Reason Demo - I get "skipping"

F

FlyJ

New member
I'm just getting started setting up a virtual home studio and have been running the demo of Reason. I'm totally impressed with the product but right now I get skipping (like a record or CD making a one-skip jump a couple seconds before or later). This happens whenever I open up a menu (like choosing a different drum patch) or sometimes when simply scrolling through the modules. Here's my setup...

P3-733mhz, 256mb PC133 ram, Windows 2000, and of course the worst part of it all...an SB Live! audio card with the latest drivers for everything.

In trying to figure out the problem, I noticed that the CPU usage runs constantly at about 20-25%, but will spike to 100% for a split second and cause the skip (or perhaps the other way around?). Could it simply be the sound card/drivers? I'm considering the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card, but I'd hate to invest in a new audio card if this skipping problem has nothing to do with it, especially since I intend to do all my recording right now in the software environment. Lastly...what about it just being the demo copy of Reason having a little bug in it? Since it happens consistently when I right-click on the Subtractor Patch, it seems connected to the software and not the hardware. Anyone have this problem with the full or demo copy? If you have it could you try it and see what happens?

Thanks!!!
 
its the audio settings... tweak your latency slider... if you set the latency too short for your hardware, it will cause glitches.

Try to go with ASIO drivers too

good luck
 
Thanks for the help! I didn't pay enough attention to the latency adjustment earlier because it didn't seem to change anything. As I played more with it, I found that I have to crank up the latency past 150ms with my current drivers to get mostly clean sound.

I'm going to try the trick with the Cubase demo to get the ASIO drivers and see how it works from there, though I think I'm still going to pick up the Audiophile 2496 card based on advice from others and Midiman!

-James
 
Dutchwave - do you know anyone who has tried working the ASIO drivers from the Cubase 5 demo with Windows 2000? I got everything in order, but when I select the ASIO DirectX driver in Reason, it says the "audio device is in use" and doesn't allow me to use the driver.

I've read about some situations with Windows 2000 drivers since there is no direct hardware control by software. Some new drivers are in the works to get around this built-in "feature" of Windows 2000, but it continues to look like I'll be replacing to audio card to get an acceptable latency.
 
I never heard someone saying he used the asio drivers with windows 2000,i use the asio driver with Windows ME without any problems(150 ms latency is a hell of a lot is that with mme or direct x)
 
hmmm.. u can also check if you have put your sample rate to
44 khz... see, a friend had it set too high, and he got a cpu load wich was like 95% on his p3-800 while i could run his track on my p2-266 laptop!...
 
Ok...so now I'm peeved a different way. It looks like my problem with Reason is not to do with latency at all, but with something in the software. Back to my earlier problem, whenever I right-click to bring up the big list of synth patches, the audio stalls or skips.

What's new? I just installed a Midiman Audiophile 2496 card and running the ASIO drivers it's almost worse than it was with my SB Live! To top it all off, when I play an MP3 or WAV file back through Winamp or whatever, I get popping sounds in the audio every 1-2 seconds and the time between pops seems to be perfectly consistent. Now I'm peeved about a problem perhaps with the card I just bought, or simply the (ugh) problem that I may have to dual-install Win98 to work with audio until Win2K (or maybe Windows XP) gets it corrected. At least for the time being, I'm not so sure if my problem with Reason is due to it being a demo copy, but I'll find out soon since my full copy should arrive in a couple days! =)

Thx for hearing me rant and rave about this crappy problem. Any new ideas on the popping issue with the audio card? ugh...

James
 
I think I recall reading a past post on the propellerheads message board that is similer to your case. I think Windows 2000 was the problem source, you might want to go to www.propellerheads.se and ask your question there. Sorry I couldn't help more.
 
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