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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: Runs fine for a while then glitchy sound
Okay I think I understand what's been causing my problem but now I need to understand why.
I'm very new to DJ'ing. All of my gear (Rane Four and Lenovo Thinkpad P series i7 16gbRAM) is new. But I do have a lot of experience with DAW's

I've had everything running fine but then leave it for a while and come back and the sound is awful, choppy, glitchy. This happens with VDJ and also Serato. I finally found the latency control in VDJ, which was set at 256 and I changed it to 156 and the sound cleared up...at least for now. I'd like to understand why the sound issues only crop up over time. I've loaded songs, messed with the effects and time shifted things without any problems, and then seemingly out of nowhere I get glitchy audio when I'm not even doing anything with the computer. There's also a feature called 'Ultra-latency', which I'm not clear on.
Any computer experts out there who can help me understand this? Thank you.
 

Posted Thu 22 Feb 24 @ 2:31 am
So, you decreased the latency further down ? WOW!

The "glitches" you describe are buffer underruns on the ASIO driver.
Buffer underruns can occur for many reasons.
By the rest of your description(s) it seems that some driver on your system missbehaves and causes it.
Common drivers that are know to cause this are acpi.sys (laptop's power/battery management drivers), usbstor.sys (usb driver encapsulation) and your gpu drivers.
Some times even heat can be a factor.
I would advise you to follow the known guides on how to solve latency issues on a system.

Finally, on cases like this the solution is to increase the buffer (e.g. from 256 to 512 or even to 1024 samples) to ensure that your system has "enough" time to fill the buffer of the soundcard.
Decreasing the buffer may seem that it works, but it's not your best option.
When you change the buffer, the soundcard resets itself, thus "catching up" and clearing any problems so far. However, same as before, you run the risk to run out of buffer if something missbehaves, only that the risk now is higher since the buffer is smaller.
 

Posted Thu 22 Feb 24 @ 7:34 am
There have been issues with In-Music (ASIO) drivers for years now. They are very picky about how they work, and in my testing indeed sometimes lowering the number cures the issues with latency.

Probably some derivative of the original Denon drivers now being used for Rane.

First discovered this with my MC6000 over 10 years ago.
 

Posted Thu 22 Feb 24 @ 8:06 am
Just to provide some balance to Keith's regular criticism of Denon, I've also had many years use of Denon products, with various of their drivers and software - but never had any issues with glitching.
 

Posted Thu 22 Feb 24 @ 10:44 am