ASiO4All distorting/skipping after ~40 mins of being fine

[frizz]

I setup a laptop running Traktor 2 and a BCD3000 for an event last month, and there was a really strange problem. After 40 minutes or so of being fine, the sound became distorted and sounded like a skipping cd, but after opening the ASIO4ALL control panel there would be a 1 second dropout and then it would be fine.

45 minutes or so later, the problem happened again (and then once more about a similar time frame afterwards).

The buffers were as large as could be set, and the routing was as follows:

Master Output was ASIO4ALL 1 + 2 (inbuilt soundcard L and R)
Monitor Output was ASIO4ALL 3 + 4 (BCD3000 monitor L + R)

The only reason we were using ASIO4ALL was because the BCD3000s master output wasn't of a great quality.

Any ideas?

[jamthrax]

sounds like laptop problems.... i have a toshiba laptop that would do this when the wifi was active. what you running laptop wise?

[frizz]

acer aspire 5750, has 6GB of RAM and a quad core processor so should be able to keep up no problem :/

[Patch]

You should disable everything that is not needed when performing.

Bluetooth
Wireless
Antivirus
etc...

A better way is to have separate partition specifically for audio with none of that stuff installed in the first place...

[frizz]

It's not actually my laptop (it's borrowed) so I won't be able to check for a few days, but I will make sure everything is killed (we killed all other software + anti-virus but didn't look at wireless radios)

I setup ASIO4all on my own system and put the buffer all the way down to 64 samples and it sounded just how the problems on the laptop did. Is there a way to extend the buffer beyond 2048 or diagnose what's causing the buffer to not be enough?

[jamthrax]

as patch said.. my toshiba's spec should run fine but due to poor build and hardware/drivers it was crap! the only way i got round it was creating 2 hardware profiles. One for internet and one for DJing. In the end I got a mac :/

[lethal_pizzle]

I wouldn't use ASIO4ALL if you can avoid it. Mainly because it merely wraps your system WDM driver up in an ASIO wrapper.

You might want to run the DPC latency checker and see if you start getting DPC latency after 40 minutes.

[frizz]

I wouldn't use ASIO4ALL if you can avoid it.

Are there any good alternatives?

The only reason we used it was to route audio to two different sound cards, the BCD3000s master output soundcard was really quite poor.

[jamthrax]

you would need to buy a 4 channeled soundcard.. either the audio 8 or audio 10 will do you

[lethal_pizzle]

+1 for a soundcard fit for the job