Technophobia.
TechnophobiaHi Frit’s
Renamed this for a new topic.
I’ve had a good rant over at an Emu forum which got there attention. They want me to try and load up there freebie Cubase to see if the problem occurs in that as well, but they seem to think that it is a problem with Podium…Then again, they would say that. 😉
I don’t really want to clutter up my system with Cubase and anyway it doesn’t constantly monitor ASIO dropouts, just a initial test setup which, if I recall correctly does not monitor over that long a time anyway.
I’ve been doing a bit more accurate timing as follows:
Latency at 10ms gives a clock loop of 40 seconds
Latency at 12ms gives a clock loop of 48 seconds
Latency of 14ms gives a clock loop of 56 seconds.
All these times are give or take a second.
@Max if looking in. Have you tried your Emu card with an other DAW (Sonar, Cubase) ? Any problems ?
Emu seem to want to go down the line of blaming Podium.
Basically I’m knackered and bit annoyed about Emu. I’m going to bed, no more testing times tonight…
Technophobia
Max@Technophobia wrote:
@Max if looking in. Have you tried your Emu card with an other DAW (Sonar, Cubase) ? Any problems ?
AFAIK Podium is the only sequencer that indicates buffer sync problems (am I wrong?!). Since I don’t have any audible problems in any of sequencers I own or tried (including Podium), it’s hard to say if this problem apperas only with Podium.
ZynewaveI’ve had a good rant over at an Emu forum which got there attention
Could you provide a link?
TechnophobiaThanks for the replies.
The link for the forum question is http://www.productionforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=6331
Also a link here for a drivers request and responses I got back.
http://www.productionforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=6335
Everybody seems to want to blame anything but the Emu card. To be honest I never had problems within Sonar but that was because it wasn’t as obvious that Underruns could have been happening (no flashing red indicator) and they probably were anyhow.
Thanks for looking into this Frit’s
Technophobia 8)
ZynewaveMax sent me a report with his E-MU ASIO driver diagnostics. In that report these details are of importance:
Log period: 17.05.2006 22:36:52 – 17.05.2006 23:00:34
– Current sample rate: 44100
– Input/Output latency, buffer size: 486/492, 440
ASIO driver status:
– ASIO sample position gaps: 38 (-440..47080)
The sample position is provided by the ASIO driver and it should be a continously running counter that increases with the buffer size on each buffer called by the driver. Some ASIO drivers use this samplePosition counter to notify the host if buffer underruns have occurred in the ASIO driver code. Podium checks the samplePosition only to notify in the UI that a supposedly buffer underrun has occurred, and that is why you won’t hear any clicks in the sound or see any CPU spikes in the Windows performance graphs.
In the report above it appears that the samplePosition provided by the E-MU ASIO driver occasionally is offset from -440 and up to 47080 samples. With a buffer size of 440 samples, -440 means that the samplePosition is not advanced at all. I’m guessing that the -440 is occurring at regular intervals and at some point the 47080 sample forward jump occurs to correct the accumulated sample offset error. So to me it seems that the E-MU drivers internal counter for the samplePosition is updated incorrectly.
Apparently not that many hosts check the samplePosition at all, since the E-MU drivers are not reported to cause problems in Cubase and other major hosts. I would prefer not to degrade the error check in Podium, so if someone at E-MU could look into this it would be super. Since the samplePosition jump occurs at regular intervals, it should be simple to track down what is causing this.
Technophobia, could you post your interface report here to verify yours is the same problem as Max? Also if you have contact to someone at E-MU on the productionforums site, maybe you can paste this post or post a link to this topic over there?
Thanks for looking into this Frit’s
Just a slight correction: It’s spelled Frits (without the ‘) 🙂
TechnophobiaMy Apologies for the slight misnaming, I’ll thrash myself later for the mistake 😆
I’ve got a report for you, it does seem to differ slightly from what Max is getting:
Podium audio manager status report
Log period: 18/05/2006 17:24:47 – 18/05/2006 17:48:59
ASIO device: E-MU ASIO
– Supported clock sources: Internal, S/PDIF, ADAT, Sync
– Current clock source: Internal
– Supported sample rates: 44100, 48000, 88200, 96000, 176400, 192000
– Current sample rate: 44100
– Input channels: 4 (1111)
– Output channels: 2 (11)
– Input/Output latency, buffer size: 514/458, 440
– PerformanceCounter: 3579545 Hz
– ASIO sample types: 18, 18
ASIO driver status:
– ASIO sample position gaps: 35 (440)
Audio stream buffer errors:
– Output buffer skip count: 35
End of report
Hope this means something. I’m off to the Emu forum now to answer a few questions and post a link to this topic…
Thanks
Technophobia 8)
Zynewave– ASIO sample position gaps: 35 (440)
Slightly different yes. Your samplePosition skips forward instead of backward. It is possible that if you had let it run a little longer that you also would see a jump in the opposite direction, like Max’s report showed. At least it appears that the interval between the gaps are the same as those Max experience.
ZynewaveI’ve been reading some of the replies over at productionforums, and a lot of the talk seems to question why buffer underruns would occur. Let me just state that I don’t think actual buffer underruns occurs in the E-MU ASIO driver. I rather suspect that it is a problem with the samplePosition counter that is not updated correctly.
TechnophobiaIt looks as though ICHi from Emu is going to get an Engineer or two to have a look into it when they get the chance.
Thanks for this Frits, even if it isn’t actually going to cause Audio drop outs, it has to be good to have the actual samplePosition counter sorted correctly.
Afterall, what state would the World be in, if we all just let things go on without inherent accuracy. 😉
Thanks again.
P.S. I have been trying the zReverb plugin. I did actually get it to crash, but just as I was about to post and let you know, you updated the .dll
Since the update it’s been as sweet as a nut. Automation is good without a lot of audible artifacts being apparent. Great work Frits. 🙂
Technophobia 8)