Help Wanted with ASIO4ALL Setup

Malice

As the thread title says I think I may be doing something wrong with ASIO4ALL. Either that or the laptop that I'm currently using just isn't up to scratch for music production but hopefully that's not the case. The laptop specs are Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz with 6Gb of RAM which should have plenty of power for even just a few VSTs right?

I've used ASIO4ALL in a couple of desktop machines and never had any issues setting it up. It seemed to just be a case of selecting it in Audio Options and that was that. With my laptop though things are a bit confusing. I'll post a screenshot to hopefully illustrate the problem. I'm running FL Studio 9 and this is the ASIO panel that I get when I click Options->Audio Settings



I don't get any audio at all unless I select Speaker/HP. The ASIO Buffer Size slider doesn't seem to make much of a difference when it's all the way to the right, the audio still crackles a bit. The sliders and checkboxes on the right don't seem to make any difference either.

Now I had thought that maybe it's down to the song but even just running one instance of Sytrus by itself and playing a simple synth string preset on it over a couple of bars produces the crackling effect .

So, does anyone have any suggestions?

DamagedTrax

your laptop is perfectly capable. its your soundcard thats the problem. even using asio4all you're still not going to get acceptable working latencies.

you should definitly invest in a decent external card, it doesnt need to break the bank either. m-audio do a good range of very affordable cards.

having said all that you should be able to work with your onboard card without crackles, using asio4all. ive no idea what your issue is as it all looks ok in the pic.

Anima

Whats your sound card do you know?

Does FLStudio report any buffer underruns in the audio settings tab? If it doesn't then its not a Buffer Size issue probably.

Malice

DamagedTrax wrote: »

your laptop is perfectly capable. its your soundcard thats the problem. even using asio4all you're still not going to get acceptable working latencies.

Damn. I guess that makes sense. I probably should have thought about things a bit more before I bought the laptop.

DamagedTrax wrote:

you should definitly invest in a decent external card, it doesnt need to break the bank either. m-audio do a good range of very affordable cards.

For various other reasons I'll probably end up buying another desktop PC at some stage in the near future so I'll make sure to check back on this forum for recommended sound cards.

Anima wrote: »

Whats your sound card do you know?

It's identified in Device Manager as "IDT High Definition Audio" which matches what comes up in FL Studio. I've had a look at the original order confirmation e-mail from Dell and it doesn't even mention the sound card so I'd imagine it's nothing particularly special.

Anima wrote:

Does FLStudio report any buffer underruns in the audio settings tab?

Yep, it sure does. See this screenshot:



That's with the DirectSound buffer set to maximum.

Playing around with the settings in that window I can get rid of the crackling by reducing the sample rate from 44100Hz to 22050Hz which is a bit drastic but I can always increase that again when I'm rendering a project.

DamagedTrax

i see you have a podxt showing up. that can be used as a soundcard cant it?

that could be a solution for you right there as it uses asio drivers, which are generally the most stable.

Malice

DamagedTrax wrote: »

i see you have a podxt showing up. that can be used as a soundcard cant it?

that could be a solution for you right there as it uses asio drivers, which are generally the most stable.

It can?
I just use it to record guitar or bass sounds as I can plug the instrument into the PodXT and then the PodXT into the computer via USB. I must have a play around and see if I can get the computer audio to come out through it.

Anima

Yeah DirectX is very bad and will give a lot of underruns. If you select ASIO4ALL in FLstudio does the same thing happen?

Another thing I've noticed is that you have "6 point hermite" selected as the mixer algorithm quality, you should set that to linear and save yourself some CPU usage.

All of that might be moot anyway if you can use the PODxt, give it a try.

DamagedTrax

Malice_ wrote: »

It can?
I just use it to record guitar or bass sounds as I can plug the instrument into the PodXT and then the PodXT into the computer via USB. I must have a play around and see if I can get the computer audio to come out through it.

im not 100% sure but if its showing up in asio devices then it surely can be used. im looking at a pic of it and it looks like it has 2 outputs for TRS connectors. just plug them into some speakers and you may be in luck!

Adyx

I'm about 95% sure I got sound out from my PC through my Bass Pod XT Live. It was ages ago and accidental though so I can't say for certain.

slavedave

Interestingly, I have never had trouble with asio4all on any of my desktop or laptop daws until a week ago when I was trying to mess around with just using my laptop without an external soundcard when playing live at rehearsals etc.
The option to use the high def audio was always greyed out as an option. I tried loads of things (direct sound always worked but the latency was shocking!). Eventually i uninstalled and reinstalled asio4all, no joy.
More research and it stated that asio4all could not be started because it was already in use. Not obvious where but I went into the control panel and turned off any windows sound profiles and the asio4all became available for my software to use. Glitch free and very useable for live playing at low latency.
May be worth checking out if this is a possible conflict in your case.
(And before anyone burns me for not doing this sooner - I was using a partition on my DAW laptop reserved for general use. I always turn off system sounds on my music partitions - standard practice).
Also, video drivers and mouse drivers have caused problems with asio4all for me in the past in the form of crackles etc. Anything running at the same time as audio is likely to cause dropouts so look for other programs / services that are running in the background (obvious stuff like updates / AV programmes / back ups etc).
All the best troubleshooting it.

ludwit

I occasionally use my toneport as an output and it works fine.