Need help: NI Audio 8 DJ cpu spikes and audio dropouts

[ze2be]

Hello guys, im in some serious trouble with Traktor/Audio 8 DJ and need your help!

Ive been DJing with Traktor regularely and flawlessly for about 6 months. But have performed world wide with this soundcard for years with Ableton Live and never ever had a single problem. Its been rock solid. Laptop is my trusty old Lenovo X61, core 2 duo 2.4 ghz, with 3 gigs of ram and an ssd drive. A clean win7 system install with nothing other then Traktor and Adobe CS was made 6 months ago. Its never failed on me before, but 3 days ago it started sudenly creating short drops in sound about once a minute. Yesterday I upgraded from traktor 2.5 to 2.6, plus the latest soundcard drivers, but problem is still persistant. Visually you can see the play heads in Traktor freezing for half a second then carry on. In the Task Manager/Performance view you can see the cpu graph jumps up and down like crazy. from 20% and then spikes in a regular order about every 10 seconds up to 80%. Does not happen using internal soundcard with asio4all. Further inspection shows the same cpu spikes problem when using Audio 8 DJ with Winamp alone, so it is clearly the soundcard. Runing the soundcard alone with win7 creates some small cpu spikes like 10%.

What did I do prior to the situation that might trigger it? Hmm.. The only thing I did was downloading Live 9 beta, m4l beta, and a few Live packages, but didnt even install them. Nothing else was done to the system.


/copy sent to Native Instruments Support. But please if you have some knowledge id be extremely thankfull for it!


Edit: text edited for better description

[ze2be]

[mr lovely]

I'm getting a similar problem - with NI traktor audio 10 plugged into my laptop running ableton I get regular cpu spikes every few seconds, causing the screen to freeze.

When ableton is running by itself (with the internal soundcard) everything is fine, and when ableton isn't running, but I'm using the soundcard with another app (e.g. itunes) everything is also fine.

But when ableton and the soundcard are running together something isn't right. Any ideas?

[ze2be]

Its Windows network drivers that does this. You need to shut of your wifi card and your lan port in the device manager. I got lots of help from NI support, and this is what worked in the end. It does not remove the spikes completely, but atleast the sound is not affected by it. Try it, maybe it works for you aswell..

[Scaper7]

I recognise the spiking pattern. It's the same as I've seen happening on an NI interface I owned a few years back. I returned it for that reason having tried everything imaginable to cure it. Solution: moved to a different soundcard ... never had the problem again (with any other card). It's an NI/Windows thing.

Perhaps, your sound card may have been CPU spiking like that all along, but you've had enough processing power to deal with it ... until Traktor starts asking for more in this upate.

Switching to another card was 100% effective and an instant fix for me with none of NI's 'performance tweaks' required. CPU spikes (as you know) only happen once you engage the NI interface. Without the NI interface the spikes are 100% gone.

[pencilrocket]

It seesm that NI can't fix for years. Don't buy their garbage. Waste of money.
http://www.native-instruments.com/forum ... -in-Live-8
http://www.native-instruments.com/forum ... -to-Warble

[ze2be]

Scaper7:
I know.. But still NI support claims its all Windows fault.. I never had the problem in XP, only in Win7. But I guess you are right, the spikes might have been there all along but maybe inreased with Traktor version upgrade.

I got a new NI soundcard for my iPad, the Audio 2 DJ. Goin to try it on the win7 pc as soon as I get back from this gig.

My main soundcard when playing live and djing is the NI Audio 8, and its not the latest model. It has been the most stable soundcard ive had up until now. Exept if you touch the usb plug that is attatched to it while sound is running. Never do that! The sound cuts out completely. It happened one time while I played in front of 5000 people hahahaha!! I put down my headset and it barely touched the usb cable close to the soundcard input, and that was that. I had a backup system running at the same time so the sound was back in a couple of seconds, but still it freaked me out a bit.

Maybe its time to go RME.