Anyone who has a computer running digital audio should periodically test for latency caused by non-audio device drivers. If you get dropouts, you need to find out why. Sometimes it's ASIO buffers, but sometimes it's an unrelated program running that you never expected. You can use Latency Monitor, but my favorite utility for almost two decades has been the DPC Latency Checker. It's free, has nice graphics, and gives directions how to fix problems if you have them.
There are two catches now. One, it's no longer featured on the developer's site. Two, DPC Latency Checker was never updated for Windows 10. However, it works fine! It just reads wrong. The 'normal' base reading is 1000, not zero. If you remember that, it works fine.
Oops, wrong link. See next post. If the directions look intimidating, never mind. Just run the program for awhile and see if you get red bars. If you don't, great; nothing to do. If you do get red bars, report it here and perhaps one of us can help you diagnose why.
Last edited by Matt Finley; 12/09/2005:38 AM.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig? “Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”
Aren't those 15 second spikes just IRQs cycling, acting on instruction? I'd say tune your interface buffers before you do anything or make any assumptions.
How would you even begin to track something like that down ?
Typically that would be hardware based, so you remove hardware one piece at a time, reboot, test again. If it isn't hardware, then you look at some TSR (terminate and stay resident) piece of software that makes a call at a regular interval.
Great example. Had a user who was having her password locked out every 15 minutes. Nobody could figure out why. Until I looked. Adobe Acrobat was set to look for updates every 15 minutes. I went into prefs and turned off automatic updates and that solved it. It was sending an Adobe supplied default password to the company proxy server and locking her out.
Sometimes it is things you never think to look for.
This is the old machine. I don't have any audio dropouts. There is a unresolved issue with the machine I have been trying to figure out for some time now. The machine has turned itself off and repeatedly tried to reboot
I did finally replace the power supply. This happened again shortly after I replaced the power supply. It has not happen again. The event log clearly shows the Kernel-Power 41 event error. There are many things that can cause this to happen. Bad drivers, power settings and a dozen other things. Power supply failing commonly causes this to happen.
Back when this first happened I installed a new 1TB SSD boot drive and did a fresh install of win 10 pro and redownloaded all the software. I just replaced the power supply and had replaced the CPU cooling heat sink and fan when this first started. This old machine has run without issue for about 40 hours now without issue.
I assume it is possible that there could be some intermittent mother board issue or even some processor issue but more likely some software glitch. There is fifteen to twenty thousand hours of use on the motherboard and processor.
I will rerun the scan.
Billy
This is the one of the reason I built a new computer.
“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig? “Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”
In looking at the PDF there were two examples, one with all green lines and the other with the large red lines. Unless I am missing something yellow lines were not described. It would seem logical that could indicate a lessor problem. I am going to run this on the new machine to see what happens.
Billy
EDIT: I disabled and reenabled every audio driver in device manager on the old machine without any change. Also the yellow graph looks about the same on the new machine.
Second EDIT: I have run this program a good bit now. It occasionally shows issues. I have in the process recorded some music and watched some video both of which ran without issue. Everything on this old computer is currently running normally.
Last edited by Planobilly; 12/09/2006:25 PM.
“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig? “Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”
Both of you, read my second paragraph. If you are on Windows 10, yellow is normal. There is no green any more because it reads about 1000 too high. But as you say, look for spikes, especially red ones and regular ones.
I have not noticed any effect during testing from being connected to the Internet unless your router driver has a problem. You don’t want to be running or doing anything else but the test, though.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
I read the 1000 comment but it sort went over my head. Now I understand. Thanks for clearing all that up.
Truthfully I have not had a lot of computer problems. The occasional virus that got past the defences and a few updates that failed.
There is a huge amount of complexity with our current computer systems and solutions are frequently extremely difficult to come by.
I have known many people of the sort that muso alluded to "they would spend ages fine tuning various tech". Fortunately, I have never found it necessary to spend countless hours trying to fix every possible issue event viewer displays.
Also I would like to know if the current paid driver update software has any real value.
Thanks,
Billy
“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig? “Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”
I have the skills to do fine tuning, and used to in the past when it was necessary, but with Windows 10, it simply is not necessary now. No more Black Viper tweaks. I do set the power properties so everything is on and doesn't turn off, but that's it.
"Current paid driver update software" - which one?
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
I have the skills to do fine tuning, and used to in the past when it was necessary, but with Windows 10, it simply is not necessary now. No more Black Viper tweaks. I do set the power properties so everything is on and doesn't turn off, but that's it.
"Current paid driver update software" - which one?
Just a general question Matt. I see lots of advertising for such programs. I don't own any and have had very little driver issues to begin with. I have had some driver issues with the old Pro Fire 2626 interface and an occasional need to delete and replace the driver for my Native Instruments interface. I also set power properties so it stays on.
When I installed Win 10 on the new machine I opted out of everything Microsoft that I could. The pop up info about One Drive continues to be a irritant.
I also looked at task manager to see what is running in the background. One of the noticeable things was the high number of PIDs for Chrome and the resource use when connected to some site. I assume that would cause some effect on the dpclat app.
Billy
“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig? “Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”
Yes Steve, but you have a very special machine...lol
As I am no longer using Pro Tools, I think I will delete it. Avid is always running in the background. It may not be causing any issue but getting rid of unneeded software is most likely a good idea.
Happy Holidays,
Billy
“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig? “Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”
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