Behringer CMD Series

Printable View

Show 40 post(s) from this thread on one page

10-03-2013, 02:53 PM
KingCast

4 Attachment(s)

Hey guys, I've been on the receiving end of allot of emails looking for advice on what seems to be a popular problem with the Studio 4a. I myself had it when I first got my controller but soon after found a quick fix. So for me, (First with Virtual DJ) my problem was that I would start my set and about a minute in the audio would cut out and the controller would become semi unresponsive. The faders would still move in the software but that was about it. I have since been told that similar frustrated users who ran into this problem could jump start there audio again by going into config > sound setup and re- apply there settings and the audio would start working again for a short period of time before going out again.

So I ran the latency checker and I realized my network was the culprit. My network is huge and allot of data was being shuffled all over the place, so all I had to do was disable my network and I haven't had a problem since. When I have a gig I don't have internet anyway so it's only a problem when I'm practicing home.

Additionally all these users who've had these problems myself included would have a similar problem in the Deckadance software as well. During sets the audio would drop out for ,what I would say is, about a half a second randomly from time to time.

Like I mentioned earlier, once I realized my network was interfering, disabling it has since remedied all these problems at least for me.

I also make sure that these troubled users are working on machines that can handle the software and controller and in most cases they can but because I also had this problem I'll list all my relevant specs to exclude some of the usual suspects:

My rig:
Asus Sabertooth 990FX motherboard
AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core 4GHz Processor
Samsung 840 Series SSD
2 Radeon HD 6570 running in crossfire
8 GB RAM
Running Windows 8 Pro OS
Virtual DJ 7.4 Pro (Authentic)
Deckadance 2.24 (Authentic)

Now hopefully someone has some useful input on how to aid users on how to fix these problems but in the meantime I'll post what I'm pretty much emailing all of them to help them out. This is more relevant to VDJ but if it works it solves both platforms problems. (in most cases it works):

Quote:

Ok first things first. download and install the "CMD_Studio4A_ASIO_Driver.zip" here http://www.behringer.com/assets/CMD_...SIO_Driver.zip
Next match my settings here

http://i989.photobucket.com/albums/a...psca51d83c.png

Next, run the cmd studio 4a latency checker, in most cases it will be a hidden icon on your task bar (bottom right for windows) it will be the CMD Studio 4a Control Panel icon, open that up and there should be a tab called tools and there you will find the latency checker.

http://i989.photobucket.com/albums/a...psa607b063.png

In the latency checker, green is good, yellow is ok and red is bad. It will tell you in that message box under the bar graph, something like "This machine should be able to handle real-time streaming of audio and/or video data without drop-outs" if your system is ok, or "some device drivers on this machine behave bad and will probably cause drop-outs in real-time" if your system is bad. If you're seeing that second message then you'll know you have to disable something.

First try disabling your network and restarting your dj software to see if that fixed the problem like it did in my case.

http://i989.photobucket.com/albums/a...psc5ca749e.png

If disabling the network didn't help try and disable some devices one at a time and see if by disabling any one device if it will bring your latency checker to just green and yellow bars.

http://i989.photobucket.com/albums/a...psa315cd1c.png

Hopefully that helped

As usual any help is greatly appreciated,
Steve
10-03-2013, 04:16 PM
nem0nic

Quote:

Hey guys, I've been on the receiving end of allot of emails looking for advice on what seems to be a popular problem with the Studio 4a.

To be clear, you've been at the receiving end of a lot of emails about a problem with user's Windows computers. There is nothing about the Studio 4a that causes DPC spikes. Turning off networking (especially wireless networking) has been a common fix for Windows audio dropouts for almost 10 years. I remember writing online guides for users of the original Final Scratch and the 1.1 software update.

EDIT - CMD Fun Fact #1
The Studio 4a ASIO driver was written by Thesycon, the same company that makes that DPC Latency Checker app you're using. When writing the driver spec, we stipulated that it be bundled into the 4a driver as well, to help users troubleshoot their own computers.
10-03-2013, 05:24 PM
KingCast

Quote:

Originally Posted by nem0nic

To be clear, you've been at the receiving end of a lot of emails about a problem with user's Windows computers. There is nothing about the Studio 4a that causes DPC spikes. Turning off networking (especially wireless networking) has been a common fix for Windows audio dropouts for almost 10 years. I remember writing online guides for users of the original Final Scratch and the 1.1 software update.

