** » Fri Feb 28, 2003 6:30 pm

tribalogical wrote:That said, I don't push it that hard (how can you with only two outs?)

It's always great to hear positive reports about gear; I wish gear always worked as advertised. The main disadvantage in my experience with USB audio (and this is how I view pushing it hard) is how it performs at low buffer settings. At higher settings things are fine, but when you want to get low latency and bump things down to the neighborhood of 128 buffers, that's when performance starts deteriorating drastically, while firewire interfaces like the MOTU 828 (on Mac OS9, anyway) remain rock solid. This makes me curious: what buffer settings are you using and are you a Mac or PC user? How have your experiences with driver updates been? The last time I checked the Tascam forum, users were impatiently awaiting a decent Mac OSX driver, is that still the case?

Alex Reynolds · Post by **Alex Reynolds** » Fri Feb 28, 2003 7:44 pm

There are no guarantees in this life that things will always work out.

Doing a lot of research beforehand saves mucho grief, though.

-Alex

The Bottom Line on Stuttering

The Bottom Line on Stuttering

It's the USB...

Re: The Bottom Line on Stuttering

New beta driver for OS X for USB Quattro