I'm late to the party....

But I have a few questions.... I didn't see these asked or answered ..... or perhaps I missed them in skimming the 4 pages of replies.

1. What is the brand and model of the "external audio interface" being used?

2. What driver mode are you using with it?


Most of the skipping and stuttering I have seen and experienced, was a direct result of the buffers not being large enough or the driver mode mot being totally compatible with the interface.

It is totally possible to use MME and other drivers with a quality interface. However, in doing so, you end up with poor performance and stuttering as well as latency and other issues such as pops and drops.

Check to see first that the external interface is set as the default sound card and then be sure you have selected the external interface as in and out for both audio and midi, and be sure you have selected the ASIO driver mode. Start with the default ASIO settings. Often, they will work just fine with no tweeking.

I have run BB for over a decade using some pretty ancient (by today's standards) computers with very limited speed and memory and they all ran BB as well as my other audio DAW's with relative ease.

3. Is the project a straight up 100% audio project or does it use and include midi tracks as well?

Again, the external interface running anything less than ASIO can and often does have problems when the project has a mixture of audio and midi. It's the midi stuff that causes the audio issues. It has to be rendered to audio and there's a delay in the processing between when it reads the data and gets the audio to the speakers. That delay is called Latency. Every computer and sound card has it. But with the right driver and set up properly, that latency will be negligible to the listener and everything sounds like it's synced up. If the driver mode can't handle the processing, and/or the buffers are not sized correctly, and there's multiple midi tracks to render, this can cause the program to pause for a split second to allow it to "catch up". You hear that as a stutter. If it's bad enough, the music in the tracks can get out of sync or in some cases, the program actually just stops totally resulting in a drop.

On my old duo-core laptop, I could load up a really large project with 15 to 20 tracks, load it with some processing intensive VSTs and get it to stutter and choke even with good drivers. Smaller BB projects with 5 or 6 tracks like BB supports were never an issue.

Have a look at the interface and the driver mode, set them up properly, and see if that doesn't solve the problem.

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www.herbhartley.com
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