A bizarre soundcard / FL studio issue? (and hello!)

[babblybobbly]

Hello all, longtime lurker here. I joined because I wanted you guys' opinion on my problem - it's a bit subtle so I don't really know what to google to research it.

So I've used FL studio with a Maya44USB sound card for many years. This allows me to record in multi-track audio from multiple instruments and/or samplers, then apply effects to each individual track.

But as long as I've been using this workflow there's been this weird bug. Whenever I do something in FL like add a virtual instrument, or add an effect to a mixer channel, the master out audio becomes crackly and heavily distorted. Sometimes even just scanning back and forth in the song playlist triggers this bug. To get the audio back to normal, I simply open up the mixer, choose any mixer channel X and change its input source (e.g. if X was previously listening to MAYA's In3, I'll change it to In1, or if X was listening to None, I'll change it to In2 - the specific numbers aren't important, only the fact that it gets changed.)

So you might be able to imagine - I've done this silly workaround zillions of times in my life and learnt to accept it as part of my process.

I always suspected it was because I was using an ancient crappy laptop. But I just upgraded to a pretty powerful new computer and the exact same bug occurs. Just to reiterate: Add a new synth > audio gets fuzzy/horrible > choose any mixer channel and change its input source > everything's OK again.

Does anyone know what might cause such a mess? Have I even explained this annoying idiosyncrasy properly? If not I suppose I can annotate some screenshots or even upload a screencapture...

This is FL 10.0.2 Producer Edition, The old-shape (blue translucent plastic) MAYA44 USB soundcard, Windows7 64-bit, and the bug has occurred on multiple computers.

 

[Adrian-MarQ]

Do you have ASIO4ALL installed? If so, try switching to it to see if the issue is still present. If the issue is resolved, make sure you have the latest drivers installed for your interface.

 

[KonKossKang]

Odd. Could be
Drivers
interface itself
Cpu[if downclocked to 1ghz just because]
low ram
Asio not being used instead of realtek

 

[babblybobbly]

Thanks for the responses.

I do have asio4all. The CPU clock is 2.3ghz, and I have 16gb ram, although I'm not sure about cache sizes.

The problem has appeared independently on 2 laptops. If I had another maya44 it would be useful to check if the physical sound card is dud, but I don't really want to spend all that money just to test.

Are there any multitrack sound cards that people DO recommend for FL?

 

[loekthuss]

i once had a similar problem with a creative onboard card. it would randomly crackly like crazy and keep doing it for weeks and then magicly fix itself. got really tired of trying all (literally all) options 10 times so i bought an audiobox usb by presonus wich is a champ and just works. apparently sometimes certain pieces of hard and software just can't get along very well. maybe it's time for an investment in a new interface. do make sure you have done your troubleshooting before you buy something new (update drivers, go trough settings etc.)

 

[sleepy]

Don't use ASIO4ALL. The only reason you should use ASIO4ALL is if your audio device doesn't have ASIO Drivers. Your Maya44 has ASIO drivers. Use that instead.

The clock speed of your laptop doesn't mean much. 2.3ghz on a Celeron, Pentium, i3, i5, and i7 will all perform different due to increased cache size and processing cores on the higher-end devices.

You get crackling when opening a new instrument because it has to be read from your hard drive and loaded into memory. This can take up a lot of resources with a mechanical hard drive and will slow down your system. The audio likely goes back to normal because it pauses the audio device and resets when you change the input.

1. Use the dedicated drives for your Maya44 card.
2. Increase your buffer size in the Maya44 control panel.

If using a USB3 slot for your Maya44, try a USB2 slot. Audio doesn't need that much bandwitdh and USB2 is more than enough. There's a chance your Maya44 is only USB2 anyway.

 

[babblybobbly]

Don't use ASIO4ALL. The only reason you should use ASIO4ALL is if your audio device doesn't have ASIO Drivers. Your Maya44 has ASIO drivers. Use that instead.

I think I was mistaken. FL Studio did install itself with an ASIO4ALL driver. But while the Maya44USB is plugged in I always use the Maya driver installed from the CD, which also uses the ASIO protocol with its own ASIO control panel.

The clock speed of your laptop doesn't mean much. 2.3ghz on a Celeron, Pentium, i3, i5, and i7 will all perform different due to increased cache size and processing cores on the higher-end devices.
...
1. Use the dedicated drives for your Maya44 card.
2. Increase your buffer size in the Maya44 control panel.

If using a USB3 slot for your Maya44, try a USB2 slot. Audio doesn't need that much bandwitdh and USB2 is more than enough. There's a chance your Maya44 is only USB2 anyway.

My new laptop is the first computer I've owned with USB 3.0 ports. I've tried it out on all its ports (it has 2 x 3.0s and 1 x 2.0) and the behaviour is the same. Also note that my old laptop (a 2008 macbook pro, on which the same bug occurred) only had USB 2.0.

This behaviour happens on all plausible buffer sizes I have tried.

You get crackling when opening a new instrument because it has to be read from your hard drive and loaded into memory. This can take up a lot of resources with a mechanical hard drive and will slow down your system. The audio likely goes back to normal because it pauses the audio device and resets when you change the input.

Your reasoning about reading from the hard drive and loading into memory sounds most plausible. Would you care to elaborate on that please?

EDIT: I just read in this description of a similar glitch but in Cubase not FL. The solution sounds similar too:

The first problem involved characteristic 5-15 sample glitches that would mar audio recorded when the ASIO drivers were set to external sync, and a quick tinker with the demo of Sonic Foundry's Vegas 4.0 confirmed this problem was not confined to Cubase SX. On the other hand, recordings made with internal sync were fine, but this mode came with its own bugbear; namely, the output signal's tendency to progressively degrade into a swathe of crackles after varying intervals of playback, necessitating either resetting the Maya from Cubase's Device Setup dialogue, or reloading the ASIO drivers.

To cut a long, dull story short, a protracted troubleshooting session failed to uncover the source of either problem, and nor was either solved by plugging the Maya into a self-powered Belkin PCMCIA USB 2 adaptor instead of the laptop's integrated USB ports. One particular hitch akin to the output degradation issue is described in Propagamma's support FAQ as usually being caused by processor speed-scaling functions, USB hubs, or "a silicon issue of hardware incompatibility that only effects the output path". Eliminating the first two possible culprits left only the obscure notion of a 'silicon issue', reinforced by the fact that my desktop PC exhibited neither problem. The workaround, of course, was to record using internal sync, and then switch to external for interruption-free mixing, or to use Cakewalk's Sonar 2, which was trouble-free throughout in both ASIO and WDM modes.

 

[babblybobbly]

Can man get a bump on this?

In particular this quoted part, which sounds exactly like my problem...

the output signal's tendency to progressively degrade into a swathe of crackles after varying intervals of playback, necessitating either resetting the Maya from Cubase's Device Setup dialogue, or reloading the ASIO drivers.