EDIT - CMD Fun Fact #1
The Studio 4a ASIO driver was written by Thesycon, the same company that makes that DPC Latency Checker app you're using. When writing the driver spec, we stipulated that it be bundled into the 4a driver as well, to help users troubleshoot their own computers.

Correct this is a PC / Windows problem.

I'm a PC user well because I know better and hey I like Unix based OS' as much as the next guy but I'm not gonna pay 40% more for a computer because it has a picture of a fruit on it. So for the rest of us that either can't afford or just simply don't want a mac I would like to be able to help.

Absolutely no offence to you nem0nic, you know you're my hero!
10-03-2013, 05:45 PM
makar1

Quote:

Originally Posted by KingCast

I'm a PC user well because I know better and hey I like Unix based OS' as much as the next guy but I'm not gonna pay 40% more for a computer because it has a picture of a fruit on it.

Why not hand out Apple stickers to all those users having trouble then? Are you implying that you know better than your hero?

LatencyMon provides more detail on what exactly is causing DPC problems, whereas DPC Latency Checker may have problems with Windows 8:

Quote:

Windows 8 Compatibility: The DPC latency utility runs on Windows 8 but does not show correct values. The output suggests that the Windows 8 kernel performs badly and introduces a constant latency of one millisecond, which is not the case in practice. DPCs in the Windows 8 kernel behave identical to Windows 7. The utility produces incorrect results because the implementation of kernel timers has changed in Windows 8, which causes a side effect with the measuring algorithm used by the utility. Thesycon is working on a new version of the DPC latency utility and will make it available on this site as soon as it is finished.

http://www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml
10-03-2013, 06:31 PM
KingCast

First of all I'm not having the problem anymore and most of the people I advised have had success with my recommendations. With more than half of the masses using pc's let's try and figure out whats causing the problem. I'm a huge supporter of the CMD line and want to help as many fellow users I can. Also thanks for the LatencyMon recommendation, it is more detailed.
10-03-2013, 07:47 PM
nem0nic

Quote:

Originally Posted by makar1

Why not hand out Apple stickers to all those users having trouble then? Are you implying that you know better than your hero...

LatencyMon is fantastic for drilling down into specific processes and getting to the bottom of DPC issues, but DPCLC is perfect for clueless users that need a generic visual indication of their problem. And that represents the majority of users that contact support regarding audio dropouts. If we determine that it is likely a DPC issue, at that point we would use something like LatencyMon or Xperf.
10-04-2013, 01:12 AM
trz303

DPC Latency checker should not be used on Windows 8 : it gives incorrect results.
10-04-2013, 08:27 AM
nem0nic

Quote:

Originally Posted by trz303

DPC Latency checker should not be used on Windows 8 : it gives incorrect results.

Again, DPCLC is fine - even in Windows 8 - for determining if an audio dropout corresponds to a DPC spike. Using it in this way gets other things (like incorrect ASIO buffer settings) out of the way. For this application we're not concerned with the baseline latency measurement. The user already owns their computer by the time they install our driver. We only care if audio dropouts the user experiences correspond to DPC spikes.

If you're looking for a tool to determine if a new computer is going to be a good one to run real time audio software, then LatencyMon is the right choice. In that application, the baseline is what you care about.
10-05-2013, 02:35 PM
wrong chris

Quote:

Originally Posted by trz303

BCF-2000 are nice but too big.
Have 3xMM-1 linked together is a pretty compact rig for 12 channels midi mixer and 5x knobs for each channel.
Too bad that Ableton is not as easy as Traktor to implement in a template (hard to handle stuff like vu-meter, modifiers etc...)

does anyone have a 3x MM-1 setup working? that sounds amazing if it works

i've been looking at the VCM-600 as a replacement for my UC-33e, but these CMD MM-1s look really cool too - especially if you can link a bunch of them together.
10-08-2013, 09:22 AM
silky303

The CMD studio 4a looks solid. Price and warranty is selling me on getting one. Well thought out design

Show 40 post(s) from this thread on one page